Thanks to our Singapore correspondent Tengku
Noor Shamsiah Abdullah for sharing a story about a free online data journalism
course. The European Journalism Centre (EJC) has announced that registration is
now open for its free online data journalism
course, Doing Journalism with Data: First
Steps, Skills and Tools.
This five-module introductory course gives
participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines.
It is open to anyone in the world with an
Internet connection, who wants to tell stories with data.
Just two days ago, Communication and
Multimedia Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Shabery Cheek said Malaysia has to produce
many data scientists to drive its effort to become a data management centre.
The minister said that while accompanying Prime
Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak on the recent Silicon Valley visit, he
learned that the success of many entrepreneurs there resulted from their being
able to analyse data and apply it in global products and services.
"Young people in their 20s have become billionaires,
such as the founders of Facebook and Twitter for example, and daily they come
up with new ideas from the available data," he said.
Malaysia, he said, should see the importance
of data scientists in the effort to transform the country in the present era of
global development.
The EJC initiative is supported by Google,
the Dutch Ministry of Education and the African Media Initiative, and features
a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School
of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion
Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.
The course is planned to begin early next
year, and the medium of instruction is in English. Details on the course and
how to register are available at:
http://www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course
The five modules are:
1.
Data journalism in the newsroom
This module is an introduction to data journalism. It shows what data
journalism is, how it works on a busy news desk and what skills you need to
know to practice it.
2.
Finding data to support stories
This module deals with the range of skills that journalists use to
obtain data. This includes setting up alerts to regular sources of information,
simple search engine techniques that can save hours of time and using laws in
your own and other countries.
3.
Understanding your data I: Finding story
ideas with data analysis
This module focuses on using spreadsheets and basic statistics to find
patterns in data that will reveal story ideas and add evidence to the resulting
stories.
4.
Understanding your data II: Dealing with
messy data
This module addresses messy data - data that needs to be organised
before it can be used. It covers the so-called ‘cleaning’ process, at the end
of which the dataset can be analysed using techniques from Module 3.
5. Telling
stories with visualisation
This module deals with how to transform data into stories, infographics
and interactive visualizations: the best practices and the principles of
graphic design that a journalist needs to know.
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