Chapter nine: Data-drive journalism and digitizing your life
There are some things everyone should know about when it comes to data productivity and organization.
What you need to manage + the right tools to manage = personal productivity
We often feel the need to organize our digital data. Things like e-mail, contacts, to-do lists, calendars and word documents. Tools such as Google, Office Live and Zoho can help us organize our data.
Google helps organize our contacts, e-mail, documents calendar and allows us to share our data and files.
Office Live provides us with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, applications that organize data.
Zoho is a full suite of productivity and collaboration tools, most of them free. Zoho provides tools for everything, plus Wiki, customer relationship management and much more.
Now, how does this apply to journalism?
Data-Driven?
Well, all journalism is driven by data. We used databases, spreadsheets and other forms of organized data to write our articles. Any assignment can be broken into data points, including this very blog.
Data-driven journalism is important because news organizations used web sites as data destinations. They can use depth, customization and searchability to archive news stories. Other kinds of databases used in news sites include public employee salaries, a list of top employers and property tax assessments.
Gazetteonline is a great web site that displays data-drive journalism.
Data-driven journalism helps reporters do their jobs by sorting out and displaying data in a simplified way. It allows reporters to share their data and tell their stories in more creative ways.
One way is by using a collaborative map such as MindMeister to display a storyboard. Map Builder also allows similar use.
Data-driven journalism is one of the most important tools in online journalism and it can certainly sets no limit in allowing what journalists can do when it comes to telling their stories.