This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Laura Amico, along with her husband, Chris, is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

On the afternoon of Dec. 30, I was sitting in D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) command center with more than a dozen other journalists waiting for Chief Cathy Lanier and Mayor Vincent Gray to arrive.

They had called the New Year’s Eve press conference to talk about the year in crime and policing, and, in part, to talk about MPD’s incredible 94 percent homicide case closure in 2011. It’s a good thing the closure rate was listed in the press packet that was handed out; if it hadn’t been, I would have thought that I misheard the number.

This post is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences, projects and sharing their knowledge with the ONA community. Fellow Lucas Timmons is a data journalist and web producer for The Edmonton Journal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Data journalism can be very compelling. Stitched with a good narrative, it can tell one amazing story. But we can do better than that. We can also visualize the data and provide a great package. With that in mind, here are three free options for creating animated and interactive charts.

Google charts API

Google offers great, free and easy chart building tools. There are 14 different types of visualizations in all to choose from, including bar charts, bubble charts, treemaps, gauges and tables.

The charts can be made interactive or static and used in print as well as online. Google also provides a quick start guide so designers can get up and running. All the code is included — just modify it to suit your needs.

Google tries to make this very simple and accessible. Even if your knowledge of HTML and JavaScript is limited, you should be able to use Google charts easily.

This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Lam Thuy Vo is a multimedia journalist based in New York.

Animations are in! International organizations, advocacy groups and journalists have come to embrace motion graphics as a means to explain complicated issues. And I’ve come to love them, too.

For a project on privacy issues, my friend and investigative journalist Stokely Baksh and I created this animation:

This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Laura Amico, along with her husband, Chris, is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

Chris and I spoke at Mark Pott’s New Media Entrepreneurship class at the University of Maryland on Saturday and if there is one lesson I wanted those new entrepreneurs to walk away with it was that business plans change.

Sometimes they change in small ways — such as how and where you grow — and sometimes they change in big ways, like, say, what your product is.

A year ago I had just been accepted into Knight’s News Entrepreneurs Bootcamp. Homicide Watch D.C. was doing well: traffic and engagement were growing, we were getting good press and when I talked to sources they were starting to recognize the site.

This post is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences, projects and sharing their knowledge with the ONA community. Fellow Lucas Timmons is a data journalist and web producer for The Edmonton Journal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

“I became a journalist so I didn’t have to do math.”

You hear this far too often in newsrooms. Many journalists shy away from math because it can be difficult. There’s also a hint of underlying pride in not being able to do math. But not knowing something shouldn’t be a point of pride for any journalist.

The lack of basic math literacy can lead to shoddy journalism. This is a problem not just in pure math, but also in statistics. As Slate’s Libby Copeland recently pointed out, a misunderstanding of what numbers mean results in stories and headlines that don’t accurately portray what studies mean.

This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Lam Thuy Vo is a multimedia journalist based in New York. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal.

Throughout my time at the Wall Street Journal I edited a lot of videos that were shot by other reporters, often print reporters new to the joy of filmmaking.

This has taught me two things:

1. How to become a better shooter (knowing what and how to shoot)
2. How important editing is in storytelling

A lot of people concentrate on shooting when they take their first steps as video reporters. Rightly so. The footage you shoot is literally the stuff that videos are made of. But I do think that fewer people put the same amount of effort into improving their editing skills. And if there’s one thing I learned from editing a lot of footage from video beginners, it’s that editing can be crucial to making a story work.

This is part of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Laura Amico, along with her husband, Chris, is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

Last week, Chris and I presented Homicide Watch at ONA’s DC meetup. You can watch the video here. In it, we discuss a lot of the technical and editorial specifics of what we do every day.

Our kicker from the presentation is the subject of this blog post (minute 35 on the video). These 11 “lessons learned” are meant to be somewhat inspirational, both for those going it alone, like I am, and for those in traditional settings.

I expand on each below, but in brief:

• Do what you can — now.
• Use what you can — now.
• Build what you can — now.
• Take risks.
• Evaluate.
• Be public.
• Think creatively.
• Trust that things will fall into place.
• But do what you can to make them fall into the right places.
• Never stop looking forward.
• Find your purpose, define it, and live by it.

This post is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences, projects and sharing their knowledge with the ONA community. Fellow Lucas Timmons is a data journalist and web producer for The Edmonton Journal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The Progressive Conservatives (PCs) have ruled Alberta for the past four decades. First elected in 1971, the Tories have formed the government ever since. With no legitimate threat to their power, Alberta’s provincial politics and elections can be very boring.

When Premier Ed Stelmach announced he was stepping down, the race was on for a new leader of the PCs and the new Premier. Six contenders put their names forward.

As part of the coverage for the leadership race, the Edmonton Journal decided to find out where the six candidates stood on four issues. We were looking for a way that would:

1. Let the candidates outline their positions
2. Allow our readers to get just the information they wanted
3. Add to our online coverage, and bring people to our website
4. Be interactive
5. Look cool

This is one of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. Fellow Lam Thuy Vo is a multimedia journalist based in New York. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she developed “Dissecting China’s Housing Market,” a project that won the Society of American Business Editors and Writers award.

When I was asked to teach a workshop at Hong Kong University a year ago, I consulted a friend and colleague about what he thought would be the most useful advice for print reporters venturing into the wild territory of multimedia journalism. I was to instruct print freelancers from across Asia in multimedia storytelling, a craft that’s still in its nascence on that continent.

My friend gave me very practical advice. He said that many classes he took in graduate school were very theoretical, and few gave explicit instructions and checklists to students and reporters. When you’re juggling photography, video, data research and good old-fashioned print reporting, there’s nothing that will save your overloaded mind better than a good checklist.

This is part of a series of blog posts from the first ONA class of MJ Bear Fellows describing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with the community. MJ Bear Fellow Laura Amico is the founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. in Washington, D.C., a website that covers every homicide in the nation’s capital, and includes news, obituaries, profiles, court documents and memorials.

The query went out Nov. 2: What should Homicide Watch include in our look back on 2011?

I wanted to build a comprehensive year-in-review package that showed off the data and reporting that my team and I had done over the past 12 months and that captured the way people across D.C. felt the impact of violent crime over the year. While I had my own story list, I wanted to hear from readers about what was meaningful to them.

Almost immediately the messages, in comments, emails and Tweets, started rolling in. “Please write about my boyfriend,” wrote one woman. “His case hasn’t been closed.” “Write about transgender murder victims,” wrote someone else. “My neighbor was killed and I think that this is a problem.”