Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/statistics/)
GIJN senior reporter Rowan Philip shares accumulated best practices from reporters around the world, on how to investigate culprits of war, human rights abuses, and other conflict.
At the Online Journalism Blog, data journalism expert Paul Bradshaw analyzed 100 pieces of data that journalists use and found that there are several common story angles.
Data journalists often encounter the term “standard deviation” when reading research, from climate change studies to social science papers. This tipsheet explains how researchers use this measure, and how reporters can benefit from the context it provides.
This tipsheet helps journalists avoid some of the most common errors related to statistcal significance in academic studies, which even trained researchers sometimes make.
COVID-19
Investigating health care is complex and challenging. Reporting in this field means reading lengthy documents and getting well-acquainted with medical jargon.
Journalist Maeve McClenaghan was scrolling through Twitter when something caught her eye: a post from a local community member about a homeless person’s death. Digging deeper, she soon realized no one was collecting the relevant data to build a nationwide picture of how many homeless people were dying across the UK, sparking an 18-month investigation involving a network of over 1,000 contributors.
With just a spreadsheet, a journalist can let the software do the counting and calculating, allowing them to concentrate on the purpose and result of their inquiry. It also opens the door to understanding more advanced statistics, and the use or misuse of statistics by governments and businesses.
Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing travel patterns and genetic data to show how the disease spread across the United States, and the impact it has had on nursing homes and elderly care facilities. The Washington Post is responding to the increasing importance of visual data communication by expanding its data and graphics team, and the Pulitzer Center is calling for data journalism story proposals.
GIJN has created a multi-part guide on where to obtain data about the spread of COVID-19 and its consequences. The document links to official and unofficial international sources on health and economic data, links to information on government policy responses, and more than a dozen sites working on pandemic projection modelling.
What will life be like after the coronavirus lockdown measures are relaxed? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 27 to May 3 finds German news outlets ZDF heute and RBB24 looking into pedestrian traffic in Germany post-quarantine, the Financial Times and The New York Times highlighting the complexities of getting an accurate COVID-19 death toll and the problem of undercounting fatalities, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention setting up a dashboard to track statistics related to the coronavirus across the region.