Data Reporting

Cronkite School MAIJ Program, Spring 2023

Preface

This book serves as a compilation of of handouts, websites and tutorials that I have created in my data reporting class at ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, IRE and NICAR conferences, and as an adjunct at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Some of the material will be useful in other courses or for self-study, but it is primarily aimed at the investigative journalism masters’ students at Cronkite.

It covers:

  • Reporting and replication in data journalism
  • Table stakes: Spreadsheets in the newsroom
  • Analyzing data for stories using R and R Markdown

It doesn’t cover:

  • Data visualization for publication
  • Working with non-tabular data such as images, sound or document collections
  • Creating news applications
  • Freedom of Information and public records techniques
  • Data science. This is a journalism book, not a programming or statistics book.

A note on language: I’ll use the words “read” and “write” in a generic sense. I intend them to cover the range of journalistic media, including listening, watching, and news applications or graphics.

Conventions used in this book

This book is written using a Mac desktop keyboard, meaning there may be key combinations you don’t have. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum. I’ll try to use the convention CMD/CTL and OPT/ALT , with the part before the / for Mac users and part after the / for Windows users.

Conventions in the R Study Guide chapters

Tip

Pro tips!

Note

An aside.

Warning

Something you should be careful about - you might have trouble running the code or get very unexpected results if you ignore it.

This background is used for instructions for anyone trying to follow along.

Credits

I’m grateful to all of the trainers, experts and collaborators who have made their training materials open to the world, and they are linked prominently throughout this book. Any errors or omissions are my own.

This book was written in quarto version 1.2 using RStudio and version 4.2 or R. . The complete source is available on Github.

Creative Commons License

– Sarah Cohen, Winter 2022-23 sarah.h.cohen@asu.edu