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The European Journalism Centre (EJC) announced today that registration is now open for its free online data journalism course Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools.

This five-module introductory course gives participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines. It is open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection who wants to tell stories with data. The course is planned to start early 2014 and the instruction language will be English.

This EJC initiative is supported by Google, the Dutch Ministry of Education and the African Media Initiative, and features a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.

Josh Hatch, Senior Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and member of the Advisory Board for this course, says: “Thanks to the European Journalism Centre’s work to foster data journalism’s move into the mainstream, reporters and editors can gain insights from the best in the business. Whether you want to get over your fear of Excel, learn the language of your data geeks, or discover how to tell stories with data visualisations, this course will help journalists and newsrooms learn how to take advantage of these invaluable skills. This is a very good thing.”

The five module course is divided into the following units:

1. Data journalism in the newsroom

This module is an introduction to data journalism. It shows what data journalism is, how it works on a busy news desk and what skills you need to know to practise it.

2. Finding data to support stories

This module deals with the range of skills that journalists use to obtain data. This includes setting up alerts to regular sources of information, simple search engine techniques that can save hours of time and using laws in your own and other countries.

3. Understanding your data I: Finding story ideas with data analysis

This module focuses on using spreadsheets and basic statistics to find patterns in data that will reveal story ideas and add evidence to the resulting stories.

4. Understanding your data II: Dealing with messy data

This module addresses messy data – data that needs to be organised before it can be used. It covers the so-called ‘cleaning’ process, at the end of which the dataset can be analysed using techniques from Module 3.

5. Telling stories with visualisation

This module deals with how to transform data into stories, infographics and interactive visualizations: the best practices and the principles of graphic design that a journalist needs to know.

More details about the course and how to register are available at:

http://www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course

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