Building a great, useful news app takes an intimidating number of skills, as you work with data, tools and design. This seminar will demystify the process and help those interested in getting started understand how to: find a story inside the data, use tools to create useful interactives, and understand design principles that help maps and numbers make sense.

Journalists will learn how to find stories — and tell stories — hiding inside a data dump. You’ll get hands-on experience with basic tools for news apps that take some good thinking, don’t take serious programming skills. And we’ll talk about the visualization concepts you’ll need to understand to bring your ideas to fruition.

Throughout the seminar, participants will discuss how they can apply what they are learning to real data. We’ll talk about how to use news applications to cover the news and current issues. 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 get you started in developing smart, simple applications to do the best journalism we can do.

You’ll Learn:

• The basics of “computational thinking” — the process of understanding how all the elements come together from the data and storytelling side
• How to find the story in the data
• How to work with structured data
• To understand what makes a good data visualization
• Simple tools get started building news apps

Guest faculty include Matt Waite, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Hot Type Consulting.

Questions or need more information? Click here first: Seminar Application Information. If you can’t find what you need, e-mail seminars@poynter.org.