When all else fails, make your own spreadsheet
It’s easy to forget, amid all the cleaning, sorting, and filtering, that data journalism is all about storytelling. A wise man once told me “It’s called data journalism, not data journalism.” This is undoubtedly true, but before you get to embedding insightful graphs and creating beautiful visualisations, you first need some data to work with. Sourcing data isn’t always easy. This is especially true of government data, where administrators will seemingly take every measure to make data unusable. And while private data is typically of a better standard, it also typically pricey. Whether public or private, getting your hands...
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