Investigative Reporting: From Numbers to Narrative

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    • Data can be a powerful tool to find and tell unique stories, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. Part one in a two-part webinar series will introduce useful sources of data for a variety of beats and will explore techniques reporters can use to identify and track down additional data resources to enrich their storytelling.

    We’ll also discuss interesting datasets that newsrooms large and small have used to tell unique stories of value to their audiences. Part two will explore strategies for approaching a new dataset to scour it for unique story ideas to supercharge your reporting. We’ll discuss how to watch for red flags that could lead to errors and perform simple analyses to surface trends and outliers.

    More training on Investigative:

    Google Earth Studio

    Learn how to use Google Earth Studio, Google Earth Pro, Google Earth Timelapse and Earth Measure Tool with training by author and data journalism expert Mike Reilley.

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    • Microsoft Excel 05 – What if

    The more data you have, the more questions you will have about it, and the more answers it can provide. Excel has a variety of conditional formulas that let you evaluate subsets of your data to find the stories to tell: If…Then formulas; Conditional Functions; XLOOKUP; Array Functions.

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    • Foundations of data journalism – Scraping

    Data scraping web pages with Google sheets, scraping PDFs with Tabula and PDFtoExcel. Build graphics with Flourish Studio. We’ll also explore how to scrape data from a photograph using Excel.

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    • Microsoft Excel 04 — Pivot tables

    Pivot table are the simple solution for some, and a rare kind of magic to others. In this session, we’ll demystify pivot tables and show you how you can use them to simplify your analysis and give you more options than ever in how you extract your story.

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