Numbers to Narrative
Telling stories with Data
Dhrumil Mehta
Database Journalist, Politics - FiveThirtyEight
Democracy and Technology Fellow - Ash Center @ HKS
dhrumil.mehta@fivethirtyeight.com
@datadhrumil
@dmil
Database Journalist, Politics
Path
- Northwestern:
- BA in Philosophy + Minor in Cognitive Science
- MS in Computer Science
- Knight Lab Student Fellow
- Political Framing + USA Today + APSA
- MediaCloud & Framing - Berkman Center
- Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
- Database Journalist @ FiveThirtyEight
- Democracy and Technology Fellow @ Ash Center - Harvard Kennedy School
Part 1: The Journey
Day One
Lessons
Month One
Year One
More Writing / Reporting / Picking Up the Phone
Building Software
Elections
More Reporting &
Writing
&
Data
Bots, scrapers, watchers, and integrated workflow
Open Data
https://www.datajournalismawards.org/project-listing/?project_id=2082
Code that is journalism - not code for journalism
Reflecting
What's Next
Part 2: Case Studies
Uber
Types of Data Stories
Huge Data Dump
- Uber
- Election Results
- Census
Answer a question with data
Support/Oppose a hypothesis
Identify a Phenomenon
Debunk or Justify Conventional Wisdom
Data-Driven Profile
Lack of Data
Data driven investigative work
Dig for Data
Provide relevant context
Build our own dataset
- With Code / Scrapers
- By Hand
- By Survey Tool
Explain Calculations
Use Innovative Methodology
Use data to inform traditional reporting
The Rare Datapoint
My Lessons
Coding Is Journalism
To What End?
dhrumil.mehta@fivethirtyeight.com
@datadhrumil
@dmil
Todo:
Familiarize Yourself with the Data
- What is in this dataset?
- What is potentially interesting?
- What do you want to know more about?
- How can you use this data?
- What other datasets are similar to this or could be relevant?
- What is newsworthy?
Brainstorm
- What makes good stories / good news?
- Pg 272 of "Elements of Journalism"
- 3-4 Ideas per pair
Pitch
- What makes a good pitch?
Pitch
- What is the story? (1-2 sentences max)
- How will you tell it?
- Why this publication? Why now?
- Through what medium?
dhrumil.mehta@gmail.com
Analyze!
- Start to do some analysis, see if you can start to answer your questions.
- Make an outline
- what will your sections look like?
- who will you talk to?
- how can you visualize the data?
- what is the best medium to tell this story?