Public information on the internet offers unlimited opportunities to journalists and media organizations. Datajournalism – collecting, analyzing, fact checking, monitoring, explaining and visualising these data – brings new stories and can offer a richer media experiences to the audience. News with more detail, presented on basis of personal preference, or provided within a broader context. All contribute to a better informed public.

Open data
Whether it’s about nation wide student scores, re-enumeration of civil servants, train delays , data for journalistic purposes can cover any topic. As transparency laws require governments and businesses to open up, vast amounts of data become publicly available.
Identifying relevant data, cleaning and gathering it requires tools like crawlers, scrapers and PDF extracters. The result is a datafile ready for processing…

Re-use
Datasets can also be used to fact check statements , monitor developments, but also used for analyzing differences between regions or years. All are starting points for new stories. By visualizing data through mapping, charting or animating a story is placed within a broader context. By making data interactive on the web, data can be geared towards local preferences personalizing the media experience.