Simon Rogers
data journalism
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
Can data journalism be taught?
Can you really teach data journalism? It’s a dumb question that I’m soon going to find the answer for: from next week I start teaching at Berkeley J-School (you can see my syllabus here). There’s no shortage of advice on teaching journalism students. If you believe what you read, young reporters need to learn to code; not … 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
Journalist datastores: where can you find them? A list.
Where do journalists post their data? It’s a pretty core tenet of open journalism that you share your sources; i.e. , you write a story about data then you make numbers available to download. It matters because: Your audience is more likely to trust your story if they can test the sources Someone out there probably … Continue reading
Ebola in charts: data journalism and the outbreak
It’s a crisis unparalleled in modern times: the biggest outbreak of Ebola ever recorded. So, what do we know about it? Data journalism is about taking the key data, breaking it down and making it accessible. So a major story like this is where getting the data can help us understand it better. So what data … Continue reading
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