data journalism
Can you imagine a reporter not using the internet now? That’s what it’ll be like for reporters who can’t be bothered to learn to use a spreadsheet.
For me, I would say programming skills are unnecessary – you can do lots in excel, and even a simple database programme, like SQL. Otherwise, there are some great online tools you can use like Many Eyes or Timetric to produce simple visualisations. You can even use Google Spreadsheets to produce embeddable visualisations for your site. And Google Fusion tables are great for mapping – we used it to produce this map of deaths in Iraq from the Wikileaks data.
There are loads of sites out there but only a few I go to a lot. Flowing data is brilliant and a great collecting point for new data and visualisations. I’m a big fan of the Open Knowledge Foundation – they do some great work with public data and the FOI pages are genius.
https://wikileaksdatajournalism.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/qa-with-the-guardians-simon-rogers/
