T E AC H I N G

DATA A N D
C O M P U TAT I O N A L
JOURNALISM
Charles Berret & Cheryl Phillips
Copyright © 2016 Columbia Journalism School

Columbia Journalism School

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Teaching Data and Computational Journalism

by Charles Berret and Cheryl Phillips

ISBN: 978-0-692-63745-6

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CONTENTS

PREFACE 7
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 8
INTRODUCTION 11

CHAPTER 1:
DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY
What’s in a Name 15
Four Key Areas of Data Journalism 17
A Brief History of Computers and Journalists 20
The Task at Hand: Causes for Concern and Reasons for Hope 27

CHAPTER 2:
STATE OF THE FIELD:
OUR QUANTITATIVE DATA
The Scope of Our Study 31
Our Findings 32
Teaching Data Fundamentals: Rows and Columns 34
Teaching Advanced Data Skills: Visualization and Programming 36
Alternative Data Journalism Instruction: The State of
Online Courses 38
Textbooks: Little Consensus 39

CHAPTER 3:
QUALITATIVE FINDINGS:
INTERVIEWS AND OBSERVATIONS
Identifying What to Teach 41
The Coding Issue 43
Institutional Challenges: Resources 44
Institutional Challenges: Faculty Expertise 45
Institutional Challenges: Student Engagement 46
CHAPTER 4:
MODEL CURRICULA IN
DATA AND COMPUTATION
Introduction and Summary of Curricular
Recommendations 49
Model 1. Integrating Data as a Core Class: Foundations
of Data Journalism 50
Model 2. Integrating Data and Computation into Existing
Courses and Concentrations: General Guidelines for the
Undergraduate and Graduate Levels 53
Model 3. Concentration in Data and Computation 60
Model 4. Advanced Graduate Degree: Expertise-
Driven Reporting on Data & Computation 67
Model 5. Advanced Graduate Degree: Emerging Journalistic
Techniques and Technologies 69

CHAPTER 5:
INSTITUTIONAL
RECOMMENDATIONS
Faculty Development and Recruitment 73
Training or Modules 74
Incoming Skills, Technical Literacies, and Boot Camps 74
Technology Infrastructure 75
Benefits of Distance or Online Learning 75
Fostering Collaboration 76

APPENDIX 78

WORKS CITED 90

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 92
P R E FAC E
The digital revolution ushered in fundamental changes in how information
is structured. It also brought changes in how governments and corporations
use information to exercise power. Governments now influence communities
through the management of large data sets, such as in the allocation of services
through predictive policing. They hold exclusive access to data that would
help us to understand which policies are working, or how vulnerable popula-
tions are affected by the exercise of public policy. Corporations write opaque
algorithms to determine who gets insurance at what price. These developments
challenge journalism to move well beyond adaptation to social media or the
adoption of new technologies for visualization. They implicate journalism’s
public purpose. Encouragingly, a new facet of journalistic practice is emerging,
adapting technology to reporting in the public interest.
This is an important reason why we must teach journalists to work with
data: There are vital questions to be asked that require numeracy, and there are
big stories to find and tell in new ways. The intellectual history of journalism
reveals a continuous interrogation of emerging technologies for their relevance
to the profession’s public purpose and concerns. We need journalists to be
positioned to assess techniques like natural language processing and facial
recognition for their relevance and promise as tools of reporting, as well as for
their ethical dangers.
This is where journalism education may play a leadership role. Integrating
computation, data science and other emerging technologies into public-spir-
ited reporting is an ideal mission for journalism. These schools can access the
full resources of a university. The mission also relieves journalism educators
of the risk of teaching perishable digital skills, and perishable platforms. Data
journalism curricula respond to objective change in the sheer amount of infor-
mation that is stored digitally today – information that requires computation to
access and interrogate. Teaching journalists to be literate about these changes
and some to be specialists requires committing ourselves to using data, compu-
tation, and emerging technologies as essential tools of our profession.

Steve Coll
Dean & Henry R. Luce Professor
Columbia Journalism School
E X E C U T I V E S U M M A RY
Over the past century, journalism schools have developed solid foundations
for teaching shoe-leather reporting techniques. Hundreds of universities teach
how to interview, how to develop sources, how to cover a beat, and how to
write a breaking news story, a feature, a sports dispatch, or an investigative
piece.
But the practice of data journalism has been largely left out of the main-
stream of journalism education, even as the field’s relatively small core of
devotees has honed it into a powerful and dynamic area of practice. For
decades, data journalists have competed for the profession’s highest prizes and
secured positions of distinction within the most competitive news organiza-
tions, yet our research has found that relatively few journalism schools offer
courses in this area, let alone a concentration, even as these schools have
expanded instruction in presentation-focused digital skills.
The authors of this report believe that all journalism schools must broaden
their curricula to emphasize data and computational practices as foundational
skills. To place data journalism in the core of journalism education will mark a
crucial advance in what schools can offer their students. Journalists who under-
stand data and computation can more effectively do their job in a world ever
more reliant on complicated streams of information.
Beyond teaching, too few journalism schools support faculty research
into tools and techniques of data-driven reporting, despite rich opportunities
for developing theories and applications that may change journalistic practice.
Journalism schools that embrace research in their missions can transform
themselves into innovation hubs, introducing new tools and techniques to the
profession and across their universities, instead of merely preparing students to
enter the field.
This report offers a snapshot of the state of data journalism education
in the United States and outlines models for both integrating the use of data
journalism into existing academic programs and establishing new degrees that
specialize in data-driven and computational reporting practices. While we
focus on the state of education in one country, we hope that the results may
also be useful internationally.
 But first, a definition. When we say “data journalism,” we mean using 9
data for the journalistic purpose of finding and telling stories in the public
interest. This may take many forms: to analyze data and convey that analysis
in written form, to verify data found in reports, to visualize data, or to build
news apps that help readers to explore data themselves. This field also encom-
passes the use of computation—algorithms, machine learning, and emerging
technologies—to more effectively mine both structured and unstructured
information to find and tell stories. The ability to use, understand, and critique
data amounts to a crucial literacy that may be applied in nearly every area of
journalistic practice.
We interviewed more than 50 journalists, educators, and students, and we
evaluated more than 100 journalism programs across the nation. This report
features a chapter detailing quantitative findings, such as the number of U.S.
journalism programs offering classes in data, computation, and related tech
skills. We also include a chapter of qualitative findings in which our interviews
and classroom observations offer some color and texture to this picture of the
present state of data journalism education and its potential.

AMONG OUR FINDINGS:

» Many journalism programs offer few courses in data journalism, and nearly
half offer no classes at all.
» The classes offered are largely introductory, and the need is still largely
for the basics, such as knowing how to use a spreadsheet, understand
descriptive statistics, negotiate for data, and clean a messy data set and
then “interview” it to find a story.
» The field offers a few foundational textbooks, but beyond that lacks a broad
and strong core of literature to help teach both the history and practice of
data journalism.
» Many journalism programs do not have a faculty member skilled in
data journalism. Hiring professional journalists as adjuncts may pose
many challenges, one of which is that job openings outnumber qualified
applicants.
» Graduates with data journalism skills are better equipped to succeed, our
interviews show. Faced with a decision to hire an entry-level reporter
with no data skills or one who knows how to use a spreadsheet or query a
database, the data skills provide a key edge.
10 AMONG OUR RECOMMENDATIONS:
» Journalism schools can collaborate across the university to meet the
burgeoning need for instruction in data and computation but should be
wary of trying to outsource too much—while understanding how to do
math, statistics, or computer programming is an important component,
data journalism is much more than that.
» Journalism programs can integrate alternative teaching methods to help
fill the gaps in their own faculty. Examples include cooperative teaching
among different university departments, online courses, and independent
tutorial packs.
» Journalism programs can choose among several models of instruction,
all of which begin with a key component: at least one required class in
analyzing data for stories—what historically has been termed computer-
assisted reporting (CAR).
» Journalism schools that embrace both teaching and research into data
journalism methods will be poised to fundamentally improve the
way future journalists will inquire into matters of public interest and
communicate with their audiences.
Following our findings, this report outlines several model curricula and
general recommendations. We offer a model for a core, required course in data
journalism. Then we suggest ways of introducing data and computation into
existing journalism classes such as Ethics and Global Reporting. Next comes a
set of full model curricula for degrees and concentrations in data and compu-
tational journalism. Finally, we address a range of institutional concerns on
matters ranging from finding teachers to providing technological infrastructure.
Our objective is not to replace or diminish shoe-leather reporting in
journalism instruction, but to augment it with data-driven and computational
techniques. This report is meant to describe the state of data journalism educa-
tion, to underline the urgency of incorporating these skills to equip the next
generation of reporters, and to offer guidelines for moving journalism schools
in this direction.
INTRODUCTION
Journalism schools have a long history of avoiding the call for instruction in
quantitative skills. A little over a century ago, when the idea of teaching jour-
nalism at the college level was practically unthinkable, Joseph Pulitzer wrote an
essay arguing for the potential and civic importance of journalism education—
all as a response to several schools refusing the money he had hoped to donate
in order to establish such a school. In this 1904 essay in the North American
Review, Pulitzer outlined the skills he thought journalists would need in order
to serve this lofty civic role. It was an ambitious list, highlighting law and
ethics, history and literature, truth and accuracy, as well as a range of mathe-
matical and scientific disciplines. Among these, Pulitzer specifically insisted on
educating journalists in statistics.
Everybody says that statistics should be taught. But how? Statistics are
not simply figures. It is said that nothing lies like figures—except facts.
You want statistics to tell you the truth. You can find truth there if you
know how to get at it, and romance, human interest, humor and fasci-
nating revelations, as well. The journalist must know how to find all these
things—truth, of course, first.1
This proposal for a statistics curriculum was largely left behind in the wave of
journalism programs that were established in the twentieth century, including
at Columbia, the school that bears Pulitzer’s name. Core reporting classes have
taught students to gather, analyze, and present information, mostly through
shoe-leather reporting and writing skills.
Data journalism and other quantitative reporting methods, on the other
hand, have been developed largely in the field. Working journalists were the
ones who first saw the potential of analyzing and presenting data, and of
adopting tools such as spreadsheets and databases for stories, visualizations,
and apps. Much of the instruction has come through professional workshops,
not in classrooms.

1 Pulitzer, “Planning a School of Journalism,” p. 53.

12 To be sure, journalism programs have offered classes in research meth-
odology, descriptive statistics, and basic numeracy. The Accrediting Council
on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), which
accredits roughly a fourth of the journalism programs in the nation, lists the
ability to “apply basic numerical and statistical concepts” among the core
competencies it expects its accredited schools to teach. This accreditation
process is designed to be a voluntary process that helps schools maintain
quality by meeting a set of national standards. Benchmarks such as statistical
concepts are useful, but they don’t get to the heart of what it means to teach
data journalism.
Many of the statistics and numeracy courses required for journalism
majors are theoretical in nature, rather than journalistic. Despite the inclusion
of basic statistics in schools of journalism and communications, the use of data
and computation as applied to journalism has remained a set of niche practices,
often omitted from journalism programs, our analysis shows.
Some of the early quantitative reporting methods that made the jump
from practice to the classroom came with the move of key data journalists to
academia. Over time, video and web-based multimedia, such as slideshows or
timelines, were integrated into journalism instruction. Web and multimedia
skills instruction now seems to outnumber data journalism instruction.
To get a better sense of what is being taught, we collected information
on the course offerings of 113 programs located within the United States,
including Puerto Rico. Four of the programs held a provisional accreditation
and the remainder were fully accredited with ACEJMC. Chapter 2 of this
report includes a longer discussion of our findings, while full tables of our data
can be found in the appendix.
Of the 113 programs, 93 offer multimedia instruction—how to design
a website, launch a blog, or shoot video for the Web. The average number of
multimedia classes was 3. Far fewer journalism programs offer data analysis or
visualization. A little more than half of these universities, 59 of the 113 schools
we reviewed, regularly offer one or more data journalism classes. Among the
59 that teach data journalism, the average number of data journalism classes
offered was 2.8, with a median of 2. The average across all 113 schools in our
study was 1.4 data journalism classes each.
We defined a data journalism class as being focused on the intersection
of data and journalism, and using spreadsheets, statistical software, relational
databases, or programming toward that end. We excluded courses in numeracy,
research methodologies, and statistics unless they included an explicit focus on
data journalism.
The 59 programs we identified as offering data journalism included a wide
range of courses. At a minimum, programs offered courses that taught students
to use spreadsheets to analyze data for journalistic purpose. At the other end
of the spectrum, some schools provided that basic data journalism instruction
and far more, teaching multiple classes in programming skills, such as scraping
the Web, building news apps, or creating advanced data visualizations.
 But those more advanced programs were rare. Of the 59 programs we 13
identified that teach at least one data journalism class, 27 of the schools offered
just one course, usually foundational. Fourteen journalism programs offered
two classes. Just 18 of the 59 schools offered three or more classes.
For those students who learn data journalism, a robust job market awaits.
But when it comes to teaching data journalism, it’s difficult to find journalists
to do it full time. Many work as adjuncts, but the pay is low. Additionally, even
as some universities add classes in web development and coding, they have
not kept pace with offering courses in computer-assisted reporting skills like
learning how to analyze and understand data.
For advanced positions in data journalism—jobs that deal with statistics
and mapping, novel forms of data visualization, rich online databases, and
machine learning—little is available in the way of data journalism education
preparation. Students who study both computer science and data journalism
are well positioned to move into some of these more challenging jobs, but
there is a dearth of such job candidates, say data journalists.
This paper will delve into the state of data journalism education today and
present the lessons learned from those who have taught, studied, and practiced
data journalism—what doesn’t work and should be abandoned, and what
works and how it can be more widely adopted.
In the hope of providing practical guidance from leaders in the data jour-
nalism world, we will offer model curricula designed to reach a broad swath of
educational institutions, from public land-grant universities to private insti-
tutions, for both undergraduate programs and graduate-level study, as well as
possible concentrations and specialized efforts in graduate programs.
The goal throughout is to help journalism education move toward a more
cohesive and thoughtful vision, one that will help to educate journalists who
understand and use data as a matter of course—and as a result, produce jour-
nalism that may have more authority, yield stories that may not have been told
before, and develop new forms of journalistic storytelling.
This vision of bringing data journalism into the mainstream of journalism
education has yet one more, broader mission: improving the future of jour-
nalism education programs from a research perspective. The practice of data
journalism—analyzing, sifting, and telling stories from information—will
increase the contribution of journalism schools to the range of data-centered
fields emerging across university campuses.
Data journalism “also can be a bridge to other parts of the university,” said
James T. Hamilton, an economist and director of the journalism program at
Stanford University, which in 2015 launched the Stanford Computational
Journalism Lab. He pointed to possible collaborations with social scientists as
just one example.
14 The authors and a committee of professors and professional data journal-
ists agree that if journalists and journalism educators want to innovate, then
equipping our students with practical data skills and, more importantly, a data
frame of mind, is a vital part of the path forward for the students, faculty, and
administrators.
CHAPTER 1:
DEFINING THE
F I E L D O F S T U DY

WHAT ’S IN A NAME
In our view, data journalism as a field encompasses a suite of practices for
collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and publishing data for journalistic purposes.
This definition may well be debated. The history of data journalism is full of
arguments about what it should be called and what it includes.
In fact, data journalism has been evolving ever since CBS used a computer
to successfully predict the outcome of the presidential election in 1952. As
technology has advanced, so has the ability of journalists to tap that technology
and use it for important storytelling.
One key definition of data journalism can be found in a 2014 report by
Alexander Howard for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Knight
Foundation. Data journalism is “gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing,
visualizing, and publishing data to support the creation of acts of journalism,”
Howard wrote. “A more succinct definition might be simply the application
of data science to journalism, where data science is defined as the study of the
extraction of knowledge from data.”2
But news games, drone journalism, and virtual reality—approaches that
some may not consider mainstream data journalism today—may represent a
much more dominant presence tomorrow. Or data journalism may evolve in
yet another direction, perhaps into common applications for machine learning
and algorithms. Data journalists are already working more with unstructured
information (text, video, audio) as opposed to the historical elements of data
journalism (spreadsheets and databases full of rows and columns of numbers).

2 Howard, “The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism,” p. 4.

16 “I think the one good thing about the name discussion is that people are
realizing there are different kinds of approaches to data for journalism,” said
Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a former executive director
of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).
The ever-evolving practice of data journalism has at heart represented what
journalists do best—push against the boundaries of what is expected. Editors
used to argue that readers wouldn’t understand a scatterplot published in the
newspaper. Today, the New York Times’s Upshot, Fivethirtyeight.com, and
others regularly provide informative data graphics and visualizations.
At the same time, each generation of data journalists has informed the
next and balanced the desire to try new methods with foundational ethics and
transparency.
Our study aims to provide a broad evaluation of many areas of journalistic
practice involving data and to identify best practices for teaching these skills
and the “data frame of mind” that goes with them. In doing so we looked at
multiple forms of data journalism and defined them as best we could to ensure
clear communication.
FOUR KEY AREAS OF DATA 17
JOURNALISM
For this report, we will divide data journalism into four categories, acknowl-
edging that overlap is inevitable in practice. Examples of journalism that fall
under each of these headings can be found in the appendix.

DATA REPORTING
definition: Obtaining, cleaning, and analyzing data for use in telling journal-
istic stories.
includes:
» Deploying computer-assisted reporting or analysis for writing
journalistic stories
» Practicing precision journalism, as introduced by Philip Meyer, including
the use of social science research methods in the interest of journalism
» Visualizing data—mapping and charting—for use in exploration and
analysis
» Programming to obtain and analyze data for writing journalistic stories
techniques and technologies:
» Invoking public records law to negotiate for data
» Using web scraping tools and techniques (ranges from tools to knowledge
of Python programming language)
» Using relational database software (can range from Microsoft Access
to MySQL)
» Understanding statistical concepts and software or programming
languages with statistical packages (SPSS or R among others)
» Using mapping and visualization tools and software (Tableau, Esri
mapping software, QGIS, Google Fusion)

DATA VISUALIZATION AND INTERACTIVES

definition: Using code for digital publishing (HTML/CSS/JavaScript/
jQuery) as well as programming and database management to build interac-
tive journalistic work. This overlaps with design work, which falls outside of
traditional definitions of data journalism. But visualizations and apps also can
be integral to the storytelling process.
includes:
» Visualizations developed and designed as interactive charts and graphics
for presentation, including the use of code
» Interactive applications, including searchable databases and games that
help readers explore and understand a news story; these applications can
be a key part of the utility of a data journalism project
18 techniques and technologies:
» The use of code, which is defined as HTML and CSS and also could
include JavaScript
» The use of visualization software or programs, ranging from Tableau
visualizations to the D3 JavaScript Library
» Database management and programming, including Python, web
frameworks such Django, Flask and Ruby on Rails, and more
» Mapping applications, including QGIS, CartoDB, Esri, TileMill,
GeoDjango, and more
» Server knowledge and the use of GitHub, versioning, and Agile software
development techniques

EMERGING JOURNALISTIC TECHNOLOGIES

definition: New developments using data and technology.
» Drone Journalism
» Sensor Journalism
» Virtual and Augmented Reality Journalism
drone technologies:
“Drone journalism is generally defined as the use of unmanned aerial systems to
gather photos, video and data for news. What separates Drone Journalism from
drone photography is the application of journalistic ethics and consideration of
the public interest when using [drones].” — Matt Waite, a professor of practice
at the University of Nebraska and founder of the Drone Journalism Lab
Drone technologies can include an airframe, defined by configuration
(such as fixed wing or multirotor); an autopilot of varying capabilities (full
automation, minor stability assistance, return-to-home fail-safe functionality);
a control system (manual control through radio signals, automated flight
through software and Bluetooth wireless connection); and a sensor (camera,
video camera, multispectral camera, other physical sensor).
sensor technologies:
Sensor technologies include a wide range of software and hardware to measure
physical conditions like air quality, motion, or noise levels. These can be
used to gather data with a small, portable computer or microcontroller. The
Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, credit card–sized computer that has a variety of
input/output pins for mounting devices like sensors. Similarly, Arduino is an
open-source microcontroller platform that is widely used for prototyping with
electronic components like sensors. Some universities have already begun
teaching sensor journalism with specific project-based classes, such as to test
environmental conditions like air and water quality.
virtual and augmented reality technologies:
Virtual reality (VR), long heralded as an emerging digital technology, finally
appears poised to enter the broad consumer market. Samsung, Oculus, and
Google have developed consumer VR headsets along with controllers to 19
facilitate interactivity using your hands and feet. From a production stand-
point, panoramic images and videos may be stitched together from an array
of cameras, while the company Jaunt is developing a standalone camera to
capture 3D video in 360-degree, immersive format. Yet questions of narrative,
audience interaction, and journalistic values have yet to be settled with these
technologies, even as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and PBS “Front-
line” have launched exploratory ventures to use VR. Journalism schools need
to not only provide exposure and instruction in this emerging technology, but
also to inquire into values and best practices.

COMPUTATIONAL JOURNALISM
definition: The use of algorithms, machine learning, and other new
methods to accomplish journalistic goals. This area overlaps with data
reporting and emerging technologies.
includes:
» Algorithms that help journalists mine unstructured data in new ways
» New digital platforms to better manage documents and data
technologies:
» Programming languages like Python, Ruby, and R
» Frameworks and applications like Jupyter that enable journalists to mix
code and prose as they perform analysis and show the steps in their work
» Platforms like Overview that facilitate the use of complicated
computational processes like natural language processing and topic
modeling
20 A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUTERS
AND JOURNALISTS
In 1967, Philip Meyer had just returned to Knight Ridder’s Washington Bureau
from a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he had delved into a
different area of computational methods: social science. Social science meth-
odologies, including statistical tests and surveys, had recently been used by
academics to detail the reasons behind the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Meyer believed similar methodologies could have great impact in journalism.
He wasn’t back at work for long when he was able to put that belief into prac-
tice.
In July 1967, an early morning raid of an unlicensed bar in Detroit resulted
in rioting. Crowds of people ran through the streets, burning, looting, and
shooting. Theories abounded as to why the rioting had occurred. Some experts
thought it was done by those “on the bottom rung of society” with no money
or education. A second theory was that it was caused by transplanted and unas-
similated Southerners.
Meyer, on loan to Knight Ridder’s Detroit Free Press, reached out to friends
who were social scientists to devise a survey, cobble together funding, and
train interviewers. In the survey, respondents, who were guaranteed anonymity,
were asked to assess their own level of participation in the riots. They were
also asked to indicate whether they considered rioting a crime, whether they
supported fines or jail for the looters, and whether they considered African
Americans in Detroit to be better off than those elsewhere.
The survey results contradicted the earlier theories and pointed to a
different explanation—that the relative good fortune of many African Ameri-
cans highlighted more deeply the gap felt by those who were left behind.
The Free Press’s coverage of the rioting, including Meyer’s “swift and
accurate investigation into the underlying causes,” won the Pulitzer Prize for
Local General Reporting in 1968 and launched a new era in the use of compu-
tational methods in the service of journalism. Meyer’s seminal book, Precision
Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods was published in
1973 and argued that journalists trained in social science methods would be
better equipped for journalistic work and provided guidelines for journalists
to understand those methods.3 “The tools of sampling, computer analysis, and
statistical inference increased the traditional power of the reporter without
changing the nature of his or her mission,” Meyer wrote, “to find the facts, to
understand them, and to explain them without wasting time.”4
That pioneering work by Meyer is commonly thought to be the beginning
of what has been termed either precision journalism or computer-assisted
reporting. His approach inspired other journalists. Their work in turn inspired
a movement and the creation of a training ground. Two academic institutions

3 In later editions, the name changed to The New Precision Journalism (2013).
4 Meyer, Precision Journalism, p. 3.
in particular, Indiana University and the University of Missouri, supported the 21
development of that training ground.
But in the wider academic world, computational methods applied to
reporting largely did not have an impact on other university programs or how
journalism was taught. Instead, professional journalists taught other profes-
sional journalists the new techniques, and only as those data journalists began
to enter academia did data journalism education begin to take a wider hold in
that setting.
By the 1980s, as desktop personal computers took the place of typewriters,
and editing terminals were used with digital publishing systems, reporters
began to use software on PCs to great effect. In 1986, Elliot Jaspin, a reporter at
the Providence Journal-Bulletin, used databases to match felons and bad driving
records to school bus drivers.
In 1988, Bill Dedman, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution,
using data from a 9-track tape and with analysis by Dwight Morris and input
from the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of
Minnesota, showed that banks were redlining African Americans on loans
throughout Atlanta, and eventually the country, while providing services in
even the poorest white neighborhoods. That series, “The Color of Money,” won
a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting.
By 1989, Jaspin launched the Missouri Institute for Computer-Assisted
Reporting (MICAR) at the University of Missouri. Soon, he was teaching
computer-assisted reporting to students at the university and holding boot
camps for professional journalists. Four years later, in 1994, a Freedom Forum
grant would help the institute boost its presence and become a part of IRE as
NICAR—the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.
In 1990, at Indiana University, former journalist turned professor James
Brown worked with IRE to organize the first computer-assisted reporting
conference, sponsored by IRE. He created a fledgling group called the National
Institute for Advanced Reporting (NIAR).
“Andy Schneider, a two-time Pulitzer winner, had just joined our faculty as
the first Riley Chair professor. One day we were talking about how so few jour-
nalists used computers in their reporting,” Brown recalled in an email. “In 1990,
I don’t know of any schools that had such skills integrated into the curriculum.
At that time, any undergraduate in even the smallest school of business knew
how to use a spreadsheet. We decided to do something about it and that was
how NIAR started.”
NIAR would host six conferences before deciding to fold to avoid dupli-
cating efforts by IRE and MICAR, Brown said. Still, the Indiana conferences
trained more than 1,000 journalists and were a precursor to a new era. In
1993, IRE and MICAR (which later would be renamed to NICAR), held a
computer-assisted reporting conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, that drew
several hundred attendees. That marked the beginning of an annual event that
continues today, where new generations of reporters and editors learn to use
spreadsheets or query data and to use maps and statistics to arrive at news-
22 worthy findings.
In 1993, the same year as the Raleigh computer-assisted reporting confer-
ence, the Miami Herald received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service after
reporter Steve Doig used data analysis and mapping to show that weakened
building requirements were the reason Hurricane Andrew had so devastated
certain parts of Miami.
Much of this new computer-assisted reporting came about because as
the Internet emerged and became more accessible, so too did the concept of
using a computer in reporting. But NICAR and the University of Missouri in
particular had a broad and deep impact. A good number of the most prominent
practitioners of data journalism learned their skills from NICAR and from
other journalists trying to solve similar data challenges.
This pattern is perhaps most visible through tracking the careers of the
NICAR trainers themselves. Sarah Cohen was part of a Washington Post team
that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for detailing
the District of Columbia’s role in the neglect and death of 229 children in
protective care, and Jennifer LaFleur has won multiple national awards for the
coverage of disability, legal, and open government issues. Both were NICAR
trainers.
Another NICAR trainer was Tom McGinty, now a reporter at the Wall
NICAR conferences
over time. The confer-
ence was not held in
2001 because of 9/11.
Source: IRE

Street Journal and the data journalist for “Medicare Unmasked,” which received
the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. Jo Craven McGinty was also
a NICAR trainer and later worked as a database specialist at the Washington
Post and at the New York Times; she now writes a data-centric column for the
Wall Street Journal. Her analysis about the use of lethal force by Washington
police was part of a Post series that received the Pulitzer Prize for Public 23
Service and the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting in 1999.
Journalist David Donald moved on from his NICAR training role to head
data efforts at the Center for Public Integrity and is now data editor at Amer-
ican University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.
Aron Pilhofer was an IRE/NICAR trainer and led IRE’s campaign finance
information center. He went on to work at the Center for Public Integrity and
the New York Times, where he founded the paper’s first interactives team. Today,
Pilhofer is digital executive editor at the Guardian.
Justin Mayo, a data journalist at the Seattle Times, graduated from the
University of Missouri and worked in the NICAR database library and as a
NICAR trainer. He has paired with reporters on work that has opened sealed
court cases and changed state laws governing logging permits. Mayo was
involved in data analysis and reporting on an investigative project on prob-
lems with prescription methadone policies in the state of Washington, which
received a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2012 and in covering a
mudslide that received a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2015.
Clearly, working at NICAR has meant building powerful skills. So, too,
has attending conferences and boot camps. The students who attended early
NICAR boot camps were “missionaries” who returned to their newsrooms to
teach computational journalism skills to their colleagues, Houston recalled.
For years, the conferences and boot camps were “the only place where people
have had an extensive amount of time to try out new techniques.”5
By the late 1990s, as the increasing prominence of the Internet led more
news organizations to post stories online, journalism education offered even
more digitally focused instruction: multimedia, online video skills, and HTML
coding, among others.
Two strands, data and digital, represent distinct uses of computers
within journalism. Early calls for journalism schools to adapt to changing
technological conditions were answered mainly with the addition of digital
classes—learning how to build a web page, create multimedia, and curate
content.
Many of the early digitally focused journalism instructors faced a battle in
trying to introduce new concepts into print journalism traditions. Data jour-
nalism instructors—focusing more on data analysis for use in stories—have
faced similar challenges.
Meanwhile, by the 1990s, a few universities had begun teaching data
analysis for storytelling. Meyer, who in 1981 became Knight Chair at the
University of North Carolina, was teaching statistical analysis as a reporting
method. Indiana University, with Brown, the professor who launched the first

5 For a more complete look at the long and storied history of computer-assisted reporting, the
spring/summer 2015 edition of the IRE Journal provides a detailed and engaging recounting by Jennifer
LaFleur, NICAR’s first training director in 1994 and now the senior data editor at the Center for Investiga-
tive Reporting/Reveal. Brant Houston details that history in “Fifty Years of Journalism and Data: A Brief
History,” Global Investigative Journalism Network, November 12, 2015.
24 CAR conference, began incorporating the methods into classes. And Missouri
offered computer-assisted reporting instruction, thanks to Jaspin; Brant
Houston, an early NICAR director who later became IRE’s executive director;
and others. Other universities began to introduce basic classes or incorporate
spreadsheets into existing classes.
Houston’s Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide became one of
the few foundational texts available on the subject. His book, now in its fourth
edition, lays out the basics of computer-assisted reporting: working with
spreadsheets and database managers as well as finding data that can be used
for journalism, such as local budgets and bridge inspection information. What
Houston detailed in that first edition became essentially a core curriculum for
data journalism from 1995 through the present day. Houston’s work codified
the principles and practices of computer-assisted reporting from the perspec-
tive of its burgeoning community.
But throughout those two decades, journalists still learned these skills
primarily through the NICAR conferences or from other journalists. For many
years, for example, Meyer and Cohen taught a NICAR stats and maps boot
camp at the University of North Carolina geared toward teaching professional
journalists.
Since then, boot camps have become a popular model, used by universities
and other journalism training organizations, often in coordination with IRE/
NICAR. A key tenet of the boot camp is practical, hands-on training, using
data sets that journalists routinely report on, such as school test scores. To sum
up this model, Houston said it’s all about “learning by doing.”
Many boot camp graduates have gone on to robust data journalism careers
and have also moved into teaching in journalism programs, both as adjuncts
and full-time faculty, where they have integrated those teaching techniques into
their classes. These journalists essentially took the curriculum from NICAR
and introduced it into the wider academic world.
In 1996, Arizona State University lured Doig from the Miami Herald to the
academic life where he has been teaching data journalism ever since, serving as
the Knight Chair in Journalism and specializing in data journalism. The stats
and maps boot camp eventually migrated to ASU as well.
As journalism programs began to offer these classes, they focused on the
basics covered in Houston’s book: negotiating for data, cleaning it, and using
spreadsheets and relational databases, mapping, and statistics to find stories.
In 2005, ASU benefited from a push by the Carnegie Corporation of New
York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to revamp journalism
education. The school expanded its focus on all things data and multimedia
with the founding of News21. That program has focused heavily on using data
to tell important and far-reaching stories while teaching hundreds of students
journalism at the same time.
At Columbia, the first course on computer-assisted reporting was offered
in 2003, when Tom Torok, then data editor at the New York Times, taught a
one-credit elective. With the founding of the Stabile Center for Investigative
Journalism in 2006, some data-driven reporting methods were integrated into 25
the coursework for the small group of students selected for the program. The
number of offerings in data and computation at Columbia has risen steadily
since the founding of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism in 2010 and the
Brown Institute for Media Innovation in 2012. In addition to research and
technology development projects, these centers brought full-time faculty and
fellows to teach data and computation, as well as supplied grants to support the
creation of new journalistic platforms and modes of storytelling.
Columbia has also launched several new programs in recent years that
situate data and computational skills within journalistic practice. One is a
dual-degree program in which students simultaneously pursue M.S. degrees
in both Journalism and Computer Science — and those students must be
admitted to both programs independently. In 2014, the Columbia Journalism
School established a second data program, The Lede, in part to aid students in
developing the broad skillset they would need to be a competitive applicant to
both Journalism and CS. The Lede is a non-degree program that provides an
intensive introduction to data and computation over the course of one or two
semesters. Most students arrive with little or no experience with programming
or data analysis, but after three to six months they emerge with a working
knowledge of how databases, algorithms, and visualization can be put to
narrative use. Post Lede, many students are competitive applicants for the dual
degree, but others go directly into the field as reporters.
The emergence of these initiatives in journalism schools reflects the extent
to which data-driven reporting practices have broadened in the last decade. In
the 2000s, journalists began to move well beyond CAR, trying out advanced
statistical analysis techniques, crowdsourcing in ways that ensured data accu-
racy and verification, web scraping, programming, and app development.
In 2009, IRE began working to attract programmers and journalists
specializing in data visualization, said executive director Mark Horvit. It always
offered hands-on sessions in analyzing data, mapping, and statistical methods.
Added to that now are sessions on web scraping, multiple programming
languages, web frameworks, and data visualization, among other topics. The
sessions have even included drone demonstrations. The challenge has become
balancing the panels so that there is enough of each type of data journalism. As
a result, the annual conferences have grown tremendously, from around 400
at the CAR conference each year in the early 2000s to between 900 and 1,000
attendees today.
Other groups began addressing data journalism as well as pushing for new
methods of digital journalism. The Society of Professional Journalists wanted
to teach its members about data and joined with IRE to do so, sponsoring
regional two- or three-day Better Watchdog Workshops. Minority journalism
associations began to provide data journalism training, often in collaboration
with IRE or its members or under the Better Watchdog theme.
The Online News Association’s annual conference focuses on the larger
world of digital journalism. Many of its panels feature coding for presentation,
26 cutting-edge developments in digital web-based products, audience develop-
ment, and mobile. It also offers panels on data journalism and programming.
Still, a gap has persisted. At times, new organizations formed to fill some
of the needs. In 2009, Pilhofer, then at the New York Times, Rich Gordon from
Northwestern University, and Associated Press correspondent Burt Herman,
who was just finishing a Knight Fellowship at Stanford, created a loosely knit
organization that brings together journalists and technologists, hence the name
Hacks/Hackers. Its mission is to create a network of people who “rethink the
future of news and information.” Even as some groups have tried to fill gaps in
data journalism instruction, what exactly counts as data journalism remains a
rough boundary, with few distinctions between data journalism and digital/
web skills. In this paper, we continue to sharpen the focus on what will improve
the level of data journalism education, not overall digital instruction.
In 2013, a group of journalists used Kickstarter to raise $34,000 and create
ForJournalism.com, a teaching platform to provide tutorials on spreadsheets,
scraping, building apps, and visualizations. Founder Dave Stanton said the
group wanted to focus on teaching programmatic journalism concepts and
skills and offer subjects that weren’t being taught. “You didn’t really even have
these online code school things,” he said. “There were a few. The problem was
there was no context for journalism.”

A PATH TO DIVERSITY IN DATA JOURNALISM

Journalism training organizations and the journalists in NICAR have grap-
pled with the challenges found in tech elsewhere of low minority and female
participation in the industry. Most of the practitioners of data journalism were,
and are, white men. IRE has worked with minority journalism organizations
to provide training in data journalism. The conference planners also worked to
include diversity on its panels and in its training sessions.
In the mid-1990s, women at the NICAR conferences began a tradition of
heading out to dinner together. In 2000, at the Lexington conference, fewer
than a dozen women attended. Over time, the number of women grew so large
that the dinner couldn’t be held because finding a restaurant was difficult. Then
in 2011, in St. Louis, the dinner was reprised by three of the original members.
In 2015, the dinner drew 100 women. It likely would have drawn more but was
capped for space limitations. The event goes a long way toward emphasizing
that women are welcomed and celebrated at this intersection of technology
and journalism.
THE TASK AT HAND: CAUSES FOR 27
CONCERN AND REASONS FOR HOPE
With data coursework lacking in so many schools, the strongest presence of
data journalism in most of academia has been the study of changing news-
rooms by sociologists and communication scholars. Their work aims to
document and explain data practices within ongoing scholarly conversations
about media, technology, information, and society.
Elsewhere in academia, narrative uses of data and computation have
emerged independently. Besides the work of quantitative social scientists, like
those who inspired the work of Meyer, significant movements in the arts and
humanities treat data either as a novel inroad to their traditional objectives
or as a means to reinterpret those objectives. Probably the broadest of these
movements falls under the heading of the “digital humanities.” One of its
leading figures, Franco Moretti of Stanford University’s English department,
has developed methods of “distant reading” by which one asks questions of
a set of books larger than any one person could read in a lifetime. Dennis
Tenen, a professor in Columbia University’s English and Comparative Liter-
ature department who has also taught at the Journalism School, identifies
himself as a practitioner of computational cultural studies and argues that most
disciplines have by now developed computational methods that have either
complemented or supplanted their earlier practices.6
Several universities have founded centers and institutes devoted to work
at the nexus of data, computation, and humanistic endeavors. The University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for instance, hosts the Institute for Computing
in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, or I-CHASS, a partnership between
the university and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The
institute helps develop partnerships among social scientists and computing
experts, engineers, data scientists, and computer scientists. Their collabora-
tions have included work on large-scale video analysis, research into climate
change, and even digitizing and analyzing the papers of Abraham Lincoln.
The uses of data and computation in architecture, geography, and
economics also reflect the manner in which these disciplines adopted new
tools and methods in recent decades. In journalism, our history is not so
different. Like data journalism, computational work in the humanities
and social sciences is growing, and this is reflected in the relatively healthy
academic job market for digital humanists compared with the job market for
traditional scholars.
Overall, we see data science and computational methods being intro-
duced into disciplines across universities that, like journalism, have not been
particularly quantitative in the past. Practices involving the use of data and
computational methods may be bundled into entirely new departments,

6 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso,
2007) and Dennis Tenen, “Blunt Instrumentalism,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, forthcoming in
2016, University of Minnesota Press.
28 centers, research institutes, and degree programs (such as data science and
computational media). It is not the purpose of a program in data journalism
to compete with these other disciplines, but to develop a curriculum that is
intrinsically journalistic—one that reflects a mission to find and tell stories in
the public interest—as well as develop partnerships and collaborations with
other disciplines.
One example of unexpected interdepartmental collaboration at Columbia
has been with the Earth Institute, which has curated a massive database of
climate data and offers courses in Python programming in which several Jour-
nalism students have enrolled. This course focuses on large time-series data sets,
which enables data journalists to put the climate into context in their stories.
In 2013, Jean Folkerts, John Maxwell Hamilton, and Nicholas Lemann—
all journalism school deans and two of the three of them longtime professional
journalists—published “Educating Journalists: A New Plea for the University
Tradition.” The paper focused on “universities’ role in journalism as a profes-
sion” but it also discussed how this transformation in journalism could be a
boon for the schools that educate journalists. The authors wrote:
That journalism is going through profound changes does not vitiate—in
fact, it enhances—the importance of journalism schools’ becoming
more fully participant in the university project. Done properly, that will
produce many benefits for the profession at a critical time. Journalism
schools should be oriented toward the future of the profession as well as
the present, and they should not be content merely to train their students
in prevailing entry-level newsroom practices.7
Key among their recommendations was this: “We see all three of these early
strains in journalism education—practice-oriented, subject matter-oriented,
and research-oriented—as essential. And all of them can and should be applied,
with potentially rich results, to the digital revolution. Journalism schools
should embrace all three, not choose one and reject the others.”8
Journalism programs, with their ability to communicate to a general
audience and their potential to analyze and visualize data for story, are a perfect
partner for other departments. For example, at Stanford’s new Computa-
tional Journalism Lab (co-founded by one of this report’s authors), faculty are
working on several projects with professors from other academic disciplines
whose research mission touches on the same data. One goal is that data sets
can be collected, analyzed, and used in academic research as well as for journal-
istic storytelling. In some instances, new methods of analysis can be developed
in concert with important public accountability journalism projects.

7 Folkerts, Hamilton, and Lemann, “Educating Journalists,” p. 4.

8 Ibid., p. 12.
Talk to deans of journalism schools today and you will hear the same refrain 29
and the belief that data journalism, while not a savior, is an increasingly
important component of how journalism education can evolve.
Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism,
describes the emergence of instruction in data-driven reporting practices as
a recognition that data journalism is about more than just publishing stories
through digital media, but about developing reporting methods appropriate to
the complexity of the world today.
“Data journalism and tools like sensors look powerful because, in compar-
ison to the way journalism schools have responded to previous iterations of
technological change, this one runs deep, and to the heart of professional
practice. It’s not about shifting distribution channels, or shifting structures of
audience,” Coll said. “It was very tempting, in many ways necessary, for jour-
nalism schools to rush over to the teaching of tools, the teaching of platforms,
the teaching of changing audience structure. But that transformation often had
little to do with the core, enduring purpose of journalism, which is to discover,
illuminate, hold power to account, explain, illustrate.”
Journalism schools, by necessity, adapted many new tools to respond to
the massive and rapid shift to digital media. But delving into data journalism
brings journalism back to its journalistic mission and moves it ahead in its
research mission at the same time, Coll said.
“What we’re really seeing now is that this is a durable change in the struc-
ture of information, and therefore a need to durably change a journalist’s
knowledge in order to carry out their core democratic function. Not to build a
business model, not to reach more people, not to have more followers, but to
actually discover the truth—you need to learn this.”
The rise of data analysis may also foster cross-campus collaboration. Jour-
nalism schools, as they embrace data analysis within their already powerful
ability to tell stories, are uniquely suited to be robust participants and even
leaders in developing means of storytelling with data.
Our research, which is focused on journalism schools, may not account
for programs where data analysis is centered in another school or department
that teaches this subject to students throughout the university. For undergrad-
uates, in particular, there is little reason to offer in-house classes in subjects that
students have free rein to study in another department. Yet it would require
a great deal of latitude and initiative for students to construct hybrid degrees
this way. Journalism students can sometimes be better served by cross-de-
partmental initiatives that pair instructors for team teaching and connect
journalism students with other disciplines that focus on data and computation.
Northwestern, Stanford, Boston University, Columbia, Georgia Tech, Syracuse,
and others have worked to build these interdisciplinary initiatives.
By establishing these interdepartmental bridges, schools can create pathways
of collaboration between journalism, its partner disciplines of communication
and media studies, and the other areas of research that share an interest in the
future of technology and society.
30 Even as cross-departmental work increases, another challenge for jour-
nalism education will be to identify which data courses need to be framed
journalistically and which others can be learned through classes framed within
the methodology of other departments. In order to learn statistics, for example,
students may be encouraged to register in classes offered by the math, statistics,
or even political science department. The principles and objectives of these
classes could apply within journalistic work, but that may not always be the
case. These classes are often taught from a research or theoretical perspective.
A statistics class that emphasizes survey methodology, for example, could be
less useful for a journalism student.
Journalists do not often work with samples, but they do work with entire
data sets. For data journalism education in particular, a more useful statistics
class might be the type of instruction Meyer provided both in college courses
and in IRE/NICAR boot camps, using social science to address journalistic
challenges. Accommodating both techniques in a research or statistics class
could foster collaboration instead of silos. In other instances, outsourcing a
course may make sense. Mapping skills necessary for journalists, for example,
are the same types of skills necessary for other disciplines in academia.
Yet the task of developing and adopting a data journalism curriculum
comes with its own challenges. The high rate of change in digital tools, plat-
forms, and programming languages means that there is more to teach and that
classes themselves must be updated frequently. It is difficult to decipher which
new techniques are just passing fads and which have the potential to remain
relevant for even ten years. For this reason, it is important for classes to be
designed so that they teach data and computation as fundamental styles of
inquiry. Students can learn enough about the concepts behind a technique to
be able to more easily learn new tools that address the technique—as opposed
to focusing on the discrete tools used from time to time.
There are exceptions—the Unix command line, for example, has been as
fundamental and immutable as any computing tool. This is a text-based appli-
cation, still favored by developers for many tasks on Mac and Linux systems,
for controlling the computer using typed commands instead of a graphical
interface. And many of its core utilities remain essentially unchanged since
the 1970s. Yet it is far more common to cite such examples as the ActionScript
language for Adobe Flash, which was taught at several journalism schools less
than a decade ago and is all but abandoned by developers today. The silver
lining is that ActionScript shares many features with programming languages
such as JavaScript and Python, so it may have offered a path for a student to
develop other proficiencies. But it also highlights the importance of selecting
techniques for journalism classes with long-term considerations in mind.
CHAPTER 2:
S TAT E O F T H E F I E L D :
O U R Q UA N T I TAT I V E
DATA

THE SCOPE OF OUR STUDY

For this report, we collected and analyzed information on 113 journalism
schools, roughly one-quarter of the nation’s journalism programs, and gathered
63 syllabi for courses on topics spanning data-driven journalism, compu-
tational journalism, data visualization, and other methods. We combined
that with a series of in-depth interviews with more than 50 professors and
professional journalists (many of whom are adjuncts), and we spoke with ten
students or recent graduates. We also attended nine classes and participated in
three massive open online courses (MOOCs).
For years, anecdotal evidence has indicated that U.S. journalism schools
have fallen behind in data instruction, or rather, started from behind and have
not caught up with the field as it has been practiced in newsrooms. A key tenet
of this field is that using data to report and tell stories can result in a more
powerful story. As LaFleur described it in her IRE article: “understand the data,
interview the data, report the data.” That is the process we tried to follow for
this report.
We first collected the course offerings of 113 programs accredited (fully
or provisionally) by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and
Mass Communications. Accreditation is a voluntary process for journalism
schools. We used the ACEJMC programs simply because they represented a
significant portion of journalism schools and their curriculum requirements
include two that fit in with the concept of providing data journalism instruc-
tion: “apply basic numerical and statistical concepts” and “apply current tools
32 and technologies appropriate for the communications professions in which
they work, and to understand the digital world.”
We scraped what we could from the journalism program websites and
hand-entered the remainder. To verify the data, we then emailed or called
programs that had listed either no classes in data journalism or very few
classes. This yielded changes in our numbers for several programs where the
online course descriptions were not accurate. In soliciting this feedback, we
also heard from 11 schools where the department is revamping its curriculum
and considering adding data journalism. Sixteen schools did not respond to
multiple emails or phone calls. We then revisited every program website for all
113 programs and double-checked the data.1
We also collected information on multimedia offerings of each program
so that we could compare multimedia course offerings with data journalism
course offerings.

OUR FINDINGS
A little more than half of the universities we reviewed—59 of the 113 schools—
offer one or more data journalism courses. We defined a data journalism class
as being focused on the intersection of data and journalism, and using spread-
sheets, statistical software, relational databases, or programming toward that
end. We included in the data journalism category only those programming
classes that went beyond basic HTML and CSS. For the purposes of this report,
we considered classes on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to be focused on digital/
design journalism, not data journalism. We also excluded courses in numeracy
and communications research methodologies and statistics unless the course
offerings explicitly included a journalism focus. The appendix includes tables
detailing the full results of our analysis.
For Aaron Williams, who is four years out of college, it was not surprising
to hear that our analysis showed 54 of the 113 programs don’t offer a stand-
alone class on data journalism. Williams has worked in data journalism at
the Los Angeles Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and now as
interactive editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Almost everything he knows
he learned from colleagues at NICAR, he said. “I didn’t even really know about
data journalism as a discipline, nor did my instructors . . . until basically I was a
senior,” Williams recalled.
Of the 59 programs we identified that teach at least one data journalism
class, 27 of the schools offer just one course, usually foundational. Fourteen
offer two classes. Just 18 of the 59 schools teaching data journalism offer three
or more classes in this subject.
At a minimum, these programs offer courses that teach students to use

1 It should be noted that information on a degree program’s website does not necessarily reflect
the present state of their curriculum. We reached out to professors and administrative staff in order to
confirm our data, but this was not always possible.
spreadsheets to analyze data for journalistic purposes. At the other end of 33
the spectrum, some schools provide far more, teaching multiple classes in
programming skills, such as scraping the Web, building news apps, or creating
advanced data visualizations. But programs with multiple classes are rare.
A significant number of programs offer some instruction in data journalism,
even if they don’t provide a standalone class. Of the 113 ACEJMC-accredited
programs, 69 integrate some data journalism into other reporting and writing
courses, our analysis showed. In most cases, this entails introducing the
concepts of using spreadsheets or basic analysis as part of reporting and writing
classes or certain topic classes, such as business journalism.
Again, tables summarizing these findings can be found in the appendix,
while the remainder of this chapter will dig deeper into our analysis of syllabi
and course offerings in data journalism.
34 TEACHING DATA FUNDAMENTALS:
ROWS AND COLUMNS
Data journalism professors say that the foundational data class is the most
important because it lays down key mindsets and skills that are a prerequisite
for more advanced learning. Steve Doig of ASU believes the core data syllabus
should consist of negotiating for data, thinking critically about data, and using
spreadsheets to analyze data.
It is difficult to overstate the value of spreadsheets for managing infor-
mation. When we asked former CUNY professor Amanda Hickman, now
an Open Lab senior fellow at BuzzFeed, how she defines data, she replied,
“anything tabular.”
For the foundational computer-assisted reporting classes, the syllabus anal-
ysis and interviews indicate that the coursework is comprehensive, providing a
strong base in critical thinking and basic concepts surrounding the use of data
to find and tell stories. Students are taught similar concepts: critical thinking
and developing a “data frame of mind”—in other words, being able to question
data in a disciplined way, make sense of discrepancies, and find the underlying
patterns and outliers that are important to the analysis.
Most of the classes include some type of hands-on learning. Many of them
focus first on spreadsheets, then SQL, followed by mapping and statistical
concepts. Others include basic data visualization, using Tableau or Google
Fusion as a way into the subject. Multiple professors said the hands-on
approach reinforces the critical thinking concepts, including helping students
to understand what structured data look like and how information of any kind
can be structured for better understanding.
Another key feature of the 63 syllabi we reviewed was an exercise in
requesting and negotiating for data from a governmental body. Dan Keating,
who works at the Washington Post and teaches a long-standing class in comput-
er-assisted reporting at the University of Maryland, said that finding what “no
one has ever known before” is a defining part of his class.
Many CAR courses break down this way:
Hard Skills
» Searching for and finding documents and data that enable the journalist
to make statements of fact, including public requests, deep research, and
scraping skills
» Understanding data structures and how to clean and standardize data into
a form that is useful
» Analyzing data using spreadsheets, databases, mapping, and visualization
» Learning advanced statistical methods that illuminate data
Guiding concepts 35
» Finding what “no one has known before”
» Developing data-driven storytelling techniques, including how to use
numbers effectively in prose and how to tell a story visually
» Thinking of data as an asset in the reporting process
Whether following the guiding concepts or applying the hard skills, journalism
students today must be well grounded in both the importance of data and
the tools to use data in storytelling. “If you don’t deal with data as a journalist,
you’re shutting yourself down,” said McGinty of the Wall Street Journal.

Analysis from our

collection of syllabi.
Key concepts overlap,
so multiple concepts
can be taught in one
class.
36 TEACHING ADVANCED DATA SKILLS:
VISUALIZATION AND PROGRAMMING
Advanced instruction in data journalism today is limited. Only 14 of the 113
AEJMC-accredited programs surveyed for this study teach programming
beyond HTML/CSS to journalism students. And only 11 of the 113 offer
coursework in emerging areas of data journalism, such as drones, virtual reality,
and computational methods.
In fact, based on the analysis of syllabi and journalism programs, even
some classes described as advanced primarily teach basic tenets of spread-
sheet use. Part of the reason is that this is still where the need is greatest, said
professors and trainers. “It is unbelievable how much time I spend teaching the
basics,” said Jaimi Dowdell, the senior training director for IRE.

Analysis from
our collection of
syllabi. Advanced
classes included
data visualization,
programming
languages, and other
emerging methods
such as machine
learning.
Foundational
classes included
spreadsheets, basic
relational database
understanding, and
descriptive statistics.

However, teaching the basic CAR curriculum is not enough, argued Kevin
Quealy, a graphics editor at the New York Times and adjunct professor of
journalism at New York University. “To do data work at a high level, one or two
semesters of courses is very inadequate,” he said.
Many journalism programs offer design classes, but often those classes
focus on basic design tenets, overall web design, or static infographics.
Teaching students the concepts and skills needed to visualize data in an interac-
tive way or to build a web application is more rare.
Not all data journalism educators are convinced that data visualization for
news presentation should even be considered part of a data journalism curric-
ulum. However, most agree that it is vital to teach visualization for the purpose
of analysis. Alberto Cairo, who is leading an effort to fill a data visualization gap
in his role as Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at Miami University, believes
that even basic visualization instruction goes a long way toward literacy.
 First, data journalists need to know how to do basic exploratory visual 37
analysis, Cairo said. And second, even journalists who practice data visualiza-
tion need to start with the exploratory analysis. They need to know—just like
the CAR specialists—how to “interview” the data, he said.
One challenge for traditional journalism schools, which may lack a strong
journalism design component and may already have difficulty teaching a
CAR or data analysis class, is whether they should tap professionals or recruit
or train faculty to incorporate data visualization. To that, Cairo and other
academics and professionals we interviewed suggest that such schools collabo-
rate with other parts of a university to fill the gap.
For our analysis, we differentiated between web and digital technologies
aimed at presentation and the data skills needed to tell a story. This can be a
difficult boundary line. News applications, for example, are focused on design,
but, based on our interviews, there is a key difference in building a new website
or a multimedia presentation and building something like ProPublica’s “Dollars
for Docs,” which enabled readers to drill into the story of pharmaceutical
industry payments to doctors and also made it possible for other journalists
to find and tell other stories. Meanwhile, “Snow Fall,” the New York Times’s
much-touted (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) interactive story of skiers caught in
a Washington state avalanche, wasn’t about data and it wasn’t about furthering
the use of the data; it used design skills to make the story an immersive multi-
media experience for the reader.
Just 14 journalism schools in our data set teach programming beyond
HTML and CSS, based on their course descriptions. At present, the program-
ming languages most often used in classes on data-driven reporting are SQL,
Python, and R. Instructors focusing on data analysis often incorporate SQL,
and some will introduce R. Some instructors also teach web frameworks, such
as Django and Ruby on Rails, and some visualization professors teach JavaS-
cript and other skills, though fewer go into the D3 library developed by Mike
Bostock, a former New York Times graphic editor.
Deen Freelon, a communication studies professor at American University,
takes a different approach, teaching “code for the purposes of analysis” in a
course open to both communications and journalism students. “I just got back
from my last class where I was teaching students how to analyze Twitter data,”
he said.
While advanced classes are rare, there is a clear demand for this knowl-
edge. In the tech world, short programs designed to train web developers have
emerged as financially viable businesses. These code schools have shown that
some of these skills can be taught in considerably less time than a four-year
degree. The Lede Program at Columbia, which offers a summer boot camp as
well as an intensive two-semester certification program in computational skills
for journalists, has drawn students interested in gaining key data skills in a
short period of time.
Maggie Mulvihill, a clinical professor of journalism at Boston University,
is raising revenue for computational journalism efforts there through holding
38 week-long camps on storytelling with data for non-journalism professionals.
Integrating data journalism exposes students to the field, highlighting
this as an area that they might choose to practice, but it is also an important
step for students developing a foundation of journalistic skills. As noted, 69 of
the 113 AEJMC-accredited programs already integrate some data journalism
into reporting and writing courses, and on this front there is some good news:
several schools expressed interest in adding data journalism in a systematic
way to their programs. When, in order to verify or data, we contacted each
of the programs that had listed either no data journalism class or just one,
11 responded that they are actively working to add data journalism to their
curricula. At the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, for example, the school
does not offer a standalone CAR class, but it now includes components of data
analysis instruction in three separate journalism classes.

ALTERNATIVE DATA JOURNALISM

INSTRUCTION: THE STATE OF
ONLINE COURSES
One response to the widespread lack of instruction in data journalism, and
instructors capable of teaching it, has been to enlist respected teachers for
massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Doig is one of those teachers, and
he suggests MOOCs offer great benefit for certain classes, providing expert
instruction and hands-on training.
He was an instructor in two MOOCs focused on data journalism, one
organized by the European Journalism Centre, which drew 25,000 people to
enroll, and the other by Rosental Alves of the Knight Center for Journalism
in The Americas at the University of Texas School of Journalism, which drew
more than 4,000.
“One strength is that there are a wide variety of MOOCs out there created
by top faculty at major institutions like Harvard and MIT and Stanford,” Doig
wrote in a memo on the subject. “Their existence begs the question of why
should your institution go to the trouble of creating and staffing a class that
covers the same ground. (Of course, one reason would be to collect the tuition
from your students!)”
He suggested that a partial journalism curriculum could be crafted out
of MOOC offerings combined with video content from journalism-related
sources such as IRE and the Poynter Institute’s News University. However,
being unable to provide individual feedback, MOOCs would come up short
for classes in newswriting or basic reporting, he said.
Our research assistant participated in three MOOCs to help us develop
a sense of how well the virtual courses teach data journalism. He found that
MOOCs are best at offering introductory exposure, but one should not expect
to reach in-depth knowledge. MOOCs may be useful for developing an initial
foundation in a subject, or for reinforcing a fading proficiency, but may be
lacking in terms of teaching reporting techniques, critical thinking, or creative 39
skills. The three MOOCs he participated in were effective at teaching tools,
and our RA reported that he was often excited to learn a feature or technique
within an application. However, finding ways to apply these tools outside of
exercises may require person-to-person interaction in a classroom setting.
In order for MOOCs to be viable resources, they must be maintained.
Many classes referenced lost and outdated information. Broken links, missing
materials, and redesigned websites often made it difficult to navigate through
the lessons.
Our participant’s experience pointed to the issues raised by Doig, but the
ASU professor does think MOOCs could still be an optional resource for a
data journalism course. “Students eager to go beyond what is offered in the
classroom (alas, almost certainly a minority) can be pointed to online sources
that will give them that content,” Doig wrote. “To that end, it might be a good
idea to develop a list of MOOCs and such that journalism instructors could
sample and offer to their students.”

TEXTBOOKS: LITTLE CONSENSUS

Our analysis also found one more gap in curricula—a strong core of textbooks.
The concepts and skills of this field were described in fairly consistent ways
throughout our interviews and the text of the syllabi, but data journalism
instructors share only a few core books in common. In fact, most didn’t use a
textbook at all but provided a list of selected readings.
Of the syllabi, more than 70 different textbooks were required, but there
was no consensus on which books were preferred. The most popular book—
Brant Houston’s Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide—was required
in just 14 percent of the classes.
Five courses required membership in IRE, and 23 of the courses required
students to buy a book published through IRE. They included various editions
of Houston’s and IRE’s The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Docu-
ments, Databases, and Techniques and Sarah Cohen’s Numbers in the Newsroom:
Using Math and Statistics in News. Various editions of Philip Meyer’s book, New
Precision Journalism or Precision Journalism, were required in nine of the courses.
Eight of the courses required The Data Journalism Handbook, which was
produced as a combined effort by data journalists around the globe. The online
book is an initiative of the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowl-
edge Foundation and is available free on the Web in English, Russian, Spanish,
French, and Georgian.
In 17 classes, no text was required. The lesson here may be that online
reading works best for these classes. But it also could mean that despite its long
history, data journalism is still a nascent subject within journalism schools and
there may be a dearth of effective textbooks beyond the few that are commonly
assigned.
CHAPTER 3:
Q UA L I TAT I V E
F I N D I N G S : I N T E RV I EW S
A N D O B S E RVAT I O N S

IDENTIFYING WHAT TO TEACH

“Data journalism isn’t easy to define or to teach. It is constantly changing
and best practices are evolving. One needs to learn a lot by doing, too.”
– Jonah Newman of the Chicago Reporter
Our interviews echoed many of the findings in our quantitative data, so rather
than repeat those findings, this chapter focuses on how the professors put the
concepts into practice in the classroom. It is intended to provide a roadmap of
existing pedagogical work in data journalism and offer insights into common
challenges.
We interviewed nearly 50 teachers and practitioners, and while there is a
diversity of thought, there also is a consensus when it comes to the foundations
of data journalism curricula: critical thinking, mastery of key data skills, and
teaching programming concepts so that students will be able to learn new tools
as needed.
David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s School of Media and
Communication, suggested that data journalism is about learning higher and
more complex levels of analysis. This includes learning more sophisticated
tools and software and almost certainly some level of programming.
In a data journalism class, having that critical thinking skill means that the
students learn to treat data in an ethical way, so that rather than bending the
data to represent a particular view, the goal is toward truth and accuracy.
42 “I would always err on the [teaching of] critical thinking skills,” said
LaFleur of the Center for Investigative Reporting. “That is the harder skill to
ingrain in people. You can learn how to click things and write a line of code.”
In general, those who teach data journalism focus on hands-on methods.
In the beginning, the professors will provide data to students to analyze.
LaFleur, for example, uses hands-on training with one data set and then will
introduce a similar data set and assign the students to ask the same types of
questions, but on their own.
By the middle of a course, students often have to obtain their own data,
submitting public records requests. The students then move on to data that
require more complex analysis. By doing this, the professors are doing two key
things: teaching the critical thinking that goes with negotiating for informa-
tion and understanding the bounds of that information. At the same time, the
students are using basic tools to accomplish their goals, be they spreadsheets
or a relational database. In some classes, the focus is on writing a memo by the
end of the course on a possible story. In other courses, the professors expect
the students to report and write a story. This last step—either a memo or a
story—once again helps the student use critical thinking, this time pairing that
with the skills of storytelling.
The key is learning how to obtain mastery, said Ira Chinoy, an associate
professor at the University of Maryland who previously led the data journalism
efforts at the Washington Post.
Chinoy relates this to the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” and how the
pilot used reflexive mastery to land the US Airways plane on the river after
bird strikes caused both engines to fail. In class, when students get discouraged
about bad interactions or conversations in pursuit of their databases, Chinoy
brings up “Sully” Sullenberger’s actions and says, “Do you think he could have
done that on his first day of pilot school?”
Chinoy emphasized that the information should not always be presented
to the students up front. He likes to give them a chance to come up against
obstacles. They also need to develop a sense of when data could be problematic,
what are signs of that, and what is each student’s best practice for examining
the data.
THE CODING ISSUE 43
Whether data journalists need to program remains an active debate. But when
we delved into this issue, we found that we first need to define what we mean
in terms of data journalism. To some, “code” means web development and
design—back to the concept of HTML and CSS. “Programming” means
writing programs that enable advanced mining of data or algorithms that could
identify patterns.
The bottom line is that to do more advanced data journalism, its practi-
tioners need, at a minimum, to understand how programming works. This
could be considered the start of computational thinking. Just scraping infor-
mation from the Web can involve simple programming using Python, and
understanding what is possible with programmatic solutions is critical for
journalists looking at websites and other troves of information, much of which
is not just in rows and columns.
As students develop the ability to recognize computational solutions to
some of these problems, some of them may then learn how to program. But
even those who don’t take the coding path should still be able to understand
how solutions like these can be a part of their journalistic practice. The ability
to work with data and think in terms of computation is a skill broader and
more necessary than any specific tool or programming language. It is vital that
we don’t confuse the two.
Mark Hansen, a professor of journalism at Columbia and director of its
Brown Institute for Media Innovation, also focuses on teaching both program-
ming skills and the mindset of computational journalism. The idea, according
to Hansen, is that by using programming, journalists can think beyond rows
and columns as they search for answers in data of all forms, whether structured
or unstructured.
Nicholas Diakopoulos, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland,
has been teaching a number of classes in data journalism beyond the introduc-
tory level. And he also provides a course on coding in the sophomore year. His
aim, he said, is to move the undergraduate students from the track of learning
CSS/HTML basic web skills to understanding web development and news
apps. Beyond that, he’s offering a class on computational journalism with a
focus on Python, text analysis and aggregation, recommender systems, and
writing stories with code behind it.
Diakopoulos suggested that students could also take computer science
classes if they want to learn how to be hackers—meaning, in the original sense
of the word, anyone fluent enough with computers to use them creatively.
It’s all about working with data in a principled way, Diakopoulos said.
He ties this to CAR and Philip Meyer’s crusade to bring the scientific way of
thinking into journalism 50 years earlier; in other words, thinking methodically,
thinking about how to frame an experiment, gather data, and use rigorous
methods to build evidence of some finding of journalistic importance.
44 In the end, data journalism is about teaching how to find the story, using
an increasing array of data techniques, said David Donald, data journalist in
residence at the School of Communication at American University and data
director of AU’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. “You’re still talking about
story and how data needs to be vetted and be expressed in a way that gets into
the public’s brain easily,” Donald said. “From the investigative side, you are
looking for evidence in the data.”
Developing that computational ability will become even more important
to handle the vast amounts of data in today’s world. More tools will come and
go, but data journalism, at its core, will enable journalists to do their job in a
more expansive way, said Coll of Columbia.
“I think that [data journalism] will be around for a while” Coll said. “It will
be around for a whole set of iterations of platforms and distribution systems,
and even media. So we get virtual reality, or we get 3D, or we don’t. That’s a
whole different set of questions. This is going to be about how you report on
government, how you report on corporations, how you tell wheat from chaff.”
Data journalists are starting to address this type of coverage, but it takes a
deeper level of data journalism capability—the computational journalism slice
of data journalism. Some of it involves presenting data in new, journalistic ways.
The “Surgeon Scorecard,” published by ProPublica, is one example. ProPublica
used extensive Medicare data and collaborated with leaders in the field to eval-
uate the performance of surgeons.
In other iterations, this level of computational journalism means exam-
ining information in new, more complex ways. Examples of that type of data
journalism are the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Medicare system, which
received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting, and Reuters’ 2014
project examining influence in the Supreme Court.

INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES:
RESOURCES
Depending on the university, some students need more support with tech-
nology. Some students still do not own personal laptops and rely on school
computer labs for their assignments, for example. Other students may be using
personal computing devices that are not equipped with what they need to do
data journalism. Students who use a tablet (such as an iPad) as their primary
tool will face barriers.
Meredith Broussard, who taught data journalism at Temple University
until 2015, said that ensuring that her students had the equipment they needed
for her class was a major priority. Many of her students relied on a tablet, which
meant equipping computer labs with the necessary equipment and platforms—
or even lending laptops to students for the term.
 Brant Houston of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign also 45
pointed to the availability of resources as an important issue—especially for
universities that draw students from economically disadvantaged populations.
Journalism schools can help these students by investing in up-to-date lab
equipment and by working to create an environment that makes it easy for
students to access needed software and to install it on their own devices. Jour-
nalism school administrators should consider more frequent audits and surveys
of professors to identify which software will be most useful for their students.
And for students who are working on their own personal laptops, some
professors hold provisioning sessions to help students install the needed soft-
ware at the beginning of the term.

INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES:
FACULTY EXPERTISE
There is no secret that a divide exists between the professional journalism
world and the academic world. This chasm continues even with faculty when
it comes to who teaches data journalism and the impact it will have on the
department.
Of course, each brand of data journalism instructor may have his or her
own biases. Those who started as professional journalists, or who still work in
a newsroom and teach as an adjunct, believe that they can convey the critical
thinking skills needed to succeed in a newsroom environment more effectively
than a professor whose experience is in research.
On the other hand, Diakopoulos of the University of Maryland believes
that faculty should hold PhDs, and that while it would be good to be able to
hire someone with 25 years of experience in data journalism, it’s an unrealistic
expectation at this stage of the field’s development. His goal, he said, is to teach
thinking through research. Still, he admitted that this is a struggle.
Some data journalists and journalism professors take issue with Diako-
poulos, suggesting that such a model of data journalism professors with PhDs
is unrealistic in a world where data journalism emerged from the professional
practice, not academia.
Wherever journalism schools find the necessary faculty, just hiring a new
professor to specialize in data journalism will not solve the problem, said Doig
from ASU. “One difficulty with having somebody like me is everybody else can
say, ‘Ah, we don’t have to worry about data journalism now.’ In reality, I teach
maybe two sections of 20 students each semester. That’s a fraction of our total
student load,” Doig said. “So believing that it is somehow being taken care of by
one specialist like that, that isn’t the case.”
To help solve at least some of the issues, Doig has provided short video
tutorials to other professors for basic government reporting classes.
46 While Doig believes it would be good to have a required data journalism
course, he also questions whether that is possible. “How are you going to find
the faculty to teach that?” he asked. “There’s not enough people in town who
could teach that.”
Professional track and academic track faculty members agree that for
now, pulling in professional journalists to serve as adjuncts will continue to be
necessary and that relying on professional journalists alone will not solve the
problem.
For Dustin Harp at the University of Texas, Arlington, this conundrum
was solved through her own initiative. She had never taught data journalism
but decided the students needed the class, so she did some research and
created one. Some colleagues asked her why. She has tenure and no one asked
her to take on the extra work. But the students needed the class, Harp said. She
used lynda.com for tutorials and learned the same information before teaching
her students.
“The thing is I’m a qualitative researcher, I’m not a numbers person, I’m not
a numbers cruncher, so it was very crazy and daunting. After I said I was going
to do it, it was on the schedule, I was like what have I gotten myself into?” Harp
said. “But I follow the field. . . . I’m aware that data journalism is, it’s a tool our
students need to be more competitive to get jobs.”

INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES:
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Journalism programs need to do a better job of persuading or even requiring
students to take a data journalism class. Students may shy away because they
believe they aren’t any good at math. “A lot of students are scared of ‘that math
thing,’” said one journalism student at Northwestern University.
Resistance to math is an issue far broader than the field of journalism, but
it will need to be addressed if teaching data journalism is to be taken seriously.
This applies to both teachers and students, some of whom may have chosen to
pursue journalism in part because they thought that it would require little or
no math.
The problems go deeper than just convincing people they can handle math.
Even in universities with entire programs focused on teaching programming,
data journalism, and even data visualization, some students have reported that
it wasn’t easy to find out about these opportunities. Some of the reasons have
to do with silos within schools and departments for specific programs as well
as specific tracks with emphasis on specific types of journalistic practice.
Rich Gordon, co-founder of the Knight Lab and director of digital inno-
vation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, agrees
that a gap exists between the basic CAR course and the much more advanced
program through Knight Lab, which brings in technologists and works with
the technologists to develop new applications for journalism. Journalism
students going through a normal degree plan may have the opportunity to take 47
a basic CAR class, but most won’t ever be exposed to the work at the lab, he
said.
In general, data journalism courses are electives and draw only a few
students out of the total enrolled in each journalism program. Some of that
has to do with capacity, but another issue is the lack of visibility. Often, other
professors don’t treat the classes as vital to a journalism career.
“There’s some student interest in CAR,” said one University of Missouri
journalism graduate. “But there would be more if it were expressed as an
option for students early on.”
Universities can address this issue, said Mike Reilley, professor of practice
at Arizona State University, who regards universities as “‘too siloed.” Reilley
advocates team-taught courses and cooperation between departments.
Some students work their way through to find what they need. For
instance, one student who took Temple University’s undergraduate class in
data journalism had taken classes in programming with Python through the
university’s business school. She told our researchers she planned on learning
more data journalism as she wanted to continue doing this type of journalism
when she graduated. But institutional changes could make data journalism
much more accessible.
Several students suggested that schools should offer a track that could
include a journalistically focused statistics class, a class that focuses on data-
bases, a class with a focus on reporting with data, and others that delve into
more in-depth data reporting and data visualization.
One of the authors of this report co-taught a spring 2015 watchdog
reporting class with an engineering professor. Five computer science students
embedded into project teams of journalism students. The journalism students
learned new data skills, and the computer science students learned techniques
in reporting and writing. The class offered challenges, too. Next time around,
there may be a more defined way for the journalism students to take on data
challenges of their own and continued emphasis on having the computer
science students learn skills such as interviewing.
CHAPTER 4:
MODEL CURRICULA I N
DATA AND COMPUTATION

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF

CURRICULAR RECOMMENDATIONS
The preceding chapters offer a picture of the state of education in data and
computational journalism in the United States, as well as an argument for the
necessity and even urgency of journalism schools committing to teach these
subjects. What follows in this chapter are model curricula and guidelines that
we hope will facilitate this transition. We intend these models to be flexible; we
hope that this information can be applied across schools despite variation in
term length, academic units, and time to degree.
This chapter is divided into five sections. The first is a model for an intro-
ductory class in data and computation that we recommend as a requirement
for all journalism students. The second section offers ways of integrating data
and computational instruction into core classes and certain electives. The last
three sections present full model curricula for a range of degrees. The first of
those three is a track or concentration in data and computational journalism. It
is flexible in order to be generally applicable at the undergraduate or graduate
level. The other two are models for advanced graduate work. The first presumes
a student with some reporting experience or a journalism degree in hand who
wishes to develop expertise-driven reporting skills—that is, to write about
complicated subjects from a position of deep understanding. The final model
is for a research-driven, lab-based graduate degree in emerging media and
technological innovation.
Above all, we recommend that all programs have a required foundational
course in data journalism, teaching basic principles of data analysis for the
purpose of finding stories while cultivating a sense of the general techniques
50 and possibilities of data-driven reporting. The premise of this course is that all
reporters must be prepared to use data in their work and to recognize when
this approach is needed.
Considering that many journalism programs are designed to cover a
dizzying range of material in a short period of time, some of our readers
might be wondering where to find room for a required class in data jour-
nalism. Schools that have an existing class on basic numeracy for journalists
could rework the class to include a greater emphasis on data-driven reporting
methods. Another opening might lie in multimedia classes, many of which
were introduced only in the past decade. Compared with data journalism,
which frames a mindset for gathering and presenting information, multimedia
instruction often centers on teaching tools with uncertain shelf lives. It might
be time to consider retiring the audio slideshow from required coursework to
make room for data skills.

MODEL 1.
INTEGRATING DATA AS A CORE
CLASS: Foundations of Data Journalism
This is a model for a required introductory course at the graduate or undergrad-
uate level. What follows is a narrative account of how such a class may proceed
in developing data literacy among beginning journalists. We realize that this
course may need to fit the unique contours of different journalism programs,
some of which contain boot camps and other introductory programs with idio-
syncratic durations and varying levels of intensity and focus on different skills.
The point is for this course to be given equal footing with other skills or subject
matters that are currently treated as essential in a journalism education.
course description: This course is an introduction to the collection,
analysis, presentation, and critique of structured information by journalists. As
students are introduced to the basics of reporting and the range of journalistic
methods that they may pursue in later coursework, an introduction to data and
computation is an essential component of their journalism education.
Over the course of a term, students should begin to develop a frame of
mind in which they approach every story looking for data possibilities. They
should understand how to use basic methods using spreadsheets and relational
databases. They should get a primer on using and understanding statistical
concepts. They should learn how to take their data findings and locate the
people who illustrate those findings for their stories. They will learn how to
convert their data analysis into a pitch for a journalistic story.
Students will learn how to find data online, how to maintain personal
records as they report stories, and how to use simple visualization methods to
find new information: how keeping a timeline can help reveal discrepancies
and how cross-checking sources of information may lead to new avenues of
inquiry. The use of data in these contexts will benefit students no matter which 51
area of journalism they choose to practice. Just like interviewing, which is a
ubiquitous journalistic skill, the art of gathering and understanding data should
extend widely across the field of journalism.
The trouble with data is that it so often appears clinical or detached from
the richness of people’s lives. To reduce things to abstractions may seem
limiting to some students. Early exercises may help to counter this presup-
position. If you ask the class to gather information about each other such as
their birth dates, blood types, eye color, and birthplace, they may see within a
20-minute exercise how interesting data can be when we learn something from
data that we care to know.
From this point, the class may move to more journalistic exercises with
spreadsheets. As students become more comfortable with spreadsheets, the
class may turn to methods of data analysis such as pivot tables and other plot-
ting methods.
skills: This class should prepare students to use spreadsheets and databases
to find and tell stories.
Central concerns include: spreadsheet training, how to find data, clean it,
look for patterns and outliers, and question the biases and omissions in how
it was gathered. Instructors may choose to use an introductory data set with a
good story for beginners to find (examples are listed in the appendix).
Students should also learn how to critically assess claims surrounding
data. Reporting on data may go astray when it presumes this information is
complete and accurate. Reporters should be trained to look for problems in
data. It is necessary to question every source of information.
Another foundational aspect of data-driven reporting is to recognize
patterns and anomalies in data. Two skills that should emerge from this class
are to look for trends and to identify outliers. Every data point is a possible
source or anecdote.
This class will introduce data visualization, but mainly as a means to
explore a data set. Using an approachable program such as Excel, Fusion Tables,
or Tableau, students will learn to display data in graphic form as an inroad to
asking journalistic questions. The goal is not to design a graphic for publication,
but to graph for the sake of understanding the data. Students may think of this
as a research method or a sketchpad for further reporting. Instruction should
include discussion of the ways that different visualization methods can be
misleading.
Along the way, this class can cover basic numeracy and descriptive statis-
tics—skills that every journalist needs to know. This may include reminders
about how to calculate percentage and percent change, working with units and
measures, and even identifying large numbers like billions and trillions. Once
those are covered, the material could move to statistics principles and methods
such as standard deviation and regression analysis.
topics: Data sources, importing data, negotiating for data, checking the
veracity of data, data cleaning, using formulas in spreadsheets, querying data-
52 bases, finding social significance in the data, writing a data story, visualizing a
data story.
course structure: Mix of hands-on practice and lectures, primarily using
spreadsheet tools and perhaps relational database software; some limited expo-
sure to data visualization for story exploration.
example assignments
» homework: Bring a piece of data journalism to critique in class.
» homework: Find a data set and explain why it’s interesting and what it
might reveal.
» classwork: Discuss basic data analysis and cleaning on prepared
example data.
» spreadsheet assignment: Analyze a government’s payroll, including
overtime, or examine a city or county budget. This could be a bridge
inspection data set, a city budget, or city payroll.
» final: Produce a data story in three assignments: pitch, draft, final
submission.

CLASSROOM SUPPORT
Since many students will enter college with little or no prior training in data
and computation—and worse still, a bevy of uncertainties about their abili-
ties—we recommend a range of support resources including open lab sessions,
teaching assistants, and online resources to review tools and methods.
Open lab sessions give students extra assistance. Matt Waite runs “maker
hours” that are well attended by his students at Nebraska. At Northwestern’s
Knight Lab, students have weekly open hours in which to build and discuss
new digital tools.
In our interviews, observations, and personal experience, a teaching assis-
tant (TA) is a considerable asset to classes in data and computation. TAs can
offer in-class help when students encounter minor bumps. Here’s a common
scenario: a student forgets to type a single character while learning a program-
ming language and cannot understand the error message or parse what’s
missing from that line. Confronted with that situation, many students may not
want to interrupt the instructor and as a result could be left behind. The TA can
quickly assist with a problem like that. TAs also can be on hand during open
lab sessions so that multiple students can get help at once instead of waiting for
the instructor.
MODEL 2. 53
INTEGRATING DATA AND
COMPUTATION INTO EXISTING
COURSES AND CONCENTRATIONS:
General Guidelines for the Undergraduate
and Graduate Levels
The basic principles of data journalism should be as familiar to students as
writing a lede, shooting b-roll, or tweeting updates to a developing story. To
integrate data skills into journalism instruction means introducing these
concerns across the curriculum.
Our central recommendation is for journalism schools to treat data and
computation as core skills for all students. Data journalism must be taught as a
foundational method in introductory classes, a distinct theme in media law and
ethics, a reporting method suitable to any specialized reporting course, and
a subject in which interested students can pursue advanced coursework or a
concentration.
Moreover, because data and algorithms are increasingly important topics
to understand in order to report on issues in business, politics, technology, and
health, among others, subject area reporting classes should include material
that prepares students to approach these information sources with proper
skepticism and to explain them clearly in writing. In the models that follow, we
point to a few ways that data journalism can be integrated into courses that are
commonly offered in journalism schools.
One notable difference between graduate and undergraduate programs
is that a master’s program often begins with a boot camp in which students
are quickly brought up to speed on a wide range of skills. For the majority of
students, who enter without a declared concentration, a boot camp may point
toward areas of unexpected interest. To integrate data and computational jour-
nalism into graduate programs, it must be given equal footing alongside other
areas where students may choose to specialize. An introductory module on
data journalism will benefit students as much as learning the basics of photo-
journalism. Moreover, thematic elective coursework such as environmental and
political reporting should integrate data instruction to the same degree that it
would emphasize such distinct approaches as photojournalism, broadcast, and
long-form journalism.
54 Introductory journalism classes are necessarily broad. Some classes are
thematic, covering material from the basic history and general practices of jour-
nalism to the range of technologies and reporting techniques that constitute
the modern media. Others focus entirely on the practice of journalism. Either
way, data and computation must have a place foundational courses.
At the undergraduate level, this should apply to students pursuing either
a major or a minor in journalism. Coursework toward the minor also should
integrate some measure of data and computational instruction.
Schools may also consider working more coursework in data and computa-
tion for other programs and concentrations. Students focused on investigative
reporting, for instance, would benefit from additional coursework on finding
stories in data, perhaps even as an additional requirement.

INTRODUCTORY AND REQUIRED

JOURNALISM CLASSES
Integrating Data and Computation

BASIC GRAPHICS, VIDEO, AND MULTIMEDIA

how and why to integrate data: Different schools may teach a variety
of visual tools under the heading of graphic, video, multimedia, or digital
media. There are productive ways for data and computation to be integrated
into these lessons, however the classes are structured. Data visualization would
dovetail with instruction in other graphical storytelling methods such as design
and video, for instance, while a general familiarity with news apps could be
developed in multimedia classes.
skills to integrate: Simple tools for building charts, maps, and timelines.
Include building maps and basic data charts, visualizations and timelines, plus
an overview on news apps.
possible assignments:
» Use simple tools (Google Fusion, CartoDB, or Esri’s Story Maps) to locate
the availability of a public service across a geographic area.
» Use simple online charting tools to illustrate changes in the annual budgets
of several government offices.
» Include data visualization within a video to provide context and enhance
the story.

MEDIA LAW AND ETHICS

how and why to integrate data: Legal considerations form one of the
core concerns of data journalists: making public records requests can be one
of the most fruitful avenues for reporting, but also one of the most frustrating.
Journalism students should learn the relevant public records laws at the state 55
and federal levels.
They should also address the common misconception that data is sterile,
objective, or in some sense detached from human experience. On the contrary,
all data exists because someone has chosen to gather it, adn the use of data has
social and ethical consequences.
Courses should include material on the verification of photos (through
metadata or crowdsourcing) and ethical considerations surrounding leaked or
sensitive data, as well as source protection and digital security in conditions of
pervasive surveillance.
skills to integrate: Becoming familiar with a range of ethical questions
surrounding the use of data. Scrutinizing data for bias, errors, and incomplete-
ness.
possible assignments:
» Prepare a critical response paper on legal and ethical concerns surrounding
leaked data. This could take the form of an essay or even a mock editorial
responding to a sensitive story.
» File a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or other public records
request, then follow up with needed negotiations. This may be framed as
preparation for a project in a subsequent term, if and when the records
come through.

HISTORY OF JOURNALISM
how and why to integrate data: Understanding history is especially
valuable during times of apparent change. To observe the field of journalism
evolving over the centuries can make journalism students more conscious
participants in the process of inventing its future. It may also help to temper
the widespread view that journalism is witnessing unprecedented upheaval
due to technology. Looking back, we see that institutions come and go, new
technologies are often disruptive before settling into routine, and the mission
and practice of the profession are perennially under revision. Data and compu-
tation are in many ways emblematic of our time, but not exclusive to it. These
topics have a long history in journalism. This class needs to tell that story.
Two distinct strands of historical concern should be covered. One is to
recount the historical uses of data in the news. For example, a striking and
memorable early case of data-driven journalism dates to the antebellum period
in the United States, when Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled the accounts
of several escaped slaves, aggregated advertisements from Southern news-
papers offering rewards for their return, and published several tables of data
as a rebuttal to claims that her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had exaggerated the
reality of slavery. Likewise, one might point to Philip Meyer’s use of data to
undermine racial stereotypes in the coverage of the 1967 Detroit riots. These
two cases highlight the enduring value of data for asserting truths that might
56 otherwise be denied. More broadly, where these stories place data journalism
in historical context, it will not only form a canon to orient students in this
area of practice, but it will also reveal that data journalism, for all its glamorous
novelty, is rooted in a tradition of quality work.
skills to integrate: Acquiring a sense of how the journalistic profession
has developed over time, especially in terms of how journalists have chosen to
depict the world to their audiences. Appreciating how data and computational
journalism fit into historical context.
possible assignments:
» homework: Find and analyze a chart, graph, map, or other data
visualization published in a newspaper at least 50 years ago.
» term paper: Consider a contemporary concern surrounding emerging
technology, such as algorithmic transparency or the Snowden leaks, in the
context of other historical cases.

ADVANCED CLASSES AND ELECTIVES:

Integrating Data and Computation

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
how and why to integrate data: Many of the tools and methods of
computational and data-driven journalism were developed through investiga-
tive reporting. Fluency with spreadsheets, databases, and other mainstays of
computer-assisted reporting will enable students to conduct deep investiga-
tions with the full range of resources at their disposal.
skills to integrate: Compiling the backgrounds of people and organiza-
tions with the use of data. Turning documents into data. Making public records
requests and negotiating for data.
possible assignments:
» Tracing shell company ownership through public records.
» Examining medical device reports for problems in devices sold by specific
companies.

NARRATIVE REPORTING AND FEATURE WRITING

how and why to integrate data: Great feature writing is built on facts
and compelling narratives. This course should incorporate some data-driven
and computer-assisted reporting methods, teaching students to frame, explain,
and give context to data that will help to tell their story. This class should
highlight that words and numbers are both sources of data. The instructor may
consider inviting a guest lecture from a professor in the digital humanities to
highlight novel approaches developed in this field for understanding literature
and the arts through a computational lens.
skills to integrate: General grasp of using numbers to support a narra- 57
tive. Using spreadsheets to organize chronologies of the main characters in the
course of reporting. Using large-scale textual analysis tools to organize, index,
and annotate documents.
possible assignments:
» Use Overview or Document Cloud to explore a large cache of documents,
such as the Congressional Record, Wikipedia, or a recent leak.
» Organize reporting for a long-form narrative piece by placing sources,
quotes, and chronologies in a spreadsheet.
» Analyze tax return (IRS Form 990) data on arts nonprofits to evaluate
their finances.

SOCIAL MEDIA SKILLS

how and why to integrate data: The use of social media by contem-
porary news organizations goes hand in hand with the use of analytics to drive
traffic. If students are taught to run social media feeds, they also should be
taught to understand the analytics for these platforms. Moreover, the ability
to mine the social web to interpret social trends and public opinion will be an
asset in reporting.
skills to integrate: Gathering and interpreting web analytics. Scraping or
otherwise aggregating social media content for analysis use in a story.
possible assignments:
» Use Twitter analytics to determine the rate of growth in followers,
retweeting activity, or the most popular stories, sections, writers, and days
of the week.
» Use Google analytics to aggregate several streams of traffic data and
generate more complicated (second-order) insights.
» Use Google Trends to do a story on patterns in search data.
» Analyze social media data to produce chart of attention around a recent
news event.
» (Advanced) Use scraped Twitter data to tell a story (perhaps through
sentiment analysis).
58 BUSINESS AND ECONOMIC REPORTING
how and why to integrate data: The ability to gather, analyze, and
critique financial data is an essential component of business reporting. Many
classes already include some instruction on reading and interpreting data. As
more of this data has become generally available, while some of it has become
more complicated and difficult to interpret, business reporting classes will
need to adapt and offer more advanced instruction.
skills to integrate: The ability to gather and analyze data from a variety
of sources, including Bloomberg terminals and APIs (application programming
interfaces) for financial information. Advanced spreadsheet analysis and finan-
cial/budget analysis training.
possible assignments:
» Spreadsheet assignment: find a story in a company’s public financial
statements.
» Build a personal dashboard of APIs to track financial information for a
story.
» Analyze whether you can predict earnings or stock price through a factor
like CEO salary.

DIGITAL DESIGN AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION

how and why to integrate data: Digital design courses in journalism
schools serve to introduce students to layout design, editorial graphics, and the
principles of visual critique. In order to integrate data and computation, such
a course should include material on data visualization and at least an introduc-
tion to the idea of news apps and web development.
skills to integrate: Basic charts, graphs, and maps. A visual critique to
know which styles of visualization are good for which kinds of data and to
pinpoint cases in which visual forms can conceal or distort the data.
possible assignments:
» Find a data visualization you like, then dissect, explain, analyze, and
critique it.
» Find some data, identify what’s interesting about it, and visualize your
findings.
» Mock up (design, don’t program) a news app.
GLOBAL AND INTERNATIONAL REPORTING 59
how and why to integrate data: When journalists cover other
countries, numbers will often help both them and their audience to picture
these unfamiliar and often complicated matters with greater clarity. A global
reporting class should teach students to find, assess, and accurately convey
facts and figures about foreign countries and subjects with an international
scope. On a deeper level, such a class should teach students to find stories by
gathering and scrutinizing data from global sources.
skills to integrate: How to gather, evaluate, and use data from multiple
international sources. How to evaluate what data can communicate about inter-
national development patterns. How to use data to complete an investigative
project focused on an international issue.
possible assignments:
» Use a data set from a large international organization such as the UN to
find a story, then learn how the organization gathered its data and discuss
the limitations and biases that may result.
» Find data that deepens your understanding of an international story in the
news, complicates the prevailing narrative, or reveals another side of it.

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING

how and why to integrate data: Data is a crucial component of scien-
tific topics in the news. The ability to interpret research papers and scrutinize
experimental methods will make students far better reporters on these subjects.
Students should emerge from this class with an understanding of the scientific
method, randomized controlled experiments, statistical significance, and other
factors that they will encounter while reporting on topics in science and the
environment. If possible, they should also have the opportunity to use their
own data sources, such as sensors for air or water quality.
skills to integrate: How to gather, evaluate, and use data on specialized
scientific topics, and to critically assess published research.
possible assignments:
» Reading and analyzing data stories covering these topics and reverse
engineering how the reporters told this story.
» Drafting data analysis of key data sets and story pitch memos.
» Reading a research paper, evaluating the evidence (including the statistical
arguments used), and summarizing in plain language for a non-technical
reader.
» Setting up a sensor network to test air quality across campus (class
project).
60 MODEL 3.
CONCENTRATION IN DATA &
COMPUTATION
A data journalism concentration should begin with several core, required
classes before moving into a track of electives offering data journalism analysis,
visualization, and online research/backgrounding.
The curriculum detailed below should provide a framework for a school to
begin offering specialized coursework to students who wish to concentrate in
data-driven reporting or computational journalism.
This section describes some of the courses that may form such a degree.
Depending on the availability of instructors and other resources, classes like
these may form either the mandatory core of a concentration in data and
computation, or else a range of electives.
Please note that we would not expect any journalism school to offer all of
these classes, nor only these, in its data and computational curriculum. This
is just one picture of the skills and thematic exposure that could constitute a
journalism degree specializing in data and computation.

CORE CLASSES
Required for Concentration in Data & Computation

FOUNDATIONS OF DATA JOURNALISM

This is the course outlined in the opening of this chapter (see full description
on page 50) as a requirement for all journalism students. If students enter
journalism school without declared concentrations, this introduction will be
suitable for future data concentrators to learn the basics before proceeding
to other required courses and electives. Schools may also choose to require
applicants to be specifically accepted into the data concentration, in which case
it may be advisable to offer a summer boot camp (see “Note on Incoming Skills,
Technical Literacies, and Specialized Boot Camps,” page 74) to get students up
to speed on the tools and methods they will need. In this case, data concentra-
tors may be placed in a more advanced fall foundations course with their peers.

INTRODUCTION TO JOURNALISTIC
PROGRAMMING
course description: The purpose of this course is to introduce students
to several foundational computer-programming skills that they will use to find
and tell stories. This should be a requirement of those who concentrate in data
and computation, but also open to students from other tracks.
course structure: Meets twice weekly, first for lecture and then for an 61
intensive workshop.
skills: The Unix command line; basic Python programming for scraping,
parsing, connecting to APIs; introduction to JavaScript for web work.
tools: Bash utilities, Jupyter/IPython Notebook, Pandas, Matplotlib, JavaS-
cript.
example assignments:
» Test proficiency with the command line with a quiz, or even a screencast
demonstrating completion of a series of tasks using Bash alone.
» Story assignment reported and submitted in Jupyter/IPython notebook.

STATISTICS FOR JOURNALISM

course description: The methods and principles of statistics have proven
to be powerful tools in the hands of journalists. This course should be a
rigorous introduction to stats work taught from within a framework of journal-
istic concerns. That means the course is story-based, in the sense of precision
journalism and the CAR tradition.
course structure:Weekly lectures with in-class exercises, regular home-
work, and a final exam.
skills: Developing and testing hypotheses; understanding and applying the
central limit theorem, normal distribution, and confidence intervals; Frequen-
tist versus Bayesian statistics; linear regression; analysis of variance.
tools: R Studio, Excel, MySQL, Microsoft Access, SAS, SPSS (proprietary)
or PSPP (F/OSS).
example assignments:
» Analyze crime statistics, look for a trend, and try to explain its cause.
» Look at the distribution of cancer cases and try to decide if there is
evidence of an increase in more polluted areas.
» Analyze statistical evidence for U.S. and international cases to predict
whether reducing the number of guns would have an effect on gun
violence.
» Analyze the stats in a research paper and report them in plain language.

DISTRIBUTION OF ELECTIVES
For the concentration, the school may offer elective courses to fulfill require-
ments in two or three areas of data and computational work. We have divided
these into three categories: presentation/visualization, analysis for story, and
journalistic programming. As a matter of designing degree requirements, a
program might choose to require at least one class from each category in addi-
tion to fulfilling overall credit requirements.
62 presentation & visualization
» Data Visualization
» Visual Journalism with Data and Computation
» Advanced Data Visualization
» Advanced Journalistic Mapping
analysis for story
» Writing About Data
» Statistical Analysis for Journalism
» Advanced Computational Reporting Methods (Using CAR)
journalistic programming
» Introduction to Journalistic Programming
» Methods of Collecting Data and Automating Reporting
» News App Development
» Advanced Computational Journalism

ELECTIVE COURSEWORK
Graduate Degree with Concentration
in Data & Computation

METHODS OF COLLECTING DATA &

AUTOMATING REPORTING
course description: This course focuses on developing expertise in gath-
ering data, cleaning it, storing it in a database, and retrieving it with ease. It also
emphasizes building automated tools to serve as data sources in reporting.
course structure: Weekly workshop or lab-based instruction.
skills: Web scraping, APIs, cron jobs, bash scripting, digitizing paper docu-
ments, regular expressions, parsing text and data, fuzzy string matching, record
linkage, content analysis.
tools: Python, Beautiful Soup, Mechanize, Scrapy, Tabula, SQL, MongoDB,
data formats (CSV, JSON), Tesseract (OCR), Twitter bots.
example assignments:
» classwork: Design Google Alerts to monitor subjects of interest.
» homework: Write a program to scrape the Congressional Record for
everything a particular representative has said on the floor of the House.
» homework: Write a web scraper in Python and automate it with a
cron job.
» homework: Build a web app or Twitter bot to post useful information
from an API.
» group project: Build a sensor network to automatically post 63
temperature or air quality measurements online.
» final project: Gather a useful body of data, previously unavailable, and
share it publicly.

VISUAL JOURNALISM WITH

DATA AND COMPUTATION
course description: This course covers a range of methods, media, and
formats for the graphic presentation of information. Readings should intro-
duce principles of visual design and integrate these into regular assignments.
Beginning with a fairly basic program like Tableau, the class should highlight
the effective and accurate presentation of information in graphic form. By the
middle of the term, students should branch out into using a programming
library such as D3 to design their own graphics outside the constraints of
existing software.
course structure: Weekly seminar to discuss readings, followed by
hands-on workshop.
skills: Data visualization, news apps, GIS/mapping for presentation.
tools: Tableau, JavaScript, D3, QGIS, CartoDB.
example assignments:
» homework: Use Tableau to find a story in a previously unexplored
data set.
» final project: Create an original visualization or interactive piece
programmed by hand (presumably in D3 or even pure JavaScript if it was
taught in an earlier class).

ADVANCED DATA ANALYSIS &

JOURNALISTIC ALGORITHMS
course description: This course should build upon the core, required
classes to bring together data and computation for finding stories and making
predictions using algorithmic and computational analysis.
course structure: Weekly lecture and workshop with regular homework
and a final project.
skills: Python for machine learning, clustering, classifying documents, stan-
dardizing and matching algorithms.
tools: R, Python (Pandas, MatPlotLib, SciPy, scikit-learn), clustering algo-
rithms (k-means, k-nearest neighbor clustering), topic modeling algorithms
(LDA or NMF).
example assignments:
» classwork: Record linkage for data cleaning, for example, analyze
Federal Election Commission data to find top donors, which requires
regularization of names, best done with machine learning.
64 » homework: Analyze State of the Union speeches since 1790 to make a
visualization of how key topics have changed over time.
» homework: Implement clustering to detect outliers in a data set.
» final project option: Build an election or market prediction model.
» final project option: Reverse engineer a pricing, lending, or credit
score algorithm.

CYBERSECURITY SKILLS
We recommend that students concentrating in data and computation take a
module on digital security because it will be a necessary consideration in their
work.
Every news organization should have an information technology staff that
is capable of securing its digital infrastructure and advising staff about security
risks and countermeasures. In practice, this is not enough. More editorial staff
should be trained in digital security in order to assess and address risks to the
organization, its sources, and its readers. This training would dovetail with the
technical skills that students in a computational journalism course are already
learning.
Cybersecurity has become an increasingly salient ethical concern, espe-
cially in the wake of the Snowden leaks, but digital security skills are rarely
taught in journalism schools today. Just as no journalism student should grad-
uate without some sense of libel law, no student should leave without knowing
at least the dangers of insecure communication channels and practices, and
ideally also some solutions.
For introductions to encryption and digital security for journalists, see
Micah Lee’s “Encryption Works” handbook, published by the Freedom of the
Press Foundation, and “Security for Journalists” by Jonathan Stray.

ADVANCED DATA VISUALIZATION

course description: This course would pick up from the data visualization
skills developed in the core course in visual journalism. The technical aspects
should be conducted entirely through programming. The most likely tools are
JavaScript and D3, but others will certainly emerge. The key point is that data
visualization at this level should be programmatic so that the software itself
does not limit design possibilities.
course structure: It may be designed to alternate between seminars
(high-level reading, discussion, and analysis of visual communication and
information design principles, focusing on how it is most effective and where
it can be misleading) and lab classes (advanced practical instruction in applica-
tion and coding frameworks for info design).
skills: Designing for clarity, precision, impact.
tools: D3, JavaScript, or another suitable programming framework. 65
example assignments:
» homework: Regular data assignments in different media: static web,
video, interactive.
» final project: An original analysis of unexplored data, presented in an
original visualization programmed more or less from scratch, with cross-
platform consistency.

ADVANCED JOURNALISTIC MAPPING

course description: This course should build on previous coursework in
mapping to cover more advanced manipulations of data, to develop a higher
degree of design sophistication, and to develop a high level of news judgment
in the selection of timely, compelling, and original topics. This involves using
GIS technologies, joining that spatial data with other information, using
density and other spatial analysis to inform stories, not just building presenta-
tions.
course structure: Hands-on workshop and lab.
tools: Both GIS analysis software and presentation software, including Esri,
QGIS, CartoDB, Leaflet, sensors like DustDuino.
skills: Clustering, binning, heat maps, joining different geographic data sets.
example assignments:
» homework: Weekly pitches and journalistic mapping assignments.
» final project: An interactive map or set of maps telling a story about a
timely or unexplored subject, and/or a narrative story using findings from
the mapping analysis.
» class project: Build a sensor network or otherwise amass an
unexplored data set, then work in small groups to build a package of maps
to explore the data.

ADVANCED JOURNALISTIC TEXT MINING

course description: Text is data. The purpose of this class is to teach
journalists to gather, analyze, and present stories using large amounts of textual
data. This may build on material from the course “Methods of Collecting Data
and Automating Reporting.”
course structure: Weekly lecture and lab, working toward a final project.
skills: Web scraping, analyzing large bodies of text, sentiment analysis, topic
modeling.
tools: Overview, DocumentCloud, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) or
Stanford NLP.
66 example assignments:
» homework: Use sentiment analysis to reproduce the before and after
tone change of a story.
» final project: Build a scraper to crawl a significant chunk of the Web,
for example, collecting the blogosphere of a country that’s in the news and
learning what people are talking about.
» final project: Gather and analyze a large body of documents, such as
looking for a story in a leaked cache of documents.

ADVANCED COMPUTATIONAL JOURNALISM

course description: This course should reflect the state of computa-
tional tools in journalistic practice while looking toward novel applications
of emerging and unexplored tools. By this time, students should have already
developed a strong foundation of programming and data analysis skills. This
class should build on that foundation and encourage in-depth, independent
projects centered on reporting stories or developing a piece of software.
course structure: Meets twice weekly, once for lecture and once for lab.
tools: Python, Ruby, or a similarly powerful and versatile scripting
language. Additionally, physical computing tools like Arduino, which is often
programmed in Java.
example assignments:
» homework: Use regular expressions to mine the Congressional Record
for a senator’s stated positions on a political issue over the course of his or
her career.
» mock coding interview: In the common style of interviewing for
tech jobs, solve a given programming problem on a whiteboard and narrate
your line of thinking.
» final project: An in-depth story reported using an advanced tool,
including but not limited to a journalistic algorithm, machine learning,
analysis of personally gathered data, or development of a piece of software.

CAPSTONE OR THESIS PROJECT

A thesis in data journalism will arise, ideally, from work with instructors and an
adviser. It could take the form of a reported story, a technical report, a piece of
software, or a substantial design piece such as a map or data visualization.
A capstone project for concentrators in data and computation may take a
class of students and coordinate a project using and honing the skills they have
developed in their earlier coursework. Each student’s work should then be
supplemented with an individual contribution such as a reported piece or data
visualization.
MODEL 4. 67
ADVANCED GRADUATE DEGREE:
Expertise-Driven Reporting on Data & Computation
While most undergraduate and master’s programs are designed to offer jour-
nalistic newcomers a set of skills that can be applied to a wide range of subjects,
there is also demand for mid-career journalists to return for coursework in
which they can develop deep expertise to report on complicated subjects. As
highly technical topics have come to permeate matters from international poli-
tics to everyday life, journalism schools may wish to offer classes that prepare
students and equip mid-career journalists to report on such issues as cyberwar,
data breaches, and cryptocurrency that require specialized skill when writing
for a general audience. The uses of data, machine learning, and computational
models may also aid these reporters in finding and telling these stories.
Data and computational journalism are ideal subjects for a mid-career
degree because of the time and mentorship that could be devoted to devel-
oping this set of skills. Since it is directed at students who already know how
journalism works, this degree could provide a level of depth and focus that may
be difficult to reach during a standard journalism program or while working a
full-time job.

COURSES

FOUNDATIONS OF DATA-DRIVEN JOURNALISM

(as detailed on page 50, but adapted to the level of advanced students)

REPORTING ABOUT DATA

course description: : The goal of this course is to prepare students to
understand and critically assess reports, studies, scholarly work, and other
information sources that are based in data and technical work. This will be an
essential skill as each student develops a focus as an expert reporter on a topic
centered on data, computation, technology, or the experimental sciences.
course structure: Small seminar focused on the discussion and analysis
of readings and case studies, culminating in a longform piece.
example assignments:
» response papers: Weekly analysis and reflection on class readings.
» term paper: A substantial long-form reporting project on a topic of
the student’s choosing, possibly developed as an outgrowth of a weekly
response paper.
68 THESIS
course description and structure: Seminar in which students develop
independent reporting projects, sharing progress during class and meeting
regularly with an adviser to build toward a master’s thesis.

ELECTIVES
One of the goals of a mid-career, expertise-driven degree in journalism is for
students to develop a deep understanding of the field they are reporting. To
this end, this degree should offer several elective slots for taking classes in other
departments that contribute directly to the subject of the thesis.
Students may also consider auditing courses with skill requirements above
their level (for example, if assignments must be submitted in the C program-
ming language, which is still the case in some traditional computer science
classes).
example electives and justification:
» An earth science or geology course focused on climate data.
» A digital humanities course that uses computational techniques to explore
historical archives, literary works, or leaked caches of documents, to name
just a few examples.
» Any number of computer science courses in which students could learn
the technical basis and academic concerns surrounding issues of interest in
their reporting, such as computer vision or cryptography.
» A course in digital security could help a journalist not only to protect
sensitive sources, but also to report on such matters as public key
encryption or onion routing, and to assess new developments in these
fields.
» A graduate course in statistical modeling, whether taken in the statistics
department or in a quantitative social science such as sociology.
The point of elective courses should be to permit students to craft a coursework
plan that is suitable to their own unique interests as they develop the capacity
for expertise-driven reporting in some area related to data, computation, and
emerging technologies.
MODEL 5. 69
ADVANCED GRADUATE DEGREE:
Emerging Journalistic Techniques and Technologies
Investigative reporting is in many ways the research and development wing of
journalism. According to Brant Houston, “It’s the only place where people have
had an extensive amount of time to try out new techniques.”
CAR, data journalism, and computational journalism are some of the
clearest examples of this phenomenon at work. These practices have developed
where reporters have had the time or inclination to work with new tools and
platforms. Universities are ideally suited to cultivate this stance toward jour-
nalistic practice—not merely teaching the wisdom of the field as it exists, but
developing entirely new approaches based on encounters with other disci-
plines and unexplored tools.
If journalism schools were to take up the mantle of encouraging work that
seems to happen only under these permissive conditions—not just through
grants and innovation labs, but perhaps through coursework as well—then
universities could also act as R&D labs in a way that investigative reporting has
in the past.
This curriculum is in many ways the least structured and most speculative
one we offer. It is an open question whether these degrees should be offered at
the master’s or doctoral level. One might also ask whether the degree should
require any coursework or simply provide an open platform for research.

OLD AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

The history of technology often appears to move in regular cycles of emergence
and obsolescence, but in fact old technologies are rarely eclipsed entirely. We
must be cautious with the concept of “emerging” technologies because we risk
missing the continued utility of old ones.
For example, microcontrollers like the Arduino have minimal computing
power by contemporary standards, but they are powerful enough to process a
set of programmed instructions for projects like gathering sensor data. These
devices have proved especially useful because of their simplicity, not in spite
of it. Similarly, as we promote spaces for journalism schools to explore tech-
nologies so new that their uses are not yet apparent, it will be worthwhile
to maintain a perspective broad enough to consider the utility of seemingly
obsolete technologies.
We should also bear in mind the long histories of platforms like virtual
reality and holograms as part of our cultural imagination, if not yet as
successful mass products. In past conceptions of the future, we may rediscover
promising avenues for innovation.
70 STRUCTURE AND TOPICS
One objective for this program would be to help teach algorithms for jour-
nalism, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Drones and virtual reality are two platforms that are being actively
explored for their journalistic potential. Matt Waite established the Drone Jour-
nalism Lab at the University of Nebraska precisely to explore the journalistic
applications of these devices. Likewise, the Brown Institute at Columbia has
sponsored several Magic Grants to support teams of journalists exploring the
narrative potential of immersive virtual reality.
Many other emerging technologies have been recognized for their jour-
nalistic potential. At the time of our writing, immersive virtual reality headsets
seem poised to enter the market to enthusiastic reception. Augmented reality
presents similar possibilities: broadcast journalists may soon arrive in our
living rooms as holograms.
The point is not to speculate on the arrival of these devices, nor to promote
innovation for its own sake, but to consider the role of journalism schools in
developing and shaping the use of new devices.

SETTING AND GEAR FOR EMERGING

TECHNOLOGY LABS
Although many coding and design projects may require nothing more than
a laptop, a variety of hardware should be on hand for students interested in
experimenting with sensors and other hardware that can be used for journal-
istic projects.
Ideally, cheap devices and components can be provided on an honor
system, and more expensive gear checked out through an equipment room. A
thriving example of this model is the Interactive Telecommunications Program
at New York University. The program also designates a few shelves for donating
useful scrap materials, such as old electronics to be dismantled for components
or sheer curiosity.

A WORD ON SAFETY
Most innovation labs will feature at least one tool or device that requires safety
training. Most journalism students will arrive without having had experience
handling soldering irons or electrical wiring.
Any lab that includes these devices must provide some safety infrastruc-
ture. Soldering irons should be used with some means of ventilation. Fire
hazards require a nearby extinguisher. And many circumstances may require
safety gloves or goggles.
When Amanda Hickman arrived at the BuzzFeed lab in San Francisco, one
of her first tasks was to evaluate safety. The BuzzFeed team has purchased safety
goggles and fire extinguishers, for example, because it is working with saws and
soldering irons.
Tinkering equipment can be quite cheap, but any technology lab must cover 71
some basics. These components are the bread and butter of hacker and maker
circles, so they are easy to find. Because they offer such useful inroads to experi-
menting with technology, they are valuable for journalism schools to cultivate
spaces of innovation.
Most electrical prototyping starts with a solderless breadboard, a flat
plastic case with an underlying grid of connections or building circuits. A
simple electronic device like an air quality meter can be built from scratch by
placing components like wires, resistors, knobs, buttons, and sensors across
the grid. And connecting a breadboard device to a simple computer like an
Arduino or a Raspberry Pi enables users to issue commands and gather data
from the equipment. A starter set for such a project would generally run under
$100, far less than cameras and other equipment that journalism students are
often required to purchase.
Beyond the small computers used for prototyping, more substantial
computers should be on hand for projects that call for it. If possible, an
emerging technologies lab should have machines that allow students to gain
firsthand experience working with news-bound technology such as immer-
sive 3D cameras, VR headsets, and drones instead of relying on secondhand
accounts. These skills and literacies fit into a larger constellation of technical
concerns that may give rise to media innovation along unforeseen paths.
CHAPTER 5:
INSTITUTIONAL
R E C O M M E N DAT I O N S
Steps Toward Bringing Data and Computation
into Your Journalism School

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT AND

RECRUITMENT
For many journalism schools, integrating specialized coursework in data and
computation will present something of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. There
is professional demand for data journalists in part because they are relatively
scarce, so while schools may wish to prepare their graduates for this emerging
field, the field itself may not yet have enough teachers in its ranks.
But specialized coursework will meet only some of the need highlighted
in this study: data and computation must also continue to be integrated into
many classes where it is now neglected, from boot camps to capstones and
theses. It is worth recalling that editors once resisted the use of photography as
a journalistic tool. Journalism schools must prepare students to bring data and
computation to any story that needs it.
This may require many journalism faculty to be trained to work with data
and computational tools. At the very least, journalism instructors should be
conscious of when a student’s work may benefit from data, even if the student
must go elsewhere for targeted instruction. Scheduling guest lectures may also
serve as a transitional solution.
74 TRAININGS OR MODULES
In 2014, NICAR introduced data journalism exercises for academics interested
in teaching data journalism but in need of a little help. These promise to be
useful to journalism instructors who would like to teach data.
The benefit of NICAR and other journalism training organizations could
go well beyond the modules, though. New tools are developing quickly, and
it is critical for faculty to continue to grow, learn, and change as the field itself
develops.
In fact, NICAR filled a vacuum that existed because many academic
institutions didn’t address new tools or skills. Meanwhile, personal computing
tools became more powerful, digital information sources became more
commonplace, and news organizations increasingly relied on digital methods
of gathering and distributing news. Just as print newspapers were slow to
recognize the power of data-driven reporting and the Internet, so too have
journalism schools been reluctant to change. Teaching institutions must adapt
or risk being unable to fulfill their goals and mission, both to their students and
to the profession.

INCOMING SKILLS, TECHNICAL

LITERACIES, AND BOOT CAMPS
Many graduate programs in journalism readily enroll students with little to
no prior experience as reporters. There is an implicit assumption that their
undergraduate work will provide a foundation to begin learning to think like a
reporter and produce stories in a variety of platforms.
With data and computational journalism, though, there may be more
substantial gaps to bridge in terms of math skills and technical literacies.
Oftentimes, students must learn to use a variety of unfamiliar software in order
to even begin working with data, statistics, and programming languages. As
it stands, it should be fairly straightforward to teach the average journalism
student to think about data, to find stories in a spreadsheet, and even to think
critically about the numbers. Reporters have always needed to see inside
complicated issues and to ask tough questions in order to get the story right.
Math and tech skills may require extra time. This skill gap could be
ameliorated with a summer boot camp that focuses largely on building skills,
tools, and technical literacies, while deferring instruction in reporting until
the regular term begins. This way, when students enter their regular master’s
coursework, they will be equipped with some fluency in the data and computa-
tional tools that they will use as concentrators.
In the case that data concentrators go through an extended boot camp, it
may be appropriate for their fall introduction to data journalism class to be
separate and more advanced than the data journalism course that is required
of all students. For an example of how this coursework could be structured, we
have listed the offerings of Columbia’s Lede Program in the appendix.
TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE 75
Many colleges and universities provide computer labs and studios for classes.
The primary advantage is the certainty that each student will have a worksta-
tion with the necessary technical specifications and software installed. The
primary disadvantage is that students may graduate without the tools they
need to practice the skills they have learned.
Although their newsroom workstation could potentially be outfitted with
the tools they need, if any of those students became freelancers, they may be
out of luck if they left class without bringing along them the tools they learned
in school.
Providing server space for students is a great way to begin teaching them
the Unix command line and to provide resources for data-intensive projects.
But several institutional concerns arise. Schools are required by law to main-
tain the confidentiality of student data, and so the security of student servers
may become a concern. Students might instead begin by working on virtual
machines using a program such as the free, cross-platform VirtualBox in order
to become acquainted with running a machine from the command line.

BENEFITS OF DISTANCE OR ONLINE

LEARNING
Using MOOCs in complementary fashion with data journalism courses could
help professors integrate new skills into what they offer, said Doig from ASU.
In addition, distance learning and virtual classrooms may provide structure
and support that MOOCs lack. Journalism schools may consider coordinating
partnerships in which students cross-enroll in specialized coursework and take
the class over a video stream. The student would participate in class, submit
work, and receive credit like any other student. This approach could fill course-
work gaps in cases where it is otherwise difficult to find an instructor.
Stanton, the founder of ForJournalism.com, offers a cautionary word:
maintaining online courses is a problem for any program that produces tuto-
rials or screencasts. Without updating, the value of the offerings diminishes
quickly, Stanton said. The ForJournalism.com tutorial on building a web frame-
work with Django is based on an older version of the open source software, for
example.
Stanton suggests that universities create a consortium of universities where
each participating university would take ownership of specific topics in which
it had expert faculty. It would create labs to provide the technical instruction in
those areas and offer screencast tutorials on the basics. Then each school could
build on that foundational learning in projects specific to their programs.
76 FOSTERING COLLABORATION
Journalism schools should build collaborative partnerships with other disci-
plines. Many professional schools, journalism included, have tended to operate
as silos within universities because they draw their culture and concerns from
a field of practice rather than a tradition of academic discourse. That stance
must shift because journalism itself is shifting. As a result, we should recognize
that journalism is not a narrow set of traditional newsroom skills, but instead
encompasses whatever tools and methods have, in one way or another, been
made journalistic. Practitioners of data-driven and computational journalism
have thrived by embracing interdisciplinarity in their work. Several journalism
schools have begun to build bridges with computer science departments by
opening research centers, co-teaching and cross-listing classes, and even devel-
oping joint degree programs. This is a promising start. Not only will journalism
schools benefit from acting as leaders in interdisciplinary collaboration, but
they also should be naturally suited to this role as a field situated at the intersec-
tion of many other disciplines.

NOTE ON SPECIALIST FACULTY IN DATA AND

COMPUTATION
An integrated data journalism curriculum presents a unique challenge. In the
state of the field as it has developed and exists today, data journalism is usually
a lone course, or element of a course, taught by one specialist instructor. Often,
the instructor is a professional journalist working as an adjunct more for the
love of spreading the word than for the money. To achieve a fully integrated
curriculum, the overall faculty at journalism programs would need to commit
to change, and administrations would need to foster training for faculty. The
change needs to be broad. There should not be a single faculty member
juggling all the classes in data and computational skills, nor should guest
lectures from that faculty member suffice in broadening the class to account
for data. Journalism schools must commit to the idea that they cannot train
information professionals to work in an increasingly complicated world of
information without developing these crucial literacies. It must be integrated
across the board.
APPENDIX

TABLES FROM OUR ANALYSIS

Classes Offered by Subject at ACEJMC-
Accredited Journalism Programs

DATA JOURNALISM

Number Number of Percent of Total

of Classes Programs
No class 54 48%
One class 27 24%
Two classes 14 12%
Three or more classes 18 16%

CLASSES WITH DATA JOURNALISM AS COMPONENT

Number of Number of Percent of Total

Classes Programs
No Classes 44 38%
One Class 31 27%
Two Classes 22 19%
Three Classes 9 8%
Four or More Classes 7 6%
MULTIMEDIA

Number of Number of Percent of total

Classes Programs
No classes 20 18%
One class 31 27%
Two classes 12 11%
Three classes 16 14%
Four or more classes 34 30%

PROGRAMMING BEYOND HTML/CSS

Number of Number of Percent of Total

Classes Programs
No Classes 99 88%
One Class 6 5%
Two Classes 5 4%
Three or More Classes 3 3%

Note: This analysis of programming classes is focused on those courses taught

within a journalism program. It should be noted that a fair number of schools
pointed to collaborations with other departments where journalism students
were able to take advanced programming or computer science classes.
80 NOTABLE STORIES
Below we list several examples, for reference, of stories that are emblematic of
the categories we define in Chapter 1.

DATA REPORTING
» “Drugging Our Kids,” San Jose Mercury News, 2014
» “Methadone and the Politics of Pain,“ The Seattle Times, 2012

DATA VISUALIZATION AND INTERACTIVES

» ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs,” 2010
» The Washington Post‘s visualization of the missing Malaysian jet, 2014

EMERGING JOURNALISTIC TECHNOLOGIES

drone examples:
» “Tanzania: Initiative to Stop the Poaching of Elephants,” CCTV Africa,
2014
» Because of regulatory issues with the Federal Aviation Administration,
the use of drones for journalism is not widespread in spite of significant
interest on the part of industry and academia. Uses foreseen when
regulations become more permissible include news photography and
videography, scanning news locations for use in 3D models and 360-degree
video applications, remotely sensed data gathering through visible images
or multispectral images, mapping of areas of interest at higher temporal
resolutions than currently available and as sensor distributors or sensor-
based data gatherers.
sensor examples:
» WNYC’s Cicada Tracker project in 2013 recruited interested listeners to
use sensors to identify where cicadas would emerge.
» USA Today’s “Ghost Factories” investigation in 2012 used X-ray gun
sensors to scan the soil.
» The Houston Chronicle’s 2005 investigative story “In Harm’s Way” used
sensors to examine air quality near oil refineries and factories.
virtual and augmented reality examples:
» The New York Times sent out more than a million Google Cardboard kits
to subscribers in 2015 as it launched its first VR story, “The Displaced,” a
piece detailing children displaced by war.
» Stanford University’s Department of Communication, home to the
Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has scheduled a VR class for the
winter 2016 quarter as part of its curriculum for its master’s in journalism
program.
COMPUTATIONAL JOURNALISM 81
story examples:
» The 2014 Wall Street Journal investigation into Medicare
» “The Echo Chamber,” a 2014 Reuters investigation into influence at the
Supreme Court
platform example:
» PDF repository DocumentCloud or Overview, developed by Jonathan
Stray

TOOLS, RESOURCES AND METHODS

DISCUSSED IN THE REPORT
The ethics of software may also shape decisions about the tools and techniques
you teach. “Free” software is licensed in an effort to promote freedom of
computing, in a manner analogous to freedom of speech. Free software may
be copied, altered, used, and shared freely. A related form of software licensing,
titled “open source,” is very similar to free software, but instead emphasizes the
public availability of code.
Proprietary software may also have certain advantages. Often the interface
design is more polished, support services are provided, and in some cases they
simply run better on demanding tasks.
But the gap between free and proprietary software has become narrower in
recent years, and many professionals in fact prefer to use free and open source
software on more than ideological grounds. F/OSS software is often more
secure because it can be openly vetted by security researchers. For the same
reason, particularly popular applications may have many talented and dedi-
cated developers, as well as a support community of fellow users rather than
call center or online service.
Given the expense of proprietary software and its inevitable obsolescence,
there are few advantages to using these applications in data and computation
classes instead of free and open-source ones.
82 GUIDE TO COMMON TOOLS FOR DATA
AND COMPUTATIONAL JOURNALISM
The following list of common tools for data and computational journalism is
quoted from the Lede Program at Columbia.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
C is a heavy-lifting programming language that is the language of choice for the
Computer Science Department. It’s far faster than Python or JavaScript and
introduces you to the nitty-gritty of computer science.
Git is something called a version control system—it’s not a programming
language, but programmers use it often. Version control is a way of keeping
track of the history of your code, along with providing a structure that
encourages collaboration. GitHub is a popular cloud-based service that makes
use of git, and we make heavy use of it during the Lede Program.
HTML isn’t technically a programming language, it’s a markup language. A
HyperText Markup Language, to be exact. HTML is used to explain what
different parts of web pages are to your browser, and you use it extensively
when learning to scrape web pages.
JavaScript is a programming language that’s in charge of interactivity on the
Web. When images wiggle or pop-ups annoy you, that’s all JavaScript. The
popular interactive data visualization framework D3 is built using JavaScript.
Python is a multipurpose programming language that is at home crunching,
parsing text, or building Twitter bots. We use Python extensively in the Lede.
R is a programming language that is used widely for mathematical and
statistical processing.

TOOLS FOR DATA AND ANALYSIS

Beautiful Soup and lxml are tools used for taking data from the Web and
making it accessible to your computer.
D3 is a JavaScript library for building custom data visualizations.
IPython Notebooks are an interactive programming environment that
encourage documentation, transparency, and reproducibility of work. When
you’re done with your analysis, you’ll be able to put your work up for everyone
to see—and check!
NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a Python library built to process large
amounts of text. Whether you’re analyzing congressional bills, Twitter outrages,
or Shakespearean plays, NLTK has you covered.
OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) is downloadable software that helps
you sort and sift dirty data, cleaning it to the point where you can start your
actual analysis.
Pandas is a high-performance data analysis tool for Python.
QGIS (geographic information system) is an open-source tool used to work 83
with geographic data, from reprojecting and combining data sets to running
analyses and making visualizations.
Scitkit-learn is a Python package for machine learning and data analysis. It’s the
Swiss Army knife of data science: it covers classification, regression, clustering,
dimensionality reduction, and so much more.
Web scraping is the process of taking information off of websites and making
use of it on your computer. A lot of times documents aren’t easily available
in accessible formats, and you need to scrape them in order to process and
analyze them.

DATA FORMATS
An API (application programming interface) is a way for computers to
communicate to one another. For us, this generally means sharing data. We’ll
be coding up Python scripts to talk to and request data from machines around
the world, from Twitter to the U.S. government.
CSVs (comma-separated values) are the most common format for data. It’s a
quick export away from Excel or Google Spreadsheets, and you’ll find yourself
working from CSVs more often than any other format. Although “comma-
separated” is in the name, a CSV can arguably also use tabs, pipes, or any other
character as a field delimiter (although the tab-separated one can also be called
a TSV).
GeoJSON and Topojson are specifically formatted JSON files that contain
geographic data.
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and it’s a slightly more
complicated format than a CSV. It can contain lists, numbers, strings, sub-items,
and all sort of complexities that are great for expressing the nuance of real-
world data. Data from an API is often formatted as JSON.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language to talk to databases. You’ll
sometimes find data sets in SQL format, ready to be imported into your
database system of choice.

TECH TEAM REPORT

Another useful resource for understanding the tools of data journalism was
prepared at Stanford by an interdisciplinary team of computer science and data
journalism students in a Spring 2015 course on watchdog reporting. The report
is available here: http://cjlab.stanford.edu/tech-team-report/
84 RESOURCES

ONLINE COURSES AND MOOCS

» Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools (http://
datajournalismcourse.net/ )
» School of Data (http://schoolofdata.org/)
» The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas offers a number of
MOOCs as distance learning for journalists (https://knightcenter.utexas.
edu/distancelearning)

USEFUL DATA SETS FOR CLASSWORK

AND ASSIGNMENTS
» Baby name census data—clean data, always varies from year to year, papers
always cover it (Top 1000 baby names by year can be found at https://
www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
» Greenhouse gas data (NOAA has a number of searchable datasets at
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/data/)
» Student grade distributions for your college
» This is a small data set used in a lot of the School of Data Examples: The
GRAIN database of land grabs (http://datahub.io/dataset/grain-landgrab-
data/resource/af57b7b2-f4e7-4942-88d3-83912865d116)
» World Bank Open Data (http://data.worldbank.org/)
» The Guardian Databases (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/
interactive/2013/jan/14/all-our-datasets-index)
» The Eurostat Databases (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/help/new-eurostat-
website)
» UK Government Databases (https://data.gov.uk/data/search?res_
format=RSS)
» National and International Statistical Services by region and country
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_and_international_
statistical_services)
» Global Health Observatory Data Repository (http://apps.who.int/gho/
data/node.home
» Business Registry Databases (https://www.investigativedashboard.org/
business_registries/)
» Google’s list of Public Data (http://www.google.com/publicdata/
directory#)
» Open Spending (https://openspending.org/)
» Datahub (http://datahub.io/)
» Open Access Directory (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page) 85
» Data Portals (http://dataportals.org/)
» NASA’s Data Portal (https://data.nasa.gov/)

PHILIP MEYER’S
RECOMMENDED TEXTS
» John Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Education. 1977)
» James A. Davis, The Logic of Causal Order (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1985)
» Robert P. Abelson, Statistics as Principled Argument (Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995)

DATA JOURNALISM ARTICLES,

PROJECTS, AND READING LISTS USED
IN INSTRUCTION

MOOC EXAMPLES:
» Cairo, Alberto. “Recommended Resources for My Infographics and
Visualization Courses.” Personal. The Functional Art: An Introduction to
Information Graphics and Visualization, October 11, 2012. http://www.
thefunctionalart.com/2012/10/recommended-readings-for-infographics.
html.
» “Cameroon—Cameroon Budget Inquirer.” Accessed September 23, 2015.
http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/.
» Downs, Kat, Dan Hill, Ted Mellnik, Andrew Metcalf, Cory O’Brien,
Cheryl Thompson, and Serdar Tumgoren. “Homicides in the District of
Columbia—The Washington Post.” News. The Washington Post, October 14,
2012. http://apps.washingtonpost.com/investigative/homicides/.
» “Find My School .Ke.” Accessed September 23, 2015. http://findmyschool.
co.ke/.
» Keefe, John, Steven Melendez, and Louise Ma. “Flooding and Flood
Zones | WNYC.” News. WNYC. Accessed September 23, 2015. http://
project.wnyc.org/flooding-sandy-new/index.html.
» Kirk, Chris, and Dan Kois. “How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns
Since Newtown?” Slate, September 16, 2013. http://www.slate.com/
articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_
american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html.
86 » Lewis, Jason. “Revealed: The £1 Billion High Cost Lending
Industry | The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.” Journalism. The
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, June 13, 2013. https://www.
thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/06/13/revealed-the-1billion-high-cost-
lending-industry/.
» Nguyen, Dan. “Who in Congress Supports SOPA and PIPA/
PROTECT-IP? | SOPA Opera.” News. ProPublica, January 20, 2012.
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/.
» Rogers, Simon. “Government Spending by Department, 2011-12: Get
the Data.” The Guardian, December 4, 2012, sec. UK news. http://www.
theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/dec/04/government-spending-
department-2011-12.
» ———. “John Snow’s Data Journalism: The Cholera Map That Changed
the World.” The Guardian, March 15, 2013, sec. News. http://www.
theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/mar/15/john-snow-cholera-map.
» ———. “Wikileaks Data Journalism: How We Handled the Data.” The
Guardian, January 31, 2011, sec. News. http://www.theguardian.com/
news/datablog/2011/jan/31/wikileaks-data-journalism.
» ———. “Wikileaks Iraq War Logs: Every Death Mapped.” The Guardian,
October 22, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/
interactive/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-deaths-map.
» Rogers, Simon, and John Burn-Murdoch. “Superstorm Sandy: Every
Verified Event Mapped and Detailed.” The Guardian, October 30, 2012.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2012/oct/30/
superstorm-sandy-incidents-mapped.
» Serra, Laura, Maia Jastreblansky, Ivan Ruiz, Ricardo Brom, and Mariana
Trigo Viera. “Argentina’s Senate Expenses 2004-2013.” News. La Nacion,
April 3, 2013. http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/ddj/data-driven-investigative-
journalism/argentina-senate-expenses/.
» Shaw, Al, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Zamora, Amanda. “Free the Files: Help
ProPublica Unlock Political Ad Spending.” ProPublica, September 4, 2015.
https://projects.propublica.org/free-the-files/.
» “Where Does My Money Go?” Accessed September 23, 2015. http://
wheredoesmymoneygo.org/.

LEDE PROGRAM CURRICULUM

The Lede Program at Columbia Journalism School is a post-baccalaureate in
which students from a variety of backgrounds learn data and computation
skills over the course of one or two semesters. The program was designed to
help students rapidly elevate their skills in these areas, especially if they were
considering applying for Columbia’s highly demanding dual-degree program in
journalism and computer science.
 In the context of this report, the one-semester version of the Lede 87
represents a promising “extended boot camp” in which students who have been
accepted into a data journalism master’s program may attend for a full summer
before their peers in order to develop the skills that will help them get the most
out of their education.
The following course descriptions were pulled on November 5, 2015,
from: http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/page/1060-the-lede-program-
courses/908

FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTING
During this introduction to the ins and outs of the Python programming
language, students build a foundation upon which their later, more coding-in-
tensive classes will depend. Dirty, real-world data sets will be cleaned, parsed
and processed while recreating modern journalistic projects. The course
will also touch upon basic visualization and mapping, and how to use public
resources such as Google and Stack Overflow to build self-reliance.
focus: Familiarize yourself with the data-driven landscape
topics & tools include: Python, basic statistical analysis, OpenRefine,
CartoDB, pandas, HTML, CSVs, algorithmic story generation, narrative work-
flow, csvkit, git/GitHub, Stack Overflow, data cleaning, command line tools,
and more

DATA AND DATABASES

Students will become familiar with a variety of data formats and methods
for storing, accessing and processing information. Topics covered include
comma-separated documents, interaction with website APIs and JSON,
raw-text document dumps, regular expressions, text mining, SQL databases,
and more. Students will also tackle less accessible data by building web
scrapers and converting difficult-to-use PDFs into useable information.
focus: Finding and working with data
topics & tools include: SQL, APIs, CSVs, regular expressions, text
mining, PDF processing, pandas, Python, HTML, Beautiful Soup, IPython
Notebooks, and more

ALGORITHMS
Machine learning and data science are integral to processing and under-
standing large data sets. Whether you’re clustering schools or crime data,
analyzing relationships between people or businesses, or searching for a single
fact in a large data set, algorithms can help. Through supervised and unsuper-
vised learning, students will generate leads, create insights, and figure out how
88 to best focus their efforts with large data sets. A critical eye toward applications
of algorithms will also be developed, uncovering the pitfalls and biases to look
for in your own and others’ work.
focus: Analyzing your data
topics & tools include: linear regression, clustering, text mining, natural
language processing, decision trees, machine learning, scikit-learn, Python,
and more

DATA ANALYSIS STUDIO

In this project-driven course, students refine their creative workflow on
personal work, from obtaining and cleaning data to final presentation. Data is
explored not only as the basis for visualization, but also as a lead-generating
foundation, requiring further investigative or research-oriented work. Regular
critiques from instructors and visiting professionals are a critical piece of the
course.
focus: Applying your skillset
topics & tools include: Tableau, web scraping, mapping, CartoDB, GIS/
QGIS, data cleaning, documentation, and more
90 WO R K S C I T E D
Cohen, Sarah, Chengkai Li, Jun Yang, and Cong Yu. 2011. “Computational
Journalism: A Call to Arms to Database Researchers.” In Proceedings of the
5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, Sailorman.
Asilomar, CA: ACM.

De Maeyer, Juliette, Manon Libert, David Domingo, François Heinderyckx,

and Florence Le Cam. Forthcoming. “Waiting for Data Journalism: A
Qualitative Assessment of the Anecdotal Take-up of Data Journalism in
French-speaking Belgium.” Digital Journalism.

European Journalism Center. 2010. “Data-Driven Journalism: What Is There to

Learn?”

Folkerts, Jean, John Maxwell Hamilton, and Nicholas Lemann. 2013.

“Educating Journalists: A New Plea for the University Tradition.” New
York: Columbia Journalism School.

Hamilton, James T., and Fred Turner. 2009. “Accountability Through

Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism.” Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Summer Workshop.

Howard, Alexander B. 2014. “The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism.”

Tow Center for Digital Journalism. A Knight Report. http://towcenter.
org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tow-Center-Data-Driven-
Journalism.pdf

Karlsen, Joakim, and Eirik Stavelin. 2014. “Computational Journalism in

Norwegian Newsrooms.” Journalism Practice 8(1): 34–48. doi:10.1080/1
7512786.2013.813190.

Moretti, Franco. 2007. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History.
London: Verso.

Pulitzer, Joseph. 1904. “Planning a School of Journalism – The Basic Concept

in 1904.” The North American Review (178:5).

Royal, Cindy. 2010. “The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New
York Times Interactive News Technology Department.” Presented at the
International Symposium for Online Journalism, Austin, TX, April 23.

Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American

Newspapers. New York: Basic Books.
Schudson, Michael. 1996. The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 91
University Press.

Tenen, Dennis. Forthcoming. “Blunt Instrumentalism.” In Debates in the Digital

Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

UNESCO. 2007. Model Curricula for Journalism Education. http://unesdoc.

unesco.org/images/0015/001512/151209E.pdf

Zelizer, Barbie. 1995. “Words Against Images: Positioning Newswork in the

Age of Photography.” In Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank
and File, edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press: 135–59.
92 AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
We could not have done this without the assistance of Maxwell Foxman and
Joscelyn Jurich, two Ph.D. students at Columbia. Max and Joscelyn traveled
far and wide, scoured the Web, and checked innumerable facts in order for this
report to even come close to depicting the state of data journalism education.
Their thoughtful memos, perceptive comments—and yes, meticulous spread-
sheets—were vital contributions to this research.
Many of the insights in this report should be credited to our advisory
committee: Sarah Cohen, Meredith Broussard, Steve Doig, Michelle Minkoff,
Shazna Nessa, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Jonathan Stray, Matt Waite, and Derek
Willis. Our committee met twice, first to launch the project and frame its
mission, then seven months later to review our findings and help us to refine
our conclusions.
A number of journalists and journalism teachers also offered in-depth
interviews on their experience, the state of the field, and their vision for the
future, and for that we thank them for sharing their time and their insights:
Jonathon Berlin, Rahul Bhargava, David Boardman, R. B. Brenner, Matt Carroll,
Ira Chinoy, Brian Creech, Catherine D’Ignazio, Nick Diakopoulos, David
Donald, Jaimi Dowdell, Deen Freelon, David Herzog, Mark Horvit, Brant
Houston, Mike Jenner, Dan Keating, Jennifer LaFleur, Darnell Little, Kathy
Matheson, Tom McGinty, Philip Meyer, George Miller, T. Christian Miller,
Maggie Mulvihill, Jonah Newman, Ben Poston, Kevin Quealy, Mike Reilley,
Simon Rogers, Judd Slivka, Margot Susca, Ben Welsh, Aaron Williams, and
Zach Wise.
Special thanks go out to those who invited us into their classrooms to
watch how they teach. Catherine D’Ignazio of Emerson College offered our
very first observation and also introduced us to her colleagues at the MIT
Media Lab who are tackling similar questions about teaching data. Zach
Wise and Larry Birnbaum invited us to observe their team-taught class at
Northwestern. Amanda Hickman hosted us twice for her class at the CUNY
Graduate School of Journalism. Meredith Broussard and George Miller each
allowed us to observe their classes at Temple University. Likewise, Dan Keating
graciously hosted an in-class observation at the University of Maryland.
We would also like to thank the students who spoke to us about their
experience learning to use data in their reporting: Matt Bernardini, Simeng Dai,
George Dumontier, Alex Duner, Jasmine Han, John Hilliard, Austin Huguelet,
Ashley Jones, Anne Li, Mary Ryan, and Nicole Zhu. We wish them fruitful
careers as they shape this field of practice.
Through the course of this bi-coastal research project, the Columbia and
Stanford communities have provided an unimaginable level of support and
inspiration. Mark Hansen, the East Coast director of the Brown Institute
for Media Innovation, has articulated a remarkable vision for the union of
journalism and computation, as well as a model for bicoastal collaboration.
Susan McGregor shared her deep understanding of journalism, pedagogy, and 93
digital security at crucial stages of this project, in addition to hosting us in her
classroom twice. Giannina Segnini, James Madison Visiting Professor on First
Amendment Issue at the Columbia School of Journalism, offered her consider-
able expertise in the use of data for global investigative reporting. Those from
Stanford who provided critical input and support include Hearst Professional
in Residence Dan Nguyen, Peninsula Press Managing Editor Vignesh Ramach-
andran and Geri Migielicz, the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional
Journalism, who is co-teaching a virtual reality class in the winter of 2015.
Steve Coll expressed an elegant and convincing case for data journalism’s
place in contemporary practice—from which we borrowed unabashedly and at
length. This report was substantially improved by Jay Hamilton, Sarah Cohen,
Jonathan Stray, Jonathan Soma, and Chris Anderson, who read our first draft
and offered remarkably useful feedback. We thank Marcia Kramer for the
thought and care with which she edited this report.
We are indebted to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for
funding this research. Knight’s commitment to both the future of journalism
education and to innovation in journalistic practice dovetailed in this project,
and we hope that it is a worthy contribution to Knight’s greater mission.
Finally, we thank the person who conceived of this project, recruited our
team, and served as a sagely advisor at every step: Sheila Coronel, director of
Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Sheila recognized not
only the urgency of developing a data curriculum based on an empirical study
of the field, but also the value of sharing the results with other journalism
educators. What could easily have been just a research study, or else just a
curriculum development project, was envisioned by Sheila as something that
could be greater than the sum of its parts.