The National Union of Journalists has scheduled two new dates for my one-day course of data journalism training: Monday 18 May and Monday 9 November, both at the NUJ’s office on Gray’s Inn Road in London.
This course is aimed mainly at those already in journalism, who want practical methods that can be used immediately – and who want to know about the pitfalls as well as the benefits.
Specifically, the course will cover how to assess and improve the quality of data; how to combine it, or mash it up, without making a mess; the reality of using the Freedom of Information Act to get material; and how to turn numbers into pictures, whether graphs or maps. I will also talk about when it makes sense not to rely on data. Advanced mathematical ability is not a requirement, although common sense is always useful.
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, a detailed study of government idiocy by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which failed to provide EPRs to most of England’s trusts, as “the veritable RMS Titanic of IT disasters” and “doomed-from-the-beginning”. As they point out, it was started at a meeting “between a prime minister [Tony Blair] who knew next to nothing about computers and a clutch of computer enthusiasts”; it was “wildly overambitious”, “far from being essential” and was apparently never subjected to “a serious – or even a back-of-the-envelope – cost-benefit analysis”.