(1) Join this Slack:

https://ledeprogram.slack.com/

join and star the following channels:

#data-ms-2023, #reporting-ii-2023

(2) Fill out the Polly survey

In the #reporting-ii-2023 Slack channel

If you have any questions, just raise your hand 🖐!

Welcome! Let's get rolling!

Hello, my name is...

Dhrumil Mehta (he/him)

Associate Prof. of Journalism @ Columbia U.

Deputy Director of Tow Center

Visiting Associate Prof of Public Policy @ Harvard Kennedy School

dhrumil.mehta@columbia.edu

@datadhrumil

@dmil

You will meet Prof. Denise Ajiri next week!

Today

- Meet Dhrumil

- Meet each other! (Introductions & Survey Responses)

- Syllabus Overview

- Data Journalism: Possibilities And Limitations

- Intro to Descriptive Statistics

- Homework Overview

Highlights:

Currently

Associate Prof. @ Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
Visiting Associate Prof. @ Harvard Kennedy School

Previously

Database Journalist, Politics @ FiveThirtyEight
Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
Northwestern:
- BA in Philosophy + Minor in Cognitive Science
- MS in Computer Science

Database Journalist, Politics

2014 - http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/job-opening-database-journalist-politics/

2021 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/were-hiring-a-data-editor/

Data-Driven Storytelling

https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/dhrumil-mehta

Data Scraping / Cleaning

Building Software

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Bots

Internal Workflows

Bots

Lets readers see results that FiveThirtyEight deems unexpected

Expectations are calibrated before results ever start coming in.

Open Data

data.fivethirtyeight.com

https://www.datajournalismawards.org/project-listing/?project_id=2082

Quantitative Editing

Research

http://journalism.stanford.edu/cj2016/files/Newsbots.pdf

Computationally analyzing text to better understand media and political environments.

I have a research interest in text analysis

Let me tell you what kind of editor I am...

- what I'm good at

- what I'm working to improve

That's me!
But who are you?

Survey Responses

Live Coding

(unless I get nervous or we are short on time)

https://github.com/dmil/reporting-ii/blob/main/pre-class-survey/survey-responses.ipynb

Pay special attention to:

- [ ] The questions I ask of the dataset

- [ ] What I do when I don't know some code or forget how to do something

- [ ] What statistical or visual treatments I chose to apply and why

Now your turn!!!

Take a second to write down (digitally) a bit about who you are! (bullet points...they don't have to be legible to anyone but yourself)

What motivates you to study data journalism?
What are your journalistic interests as we start thinking about forming project groups...
- topics you'd like to work on
- skills you bring to a group project
- skills you'd like to build / pick up from your group-mates

But there's a catch!

You have 5 minutes to create a 5-questions to get to know one other person in the room who you will have to introduce to the class

You will be split into:

1) Survey Makers

2) Interview Takers

Survey Makers (5 question survey)

Multiple Choice

Which of the following reporting topics interests you most? (1) Healthcare (2) Education (3) Agriculture

Scale

On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being most sure. How sure are you about what your thesis project will be about?

Yes/No

Are you an interested in New York City issues?

1-phrase Answer

Where did you grow up?

Interivew Takers

5 open-ended interview questions

Step 1: Send your questions to your partner via Slack

Step 2: Answer the questions that were sent to you via Slack

Tell us a story about your partner:

What motivates them to study data journalism...
What are their journalistic interests as we start thinking about forming project groups...beats you'd like to work on, skills you'd like to learn etc...