Welcome to data journalism. The main goal of this course is to expand your ability to report and tell stories using data. You will use these tools to discover trends in data. You will learn how to create and publish graphics and maps. It’s hard work but it is a lot of fun and very rewarding.

We have some basic goals for you to reach in this class. By the end of the semester, we want you to have basic proficiency and independence with data analysis. We want you to be able to write about data clearly, using the Associated Press style as a benchmark. We want you to be able to find and download a dataset, clean it up, visualize it.

You’ll get a taste of modern data journalism through Google Sheets and programming in R, a statistics language. You’ll be challenged to think programmatically while thinking about a story you can tell to readers in a way that they’ll want to read. Combining them together has the power to change policy and expose injustice.

This book is the collection of class materials compiled by various data journalism professors around the country: Matt Waite at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications and Sarah Cohen of Arizona State University. This version was rewritten by Rob Wells, building on work by Sean Mussenden and Derek Willis, at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

There’s some things you should know about it:
- It is free for students.
- The topics will remain the same but the text is going to be constantly tinkered with.
- What is the work of the authors is copyright Rob Wells 2024, Sean Mussenden and Derek Willis 2022, Matt Waite 2020 and Sarah Cohen 2022.