Simon Rogers
data journalism
COVID data journalism special podcast episode
In the latest episode of the pod, we get to grips with COVID19 data and the challenges of reporting on the numbers during a pandemic. Financial Times senior visual journalist John Burn-Murdoch explains how he hunts for the key data and talks through what he thinks we will see happening next. The Covid Tracking Project’s … Continue reading
Taking the numb out of numbers
For a kid who actually hated maths at school, I love data. I love how it can help us understand the world and the way it works. I love the way that it can spark change too — and always has, from the work of Ida B. Wells, who used data to fight lynching, through … Continue reading
How to make data journalism for humans
In the latest episode of the Data Journalism Podcast, we talk to Lam Thuy Vo, a polymath data journalist who works for Buzzfeed and teaches at CUNY. We discussed her data-driven investigative stories, her quantified self projects, and her interest in providing learning resources for data journalists from underrepresented communities. Next, we talked to visualization … Continue reading
Introducing The Data Journalism Podcast
Alberto Cairo and I have been working together for a while now and we spend really way too much time discussing the state of data journalism. Well, now you get to see what we talk about with our new Data Journalism Podcast. It’s available on Spotify, Google Podcasts and other platforms and we will have … Continue reading
A new free online course in Data Journalism
Just launched: a new free online course produced with the Knight Center for Journalism for anyone wanting to learn how to do data journalism with free tools. I get to teach the introduction and welcome you to the course, along with the great Alberto Cairo and a fabulous set of teachers, including: Debra Anderson, Duncan … Continue reading
A decade of working in data journalism: what has changed?
When I decided I wanted to be a journalist, somewhere between the first and second years of primary school, it never occurred to me that would involve data. Now, working with data every day, I realise how lucky I was. It certainly was not the result of carefully-calibrated career plans. I was just in the … Continue reading
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
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