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We hope you're joining us in Chicago, March 8-11 for the 2018 CAR Conference. We want to hear which hands-on classes you're most excited to attend. Consider taking our survey to help us plan repeat sessions.
We'll keep the survey open through Tuesday, December 12. At that time, we'll tally the votes to help us plan repeats of the most popular sessions.
Our annual data journalism conference will be taking place March 8-11, 2018 in Chicago — and we want your input!
Use this form to share ideas, suggestions and other comments you think will help us plan the best possible conference. The only required field is your contact information (in case we want to follow up). No suggestion is too small.
Here are a few ways you can use this form:
Have several ideas? Great! Feel free to fill out the form as many times as you’d like. And help us spread the word by sharing this form with friends and colleagues.
Make sure to get your ideas in by Sept. 22.
Please direct questions to conference@ire.org.
By Soo Rin Kim
You’re a city government reporter and you’re on a deadline to write about a public hearing on the city’s zoning overhaul. You want to quote a resident who made an interesting comment at the hearing, but you forgot to get the exact spelling of his name (oops!). What do you do?
As unlikely as it sounds, voter registration data can save your life in a situation like this. If you managed to get his address, you can look up his name in the county voter registration data.
At a 2017 CAR Conference panel, Derek Willis, a news apps developer at ProPublica; Rachel Shorey of the New York Times; and Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political science professor, discussed how to utilize election data beyond election results with some examples from this year.
ProPublica used voter survey and turnout data to investigate administrative problems in the election system – including voter registration rejection rates – as part of Electionland.
Voter registration data usually includes a person's name, address, age, gender, race, party registration and even voting history. This data can usually be obtained directly from county agencies or from private data vendors that collect and standardize the data.
Voter registration data is also handy when looking up sources’ names and addresses or doing broad demographic counts. You can also dive in deeper to find more interesting anomalies, such as Republicans that live in mostly Democratic districts and districts with big swings.
Panelists said some states are particularly helpful. Florida collects additional election information such as the number of anticipated voters, staffing and types of voting machines in Election Preparation Reports. Georgia collects additional early voting and absentee voting data.
They also warned that election data is ephemeral in nature. States and localities have different retention policies and are not required to archive data beyond certain periods of time, making it difficult to compare election cycles. County-level data can also be incompatible. It took about a month and a half for Smith’s research team to collect precinct data from all 67 counties in Florida. And the data they obtained wasn't easily synchronized because every county had different reporting methods.
By Amanda Nero
The CAR Conference came and went much too quickly. Luckily, it’s nearly impossible to walk away from the conference empty-handed. Whether it’s technical skills or a deeper understanding of the data community and its importance, hopefully you walked away with a memento to remember the conference by.
Here are some conference takeaways from a first-time CAR Conference attendee:
1. Victor Hernandez and Mike Reilley have an app for everything. During their session, “30/60: Thirty of the best free data storytelling tools in sixty mins,” they introduced 30 free tools worth checking out for advanced and newbie journalists. Typeform, a cloud-based app for creating surveys, and Banjo, a real-time event detector, are just a few notable examples.
2. Journalists have a responsibility to protect endangered data. David Herzog, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, moderated a panel of mostly non-journalists who do their part to protect data in the Trump era and beyond – but they need journalists’ help. If you are working with or come across a dataset you wouldn’t want to see disappear, archive it or find someone who can. Preservation is key for the future of data reporting.
3. GIFs are an insanely useful way to present data visualizations, and they’re not that hard to make. Lena Groeger of ProPublica showed how easy it is to make a GIF with Photoshop and from the command line. The options for making GIFs and the possibilities to get more people interacting with data visualizations on social platforms are endless.
4. Tableau is more than just a storytelling tool. Ben Jones from Tableau proved that you can use the data viz program to find stories in data, too.
5. Young data journalists shouldn’t be afraid of what they don’t know. Madi Alexander and Rachel Schallom, two recent college graduates and working journalists, reassured young conference-goers that no one is perfect when starting out. In the session “Jobs and career straight-talk,” Alexander, Schallom and a group of mentors talked about how being adaptable is just as beneficial as knowing every program and having every skill.
By Uliana Pavlova
"If you think you are indispensable, just die and see what happens." – Ron Nixon
It seems almost impossible to find a work/life balance when you're a journalist in a constantly shrinking industry. In the world of breaking news and Twitter, it's hard to unplug. Nixon, a Washington correspondent with The New York Times, sat on a 2017 CAR Conference panel with Darla Cameron of The Washington Post; Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine; Cynthia K. Persico, a vice president for Health Advocate; and Andy Boyle of Axios. Together, they shared tips and advice on battling burnout.
What do you do when your boss tries to reach you after hours? Panelists suggested setting up boundaries with your boss early on. Hannah-Jones tells her boss she doesn’t check her email at night and asks for texts if it’s an emergency. Boyle uses email for semi-important stuff, Slack for important stuff and phone calls in case of emergency.
It’s important to find ways to relieve stress. Hannah-Jones throws parties for writers at her house in New York. Reading poetry with like-minded people helps her reduce anxiety. Boyle works out six days a week to take his mind off of work. Nixon never eats at his desk. He said a quick change of environment helps him relax and think.
All journalists suffer from imposter syndrome to some extent. It’s typical to put in more hours when you are just starting a new job or transitioning from an internship to full-time employment. But after a while, panelists said, it’s okay to transition to normal hours and let your life take over.
“No one ever dies and wishes they worked harder,” Persico said.
By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova
The definition of bots is murky, but expectations for the use of artificial intelligence tools in news organizations is on the rise. Bots, like automated personal assistants, can collect information, execute actions, generate content and even emulate humans, said Tiff Fehr, an interactives editor at The New York Times.
Fehr moderated a 2017 CAR Conference panel on bots with John Keefe of Quartz, Ken Schwencke of ProPublica and Simon Rogers of Google.
How can journalists interact with their audiences using bots? How can they use them to improve their reporting? One example panelists pointed to was The New York Times’ Politics Chatbot that provides automated updates with the latest election poll numbers, along with news updates via Facebook Messenger.
Quartz recently launched a Bot Studio, with the support of the Knight Foundation. It’s an experimental project, intended to build automated tools for journalists and applications for voice and messaging interfaces.
Bots can help you watch RSS feeds, keep an eye on court cases and even see things before everyone else, Keefe said. “That kind of tool is completely amazing,” he added, “especially if you can come up with stuff that nobody else is watching or thinking.”
Panelists said that bots can be our digital assistants and robot friends. They are programmed to automate journalists’ routine tasks and to deliver efficient, timely responses to journalists’ queries.
But is there a way to have them interact in an unprompted way, on their own?
“We are not there yet,” Keefe said, laughing. “And I am not sure if we want to be there.”
By Natalie Lung
Two factors measure the impact of journalism: the output (how much work has been done), and its significance. But Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute (API), thinks newsrooms don’t actually measure much of either.
At a 2017 CAR Conference panel, Rosenstiel spoke alongside Lindsay Green-Barber, former director of strategic research at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica’s Director of Business Development Celeste LeCompte. The panel explained that most publications don’t keep track of the nature of their stories – for instance, whether it’s a unique story idea or just a reaction to a news event, or if it’s an explanatory piece and or an investigation.
Rosenstiel's team at API has found that watchdog and accountability stories increase engagement by almost half, while daily coverage does little to move the needle.
Rosenstiel also reminded newsrooms to evaluate public discussions and reactions generated by their stories annually, instead of waiting for someone to go to jail or a change in public policy.
Green-Barber stressed the importance of doing network analyses: Who are the actors that reacted to your story, and how is the story used by communities to build networks? She also shared strategies for generating impact:
LeCompte said ProPublica’s measure of success is binary: Did something change in the real world? Did a public policy change? Did someone get fired because of the story?
“We are looking very specifically for places where our work was original enough, and was mentioned by people who are actually making the change, to say that this was attributable to us,” she said.
By Haotian Mai
A panel of environmental reporters gathered at the 2017 CAR Conference to discuss stories based on public and private data sources.
Dinah Pulver of the Dayton Beach News-Journal helps build and maintain the paper’s database of shark bites.
In addition to their own database, Pulver also finds water.usgs.gov useful for a variety sources of data. She said she uses it to track water flow, temperature and quality in Florida. Many other resources are accessible on the U.S. Geological Survey website, where you can find data on phenomena like earthquakes.
Dianne Finch, a journalism professor at Kent State University, spoke to the importance of knowing how to work closely with scientists. Finch also suggested checking out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coral Reef Conservation Program, which features data on coral bleaching.
David Heath, the data director at CNN, said that America’s system of identifying toxic chemicals is lagging behind, something journalists can and should cover rigorously. There are over 80,000 commercially available chemicals, but only a few hundred official risk assessments.
Heath suggested several resources for reporting on toxins:
By Uliana Pavlova
We live in the age of cybersecurity, when it is more important than ever to protect our information and sources digitally. Olivia Martin from the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Mike Tigas of ProPublica offered useful tips and tools on digital security for journalists at the CAR Conference.
Why does security matter? Security matters because, as journalists, we want to protect our information from hacking, especially when it comes to crossing borders. The first step towards better information security is threat modeling, which allows you to identify assets, adversaries, risks, and best practices.
The next step is to break down the data you have on your computer into two categories: data at rest and data in transit. Data at rest is the information we store on our computers. Data in transit is the information we choose to share with others via email, text messages and over phone calls.
A regular password can be cracked in a matter of days or even seconds. For example, “password123” can be cracked in 6 seconds. However, passphrases can take years to crack. Journalists need to make sure they are making it as hard as possible to gain access to their accounts. A passphrase can consist of three random words like “carrot horse shoe.” Secure password managers like 1Password, LastPass and KeePassX can help you manage your passphrases.
The next crucial step towards digital security is two-factor authentication. The easiest way to think about two-step authentication is to break it down into something that you know (passphrase) and something that you have (mobile phone.) Martin and Tigas suggested a Yubikey or hardware tokens.
Now, if you’re storing important files on your computer, you want to make sure you are using full disk encryption. Panelists suggested several programs:
Data in transit is the information you choose to share with others. When you don’t encrypt a message, it's like sending a postcard in the mail; Everybody can see its content. Encrypted email puts that postcard in an envelope. Now you can only see a sender and a recipient.
When it comes to text messages, here are the best tools for encrypted messages:
Last but not least, make sure to avoid phishing. Watch the “from” field in your email for little misspellings; someone else can pose as your boss or your mom. Also, beware of attachments and links.
By Abigail West
The left brain is commonly understood as the logical side, and the right brain as the creative, intuitive side. This is not accurate.
The correct way to look at the brain is that the left side is the verbal side. It is conceptual and anticipatory. The left brain will apply already known information to situations. The right side of the brain pays attention to shapes, colors and patterns.
Artist Leah Kohlenberg and Scott Pham and Jennifer LaFleur, from Reveal for the Center for Investigative Reporting, discussed how drawing can help journalists develop both sides of the brain while they work. Drawing is not an innate ability – it must be taught. If you don’t exercise the right side, you think you can’t draw. But do it anyway. Drawing clears the mind and helps people deal with complex challenges.
This is called brain flipping, and it allows people to see tasks in a new way and focus on the job at hand.
Pham spoke about tools journalists can use for organizing and prioritizing tasks. These include:
Some additional tips for organizing and prioritizing:
Drawing forces you to look at what’s in front of you. It makes you think visually and spatially. Concentration can calm you and stimulate brain activity.
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