Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Journalism scholars want to make journalism better. They’re not quite sure how.
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
March 6, 2017, 2:10 p.m.
LINK: blog.chryswu.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Shan Wang   |   March 6, 2017

Didn’t make it this year to NICAR in Jacksonville, Florida, where attendees worked through issues around data analysis and visualization, FOIA, and more (including a Trump rally and a bullriding outing)? You may have missed the company of hundreds of people working in investigative and data journalism, but luckily, there’s great documentation from the weekend (there was even a friendly conference concierge Twitter bot, which Quartz’s Bot Studio tested out at this year’s NICAR).

I trawled through Twitter and many of the presentations to find a few fun and useful ones for the Nieman Lab crowd. Since I wasn’t at the conference myself, I’m drawing from an incomplete selection, so feel free to suggest more:

— You may find some useful tidbits in this reassuring lightning talk with advice for those picking up coding for the first time, this talk on how newsrooms can get ahead on Trump stories in an age of Saturday morning presidential tweetstorms, and this talk on everything The New York Times has learned about reporting on elections and live election results (including: don’t forget about the District of Columbia). (If all the videos are posted online, we’ll update with a link.)

— This talk, on getting data from the social web (and guidelines on a way to do it efficiently and properly).

— How to make data approachable, for younger audiences: Stop focusing only on shiny, flashy, expensive-to-build interactive experiences for Snapchat, and consider better ways of integrating graphics and numbers, and interactives that put the reader in the middle of the data and lets them explore it for themselves.

A how-to on making data gifs.

— Some ways to think about mining Google Trends effectively, and accurately (make sure you know what it actually means when a term is “trending”).

— These tips on “putting your town under a microscope, and keeping it there.”

Chrys Wu, as always, has your back with her far more comprehensive comprehensive hub for presentations, lightning talk slides, links to relevant software and tools, and other resources.

Many more tipsheets and links from the sessions are available on the Investigative Reporters and Editors site here.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Journalism scholars want to make journalism better. They’re not quite sure how.
Does any of this work actually matter?
Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act is being deliberated in both houses of Congress.
Going back to the well: CNN.com, the most popular news site in the U.S., is putting up a paywall
It has a much better chance of success than CNN+ ever did. But it still has to convince people its work is distinctive enough to break out the credit card.