APPLICATIONS ARE NO LONGER BEING ACCEPTED FOR THIS SEMINAR

Held in partnership with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE)

Never before has using data and data-based applications offered so much promise to those who pursue journalism, especially around big events like the elections. Unfortunately, fear of programming stops many news organizations from building their own. This Poynter seminar can change that.

Journalists will learn how to find stories — and tell stories — hiding inside a data dump. You’ll also get hands-on experience with basic programming, and build a simple and useful application to take home.

Throughout the seminar, participants will discuss how they can apply what they are learning to real data. Bring a dataset that is important to you, and we’ll help you answer questions you need to solve to make it usable for your site. Together, we’ll learn how to scope out viable projects that use programming to do the best journalism we can do.

For educators, we’ll have a special session on how to incorporate teaching data and programming into class work with what Matt Waite calls “small wins.”

Guest Faculty include:

Aron Pilhofer, Editor of Interactive News for the New York Times. His team blends journalism and technology to enhance The Times’s reporting online through social media, community and dynamic, data-driven Web applications. He is co-founder of DocumentCloud.org, a project designed to improve journalism by making source documents easier to find, search, analyze and share online. He is also Founder of Hacks and Hackers, an organization designed to bring journalists and technologists together.

John Keefe, the Senior Executive Producer for News at WNYC, New York Public Radio. He guides the station’s news operation and has grown its capacity for breaking news, election coverage, investigative reporting and data journalism. Most recently, Keefe is focused on rolling online databases, maps and interactive applications into WNYC’s journalism. His projects include Census maps, teacher ratings databases, stop-and-frisk charts and listener text-messaging systems.

Matt Waite, Co-founder of Hot Type Consulting LLC, a company that specializes in web development for media companies. In August 2011, he joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a professor of journalism. Previously, he was the News Technologist for the St. Petersburg Times/Tampabay.com. He is the principal developer of PolitiFact, a data-driven site that fact checks things powerful people in Washington D.C. are saying.

You’ll learn

• The basics of “computational thinking”
• How to find the story in the data
• How to work with structured data
• The anatomy of news apps
• How to start programming news apps
Questions: E-mail seminars@poynter.org