The Royal Wedding: An experiment in data journalism

WANNABE HACKS: by Matthew Caines

Graph by Matthew Caines using ManyEyes

UPDATE: After having a stab at data journalism today, my first ever piece has since been featured on the MANY EYES homepage. Not too bad for first-timer…

Seeing as today is all about taking the plunge and tying the knot, I’ve been thinking about joining to someone in holy matrimony myself… to data journalism! I say taking the plunge because it’s not necessarily a match made in heaven – data journalism is something I’ve often shied away from, always assuming the tech geeks + web guys are the only ones who can do it and do it well.

My cold feet were that anyone who saw my Microsoft Word multi-coloured pie-chart would surely scoff at my horrendous attempt at interactive data. But I need this marriage to work because data journalism is fast becoming a valuable skill for any aspiring journalist. [Read more…]

 

The Social Media Buzz Behind the Royal Wedding [INFOGRAPHIC]

MASHABLE: by Ben Parr

 

Infographic from Mashable website

With hours to go until the Royal Wedding, online buzz surrounding the big event has surpassed the chatter that surrounded the Egypt uprising and the Japan earthquake.

New stats gathered and analyzed by Webtrends reveal that the world simply can’t stop talking about the Royal Wedding (not that you needed us to tell you). According to the web analytics company, people have sent 911,000 tweets in the last 30 days, or just a little more than 30,000 tweets per day, which accounts for 71% of the buzz Webtrends tracked. For comparison, there were approximately 217,000 Facebook status updates and 145,000 blog posts about William and Kate’s big day. [Read more…]

 

Journalism in the Age of Data: A video report on Data Visualisation a storytelling medium

STANFORD.EU: Geoff McGhee

[vimeo 14777910]

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays? [Watch the full version with annotations and links on Stanford.eu]

The New York Times’ Cascade: Data Visualization for Tweets [VIDEO]

[youtube yQBOF7XeCE0]

MASHABLE – by Jolie O’Dell

The research and development department of The New York Times has recently been pondering the life cycle of the paper’s news stories in social media — specifically, on Twitter. Cascade is a project that visually represents what happens when readers tweet about articles.

Even now, however, Cascade is more than just a nifty data visualization. [Read more…]

 

Infographics in the newsrooms, David McCandless [AUDIO]

Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless

 

Information is Beautiful by David McCandless

There is no denying it, David McCandless is the undefeated guru of data visualization. A compilation of his work called “Information is Beautiful” has been a success around the world and his visualizations for The Guardian’s Data Blog such as or are a good example of how pictures can sometimes speak better than words.

We met with him in a busy London cafe to discuss what news organisations need to do to embrace and adapt better to the emergence of open data…

[audio:https://www.datajournalismblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/David-McCandless1.mp3|titles=Infographics in the newsrooms, interview with David McCandless]

 

The 4 Golden rules to Data Journalism from the NYT

 
data visualisation by the New York Times graphics team
 
 
source: Joel Gunter from Journalism.co.uk
 

The New York Times has one of the largest, most advanced graphics teams of any national newspaper in the world. The NYT deputy graphics editor Matthew Ericson led a two-hour workshop at the International Journalism Festival last week about his team’s approach to visualising some of the data that flows through the paper’s stories everyday. Here is a short guide on how to make good data journalism…

The New York Times data team follows four golden rules:

  • Provide context
  • Describe processes
  • Reveal patterns
  • Explain the geography

Provide context

Graphics should bring something new to the story, not just repeat the information in the lead. A graphics team that simply illustrates what the reporter has already told the audience is not doing its job properly. “A graphic can bring together a variety of stories and provide context,” Ericson argued, citing the NYT’s coverage of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

“We would have reporters with information about the health risks, and some who were working on radiation levels, and then population, and we can bring these things together with graphics and show the context.”

Describe processes

The Fukushima nuclear crisis has spurned a lot of graphics work in many news organisations across the world and Ericson explained hoe the New York Times went about it.

“As we approach stories, we are not interested in a graphic showing how a standard nuclear reactor works, we want to show what is particular to a situation and what will help a reader understand this particular new story.

Like saying: You’ve been reading about these fuel rods all over the news, this is what they actually look like and how they work.”

Reveal patterns

This is perhaps the most famous guideline in data visualisation. Taking a dataset and revealing the patterns that may tell us a story. Crime is going up here, population density down there, immigration changing over time, etc.

These so-called “narrative graphics” are very close to what we have been seeing for a while in broadcast news bulletins.

Explain geography

The final main objective was to show the audience the geographical element of stories.

Examples for this section included mapping the flooding of New Orleans following hurricane Katrina and a feature of demonstrating the size and position of the oil slick in the Gulf following the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, and comparing it with previous major oil spills.

Some of the tools in use by the NYT team, with examples:

Google Fusion Tables

Tableau Public: Power Hitters

Google Charts from New York State Test Scores – The New York Times

HTML, CSS and Javascript: 2010 World Cup Rankings

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library

jQuery UI – Home

Protovis

Raphaël—JavaScript Library

The R Project for Statistical Computing

Processing.org

Joel Gunter from Journalism.co.uk wrote a very interesting article on the workshop led by Ericson. He spoke to Ericson after the session about what kind of people make up his team (it includes cartographers!) and how they go about working on a story. Here is what he had to say.