Data for Journalists Chapter Two | Investigative Journalism Education Consortium

Chapter Two

Online Resources: Researching and Finding Data on the Internet

Here are exercises for this chapter and links to resources for effective searches for information and data that are available online.

Exercises

1. Find data on three international web sites, three U.S. government websites, and three U.S. state sites. Hint: The World Health Organization can be one of the international web sites.

2. Download data from one of those sites into a spreadsheet or Google sheet. If it does not import easily, then import it into the spreadsheet or Google sheet. Hint: You can try downloading tuberculosis data from the World Health Organization at https://www.who.int/tb/country/data/download/en/ and also the data dictionary so you know what the column headings mean.

3. Sign up for cometdocs.com at https://www.cometdocs.com/ and convert a PDF file to an Excel file. You can try this by downloading the employee compensation file from this city government and then using cometdocs to convert the PDF.

Here is the link and the file:

http://champaignil.gov/hr/salaries-and-benefits/

Fiscal Year 2017-18 Employee Compensation Report