About this introduction to data journalism

These pages have been prepared at Jomec, Cardiff University’s school of journalism, as part of online data training for BBC journalists. They are now available for anyone to use and there is a github repository available for download.

The Learning section covers the basics of starting to use spreadsheets and an online visualisation tool. It has three pieces of reading that touch on history, ethics and gathering data as a journalist. It is designed to take about three hours to complete.

The Practice section is a series of exercises with accompanying quizzes that allow you to apply basic data analysis to some datasets (i.e. to ‘interview’ some data sources). It is designed to take around eight hours.

The Resources section has useful people or events to follow if you’re getting started and has links to resource lists and datasets lists that we use at Jomec.