Simon Rogers
data journalism
The weight of words (and data)
This is the introduction I wrote to a new book from the excellent data team at Paris Match, published in French. Check out the project here. What’s in a word? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The fortunes of a political campaign can turn with a single word. The right ones can propel a … Continue reading
Can data journalism be taught?
There’s no shortage of advice on teaching journalism students. If you believe what you read, young reporters need to learn to code; not to learn to code; learn history of the internet (the flowchart above is from there), or the ‘technologies of the web‘. The fact that there’s so much discussion is easy to understand: it’s the traditional curse of … Continue reading
A new machine learning app for reporting on hate in America
Hate crimes in America have historically been difficult to track since there is very little official data collected. What data does exist is incomplete and not very useful for reporters keen to learn more. This led ProPublica — with the support of the Google News Lab — to form Documenting Hate earlier this year, acollaborative reporting project that aims to create a national … Continue reading
Open data is a right
It’s not that long ago that open data was set to change the world. Governments across the globe opened their vast vaults of data. By mid-2010, it looked like the river of data was unstoppable. First the US launch of data.gov, then data.gov.uk — and then a “tsunami” of open data around the globe, from Bahrain … Continue reading
Building an Alternative Olympic Medal Table
Since the modern Olympics began nearly 120 years ago, they have been dissected and evaluated through every possible angle. But data journalism is about looking at the world anew through the fresh lens of facts and numbers. With the Games in full swing, all eyes are on the medal table: who’s winning and which countries … Continue reading
Three refugee datasets for the 19 Million Project
For the next two weeks the 19 Million Project will meet in Rome to wrestle with how data, design and journalism can best tell the heartbreaking stories produced by the refugee crisis which has sprung out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The project brings a pretty brilliant cross-functional team together to see what they can make of the … Continue reading
We need a Data Journalism Archive. Before it becomes just another 404 error
Are we about to enter a dark age of data journalism? The internet has made it possible to see the world’s information without moving a muscle, not matter how old that information is. You can absorb the first news page of The Guardian, from May 1821, which had data journalism at its heart, even then. … Continue reading
Data journalism in China
Facts are Sacred has just been published in China. This is the new introduction written for this edition. When Western data journalists think about China, it’s often as the subject of data journalism, rather than a source of it. And you don’t have to search hard for smart examples of interesting work: just take Propublica’s … Continue reading
A data journalist at Twitter
In 2013, as I was about to start at Twitter, Alex Howard wrote a piece pondering on just what a data journalist would do at a tech company. Now, as I’m about to begin a new adventure, I thought I should collect together a selection of the projects worked on with some amazing developers and others … Continue reading
The five Ws of data journalism
This is taken from materials for an introduction to data journalism, a MOOC course run earlier this year. You can read more about the course here. 1) Who? Where did the data come from? Why does this matter? This could be the most important W. Because data, like any kind of information, can be wrong … Continue reading
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