I maintain The Data Reporter as a place to practice and display the data journalism techniques I teach at Middle Tennessee State University, where I am an associate professor on the School of Journalism faculty. Free, online tutorials in many of the skills you see demonstrated here are available on my “professoring” website, drkblake.com. For example:
Spreadsheet basics for journalists is a three-part tutorial that will show you how to use Google’s free spreadsheet app, Google Sheets, to do basic data analysis as well as create and share interactive data visualizations. I designed this course for use in my School of Journalism’s introductory media writing class.
My Data journalism minicourse is considerably more comprehensive, covering not only basic and intermediate Microsoft Excel skills but also making interactive online maps, using Microsoft Access, computing and interpreting univariate and bivariate inferential statistics, and conducting simple content analysis.
Finally, the Excel stats minicourse, which I created for my mass comm theory graduate students, covers a number of inferential statistical techniques available through Excel’s Data Analysis Toolpak, a free add-in for the PC version of Excel.
The Data Reporter 