Digital = Journalism

DATA DRIVEN ADVENT CALENDAR! Every day, from December 1st to 24th, one door will open and reveal a data journalism tool that the folks at journocode recommend. Many of tools don't require extensive coding skills and are suited for beginners and experts alike.               

Superpowers: The digital skills media leaders say newsrooms need going forward from Columbia School of Journalism’s @towcenter

From the  report:

News organizations want to hire new kinds of journalists who combine coding, visual production and audience acquisition skills with traditional reporting competence and even a little entrepreneurial savvy. This report describes the “superpowers” news leaders say they need now, and why.

Columbia’s @TowCenter gitbook resource center!  Their latest offering by Tow Center Fellow @jonathanstray is The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data. 

Enjoy this highly readable primer by Paul Ford.

This issue comprises a single story devoted to ­demystifying code and the culture of the people who make it. There’s some technical language along with a few pretty basic mathematical concepts. There are also lots of solid jokes and lasting insights. It may take a few hours to read, but that’s a small price to pay for adding decades to your career.

—Josh Tyrangiel

The Digital Literacy Resource Platform from @berkmancenter​, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is an evolving collection of tools about online safety, privacy, creative expression, and information quality, that can help you navigate connected learning environments and the digital world.

DataBasic is a suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data.

A field guide for understanding automated journalism link to the full report here.

By Andreas Graefe

What it is automated journalism? Algorithms that can create thousands of news stories for a particular topic. They also do it more quickly, cheaply, and potentially with fewer errors than any human journalist. 

Who produced this report and what is it about? A fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University researched the growth of automation in journalism and produced a guide discussing key questions and potential implications of its adoption by media companies. 

How do you recycle on the internet? Learn to tag. Learn to repurpose old material. This 2014 @niemanlab article that calls out takeaways the now famous NYT Innovation report still makes sizzling reading for large and small news orgs. 

What is data literacy and why is it so important?