database

There’s no dearth of ways for journalists to congratulate and recognize themselves with awards. Whether you’re a small local newspaper or the most-watched national news show, there exists a seemingly endless list of contests and prizes to celebrate everything from the best public service journalism (Pulitzer anyone?) down to the most-specific specialized reporting (Media Orthopaedic Reporting Excellence Awards?). But within that sphere of contest categories, there’s not really been a contest solely focused on data journalism.

Now there is: The Data Journalism Awards, which purports to be “the first international contest recognizing outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide.”

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.

When it comes to working with and presenting data, Google reigns supreme. We’ve covered Google’s Chart Wizard, Google’s Public Data Explorer, and even ways to run a news website using Google Docs (with WordPress). Another of Google’s powerful data tools, Google Refine, lets users work with “messy” data sets and transform them into something amazing. Check out Part 1 of the Google Refine screencast.

Unlike Google’s general web-based data services, Google Refine is a standalone desktop application. Formerly known as Freebase Gridworks, the Google Refine tool has been used by the Chicago Tribune, data.gov.uk, and most famously by ProPublica for their “Dollars for Docs” investigation series from October 2010. Once you download and install the Google Refine tool, you interact with it through your web browser. You can create a new project from scratch, or you can import data sets from files stored on your computer. When your data is imported, that’s where the real power of the tool comes through.

You can use facets and filters to create subsets of data, as well as format strings of data which match your search patterns. For example, if you see the term “as soon as possible” and “ASAP” in the same data set, you can reformat both data strings to match each other. For more complicated queries, you can use the Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) to create regular expressions and isolate substrings of data to separate columns.

Once you’re done with formatting your data, Google Refine lets you export your work in a number of different formats, including as an Excel spreadsheet, an HTML table, or as JSON data, which you can change to match a wiki-style format. Google Refine also lets you hook into open web services, such as Google’s Language Detection Service or the open map service Nominatim.

Google Refine is a free download and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

There’s a joke in reporting that one person’s an anecdote and three’s a trend. It’s not really funny, though, because too many stories rely on this metric to prove something’s happening or happened. There’s a better way, it just takes some digging, maybe a FOIA request, and some minimum database skills (which is another topic, but if you’re really serious look into IRE’s training or if you’re still in school, take a computer-assisted reporting course, which your school ought to require).

By analyzing databases on topics on your beat you can find the real trends and back it up with statistics. Your job as a journalist is to make those numbers and statistics meaningful. (But don’t force the story, sometimes the data doesn’t support your hypothesis. It hurts, but it happens.)

Here are a few places you can find data that will help you support your stories with facts instead of trends.

Data.gov —This site will probably just overwhelm you with the sheer quantity of information. The hard part will be picking through what’s there for what’s relevant. But you can find some interesting federal government data, including everything from military marriage trends to consumer spending to climate change, if you dig. You can sort by the type of data, the department that collected it, the category, location, topic, and more. At least try a few searches to see what’s what — and whether it leads to or fits in any of your stories.

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