Data for Journalists: A Practical Guide for Computer-Assisted Reporting

Now in its sixth edition, Data for Journalists is a straightforward and effective guide to using data for news stories.

This concise textbook addresses all the key basic skills that data journalists need, including how to find and scrape data, how to build a database, how to visualize data, and how to use spreadsheets and database managers – before launching into coding and more advanced analysis. Alongside step-by-step instructions on beginning data analysis, Houston discusses why these digital tools should be an integral part of reporting in the present day. Thoroughly revised and updated, this sixth edition features a new chapter on data visualization as well as new material on using free software such as Google Sheets and Datawrapper.

Emphasizing that journalists are accountable for the accuracy and relevance of the data they acquire and share, particularly if artificial intelligence is involved, this is an ideal core text for courses on data-driven journalism and computer-assisted reporting.

Brant Houston is a Professor and the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, where he teaches journalism and oversees an online newsroom. An award-winning journalist, he was an investigative reporter at U.S. newspapers for 17 years. For more than a decade, he served as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a now 5,000-member association headquartered at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he also taught investigative and data reporting. Houston has conducted more than 400 seminars for professional journalists and students in 30 countries, and he is a co-founder of networks of nonprofit newsrooms and educators throughout the world. He is also the author of Changes in Models for Journalism: Reinventing the Newsroom and co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases, and Techniques.