Claire Miller has been a reporter and data journalist for Media Wales since 2010. Featured on my list of top ten tweeters in the field, she has recently been appointed as senior data journalist for Trinity Mirror. Claire kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions about her new role and the developing field of data journalism.
How have your past experiences in journalism and/or data led you to your current position, and what does your current position entail?
I’ve kind of fallen into data journalism, I like maths, did a maths A-level, and I’ve always preferred doing stats/FOI based stories over more feature/human interest pieces. I went on a weekend training course about two years ago and have just been trying to pick up skills from there on.
My current postion is pretty new – Trinity Mirror now has a data team working across the regionals and I’m the senior data journalist on the team. The major part of my day is spent going through datasets – ONS releases, reports, older data that fits the day’s news agenda and then sending bulletins to newsdesks across England and Wales telling them there’s a potential story for them – we’re trying to send out more based on original research so that’s probably going to be a bigger part from now on.
How important do you consider data journalism skills to be in this day and age? Is it really changing the face of journalism?
It’s very popular at the moment but it is starting to prove it’s worth in terms of generating stories and views online. It’s not so much the changing face of journalism as a reflection of how journalism is becoming more focused on digital – data journalism can’t really be shown off to full effect in print, but online you can create visualisations and interactives that realy grab people’s attention.
They’re good skills to have. Looking at the US, data journalism, journalism coding, are where a lot of the jobs are (and in the UK potentially) and are likely to be. They set up a jobs board at the NICAR conference recently and where surprised how many things were posted on it. Journalism isn’t a thriving industry and there really aren’t that many just reporting jobs about and there are lots of qualified people who can do them. This is likely to be a growth area in years to come.
Should all journalism students be learning how to source, analyse, visualise and in essence, tell stories with data?
Yes, because this isn’t a new skill – everyone working in news has always had to deal with crime figures and GCSE results and figures on hospital waiting times – it’s much easier if you at least have some of the basic skills to deal with those – it also gives you the opportunity to spot a better story.
There’s so much data out there – the UK Government is pushing the Open Data agenda – so there are potentially lots of stories. Who wants to miss a great story because they lack the skills to find it? Visualising data helps tell stories – it can be useful for working out what the story is (sometimes it is easier to see it visually) or it can help explain what is happening.
Do you think the growing interest around data journalism risks putting stats and technology at the forefront and traditional word-based reporting to the side?
Not really, because lots of numbers are really boring! Traditonal reporting is about telling a story, finding the good intro and teasing out interesting quotes – in order to get people to read stats, you need to dress it up.
The process with data journalism is broadly the same as with traditional reporting, you find your potential line and then you go speak to people about – experts to add analysis, politicians for opinion and maybe a case study – data journalism is just a very good way of generating story ideas – there’s lots of data about and most of it is freely available.
What data story that you have been involved with are you most proud of and why?
I love how the census piece I spoke about at news:rewired turned out – after a lot of work putting it all together, trekking up to the Valleys to talk to people, it’s a nice balance of visualisation and reporting.
Who in the field of data journalism is producing work that you admire at the moment?
I really liked the FT’s austerity map – it’s a good example of using data to find out the facts about what’s happening with an issue and then using that to tell stories.
The BBC interactives, like the class calculator, are brilliant and really show the potential for interactive story-telling – and why, when you get something that goes viral, data journalism is popular at the moment.
I always keep an eye on the work Kathryn Torney is doing at The Detail in Northern Ireland for a great regional/local perspective
It’s good to look at well-resourced amazing projects that you can’t really emulate and then try a little bit anyway – New York Times and Washington Post do amazing things.
What main piece of advice can you offer somebody thinking about exploring data journalism? What tools would you recommend?
Learn to love Excel, you’ll be spending a lot of time with it. Google Fusion Tables, Tableau (students can get a year’s free access to the Desktop version: http://www.tableausoftware.com/academic/students), and Datawrapper are all good to start experimenting with.
The internet is full of information about how to do data journalism, plenty of people who will answer questions – Twitter is worryingly full of journalists complaing about PDFs, so if you are not sure where to start or get stuck, there’s plenty of advice.
Start with small straightforward datasets – crimes by police force etc and start trying to ask the obvious questions – which is the most, smallest, biggest change etc – then look at ways to visualise the data to tell that story – all data journalism, no matter how big the dataset, tends to work through that process.
Thank you to Claire for sparing the time to answer my questions.
Filed under: Dataplay Tagged: Claire Miller, Media Wales, news:rewired, Trinity Mirror
