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
Making a virtual reality visual is traditionally a tricky thing, as we found out in building one around Brexit. It requires coding and developers and there are many rules about avoiding making people feel physically sick. That’s a barrier to use. But recently, a new platform has made it a lot easier to visualise data … Continue reading
Journalism hasn’t been ‘just’ words for some time — and there’s a phrase for one strand: ‘Visual Journalism’. I’ve written one of the pieces in a new book from Gestalten which provides a detailed (and beautiful) look at the field, combining images and text. But the real stars are the visuals. Here’s a selection. Visual Journalism on Amazon
The latest in our series of data visualisation projects sees Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer apply their unique take on life to Google data. The pair together make up Datasketch.es. Shirley is based in San Francisco, Nadieh in Amsterdam, and the two regularly produce complementary work that tells beautiful stories. This month, in the latest … Continue reading
Data journalism has to do one important thing to prove its worth: it has to matter. And providing data where there is none is a key part of that role. This is where Documenting Hate comes in. The project, which includes a number of different news organisations and journalists, is designed to change that by collecting, … Continue reading
While America goes to the polls, a group of data journalists, fact-checkers, reporters and social media experts gather in a room at CUNY in New York. The purpose: to monitor in real-time voting issues around the country. It’s a huge project – you can see some of the results as they happen here. I’m also … Continue reading
The US Presidential election is not just being watched in America. From Indiana to India, each development is being intently followed by people across the globe. Those people are also searching about the election online — and that’s whereworldpotus.com comes in. Along with Accurat, a design group headed by Gabriele Rossi, Simone Quadri and Giorgia Lupi (of … Continue reading
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
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
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