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 an associate producer for National Public Radio’s Planet Money.
For the past three years, I’ve been a videographer through and through with only smaller excursions into the world of data visualization (although I never really stopped consuming them). The last time I worked on extensive graphics was eons ago in Internet terms — the distant year of 2008 when I was tinkering around with Adobe Illustrator to sketch out corn prices in an elaborate “charticle,” the crossbreed between a chart and article.
But I wanted to rekindle that passion of mine. I’ve recently started working more with infographics and wanted to educate myself. So I talked to two former colleagues who KNOW what they are doing and have spent the past few years in data journalism — from mapping data points, to finding stories in deluges of data, to making sure each is visually pleasing and clear.
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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.
I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks in trial, watching the government try to prove that Rickey Pharr shot and killed Angelo Jones at a craps game in Southeast D.C. in October 2010 because he believed that Jones was cooperating with the government in a police investigation.
The trial took place in fits and starts. More than a dozen bench conferences delayed the proceedings, and, at one point, a fire alarm forced the evacuation of the courthouse. Witnesses, as you might imagine, were not thrilled to testify in this case. One young man who did not respond to court when subpoenaed to testify was arrested and brought to the witness stand in a jail-issued jumpsuit.
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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 Tor logo.
is a free, open network designed to allow users to connect to the Internet anonymously, without fear of being tracked. Using onion routing (more on this below), Tor conceals the data you send and receive online, keeping your data private and your identity shielded.
The Tor project website says, “Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents.”
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I’ve recently started looking into the world of independent documentary filmmaking in an effort to understand how so many filmmakers figured out a way to make a living with long-form storytelling. One thing is for sure: Most successful filmmakers I spoke to also are savvy business/sales people.
It was very interesting to get a glimpse into this world, mostly through the FilmShop and the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, two collectives I am part of. As a journalist, the divide between the ad sales department and the editorial side was as holy as anything could be. Here, filmmakers were writing proposals for grants, setting rates for their film screenings and speaker appearances, and working out ways to get funding from advocacy groups and corporations.
Here are a few things I think we could learn from our filmmaking colleagues.
Get your reporting funded
I have been speaking to a number of documentary filmmakers and video journalists, picking their brains about doing long-form journalism at a time when funding is scarce. A recurring theme is that some journalists and independent filmmakers (those worlds seem somewhat separate) produce shorter grant-funded pieces for journalistic publications and repurpose the footage later for 60- to 90-minute films.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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:
- How to become a better shooter (knowing what and how to shoot)
- 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.
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