GIJC17

Lightning Round Talks Offer Tips on Teaching Data Journalism

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During the Academic Track Lightning Round on Saturday, Nov. 18th, 10 professors and trainers based in countries all over the globe offered tips and techniques on teaching data journalism.

Data Journalism Lecturer Pinar Dag works at Kidar Has University in Turkey. She started her presentation with advice on how to adjust lectures to the audience. When teaching engineers, for example, an instructor might need a separate dataset more pertinent to that profession.

Associate Professor and investigative journalist Jeff Kelly Lowenstein from the U.S. talked about the kind of dataset that is most popular among his students: food inspections.

University of Illinois professor Brant Houston and author of four editions  of “Computer-Asssisted Reporting: A Practical Guide,” started his presentation by explaining the usefulness of data in journalism.

Crina Boros is a data journalist at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. She also works as a freelance trainer for organizations such as the BBC and Greenpeace. Boros’ presentation focused on what can go wrong during training and how to approach various kinds of students.

Jennifer LaFleur is data editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington D.C. and became the first full-time training director for the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in 1994. Her presentation focused on using two tools, Microsoft Excel and SQL (Structured Query Language), to teach data analysis.

Training

MPI Presents: News Literacy, Fake News and the First Amendment

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Join the Mid-America Press Institute Sept. 20 for a one-day seminar on increasing news literacy to better report stories for your audiences.

The one-day seminar — “News Literacy, Fake News and the First Amendment” —  will cover how to recognize and verify news, the role of the First Amendment and how to combat fake news.

Training

New leadership, new home for Mid-America Press Institute

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The Mid-America Press Institute, a newsroom training association approaching its fifth decade, has relocated to Champaign, Illinois, and is now under new management.

The move was finalized August 1.

The Mid-America Press Institute, a nonprofit offering low-cost training to mid-career journalists, built its membership from newspapers across the Midwest and had been located at Eastern Illinois University since 1994.

Management of MPI is overseen by part-time co-directors, Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, and Pam Dempsey, the executive director of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, an online, nonprofit newsroom covering agribusiness and related issues.