News Nerd Jobs - Tech Skills Journalists Need
Big data has changed our way of life beyond recognition. It permeates all fields of works, including journalism. Reporters rely on big data to tell their stories. Both analyses of a complex situation and the visualization of the findings happen much more effectively thanks to data analytics.
The internet has transformed journalism in several ways. The most impactful of those was the business model major outlets use. It seems news agencies, TV stations, and newspapers have a tough time transitioning successfully online. Budgets go down, while the demand for a constant stream of new content never seizes. Data analytics come to the rescue. The new computing methodologies allow for working with large data sets and attractively visualizing them. It all happens for a fraction of the price of having a team of experts working non-stop. It allows fact-based reporting of the highest quality standards without breaking the bank.
The first time journalists tapped into the vast sea of coding it was to learn how to gather data from the internet. The web produces enormous amounts of datasets daily. Some of them are useful to journalists, others not so much. Coding can help reporters not only find the information but put it to fair use in their texts.
Let’s look at a simple example. If a journalist finds a table and wishes to use the information in their text, they can export it using simple coding skills. Yes, Microsoft Excel has an “export from web” feature that can get the job done. With a few lines of code, however, they would be able to do much more than what the application offers. They can dig into additional detail pages and even extract more columns to use in their stories. They can target specific data from the table using pre-defined expressions and much more.
More often than not, data on the internet does not come in the form of neat columns. The journalist can write algorithms in Python that allow them to comb through hundreds of pages at a time and find the data they need. Then they can arrange the findings in files they can use in Excel and other data visualization tools.
Data journalists need to know how to use Application Programming Interfaces. They are the access point for the majority of datasets on the internet. Local and federal authorities maintain databases that journalists can access through an API. If they want to get information straight from the source, they need to know how to work with Application Programming Interfaces. They can find specific info they seek by using scripted queries. Modifying these queries to better fit the requirements of their investigations is easy.
Journalists can use coding to do a variety of other magnificent things with data, like:
The best part is that reporters do not have to learn everything there is about programming. They require a set of particular skills that they will find useful in day-to-day reporting. Most data journalists use Python. This powerful programming language can get all jobs done. It also has the distinct benefit of being much easier to learn than other programming languages such as Java or C++, for instance.