Data-Driven Journalism

Catalog description

Increasingly, the most important, and least accessible, stories that the public needs told are buried in the numbers. Public and private institutions amass billions of bits of information that are potentially available for analysis. This course will teach students how to collect and interpret such data in ways that are valuable for use in news stories. They will become familiar with computer-assisted reporting tools, learn how to use them for news-gathering purposes and produce one or more publishable stories based on data they have extracted, cleaned and analyzed. Prerequisite: MMS 101 or COM 101. (Offered every spring term.)