Data Journalism Advice For Science Writers
I was interviewed for a nice piece on The Open Notebook about data journalism for science writers.
Interrogating Data: A Science Writer’s Guide to Data Journalism
As with all these things, a long interview was cut down to a short series of quotes. But I think my interviewer, Betsy Ladyzhets, did a great job of picking out the most important points. The key bits of advice I gave were:
- Figure out what the data is showing, but also what it’s not showing.
- Write down aspects of a dataset that you find interesting, as well as questions that come up, as you explore the data (for more on this, read my New Beginning essay).
- Good science communication thinks about its audience (for more on this, read my guide and worksheet for identifying your audience).
- Join the Data Visualization Society.
The rest of the article has a lot of good advice from others, as well as recommendations for tools and resources to try out. Go check it out.