Investigative certificate
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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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Business tools and investigating companies
Learn how to scrape real-time and historical stock data from Google Finance into a Google Sheet and track it. It’s useful for anyone covering a specific industry or company.
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Reporting with Pinpoint
Learn how to probe through millions of documents, including audio, video, PDFs and more, to find patterns or that proverbial needle in a haystack. You’ll see case studies of how Gannett journalists have used this software to break big investigative stories.
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Using specialized search engines to find sources, data and fact-checks
Execute deeper, more precise, more sophisticated web searches by harnessing specialized search engines. Diversity your stories, angles, sources and readers.
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Backgrounding a business
How to search for proxies and tools for covering business, non-profits and the economy overall.
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Secure communications with sources and tipsters
Tips and traps: Tools such as Signal app, Freedome and VPNs to keep you, your data and your sources safe.
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CSV Match and other fuzzy-matching tools
Finds matches between two files rather than within one.
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Analyzing batches of PDFs
Learn tools and techniques for working with data buried in PDF files.
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Basic databases in Google Flourish and other tools
A few easy tools to help you show your work: Google Flourish, Airtable and Tableizer.
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What do you mean, it’s “statistically significant?”
Advanced math for journalists.
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Investigative/data skills series: Data visualization using Infogram
Data visualization for everyone using InfoGram, an easy but powerful tool available to journalists across Gannett.
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How to pry public records from a reluctant agency
Government databases are public records, yet most agencies treat records requests for data as something exotic and fraught with challenges. Anticipate the objections and defeat them for the win.
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Unlocking the power of Excel pivot tables
Slice and dice data to to organize your reporting, find patterns and reveal better stories.
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Backgrounding like a boss: Reporting on people and companies with free tools
Even great reporters can get tricked by fake names or sketchy backgrounds. We’ll walk through some websites and strategies you can use to create a routine and spot potential red flags before you get burned.
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Advanced Search: Power tools for search, research and analysis
See what users in your area are searching and discover story ideas on Google Trends. Explore Backlight, an AI tool for parsing massive amounts of documents.
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Building a public records mindset
A discussion on developing a documents state of mind — the key to doing solid watchdog work on a beat.