Coding With Data in the Newsroom

Career Coaching
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Coding can make working with data simpler, more elegant, less repetitive and more repeatab le. This does not mean that spreadsheets will be abandoned, but rather that they will become one of a number of different tools available. Data journalists often jump between techniques as they need: Scraping data with Python notebooks, throwing the result into a spreadsheet, copying it for cleaning in Refine before pasting it back again.

Different people learn different programming languages and techniques; different newsrooms produce their work in different languages, too. This partly comes from an organization’s choice of “stack,” the set of technologies used internally (for example, most of the data, visual and development work at The Times (of London) is done in R, JavaScript and React; across the pond ProPublica uses Ruby for many of their web apps).

Time to Learn
One of the wonderful traits uniting the data journalism community is the appetite to learn. Whether you are a reporter keen on learning the ropes, a student looking to get a job in this field or an accomplished practitioner, there is plenty to learn. As technology evolves very quickly, and as some tools fall out of fashion while others are created by talented and generous people, there are always new things that can be done and learned. There are often successive iterations and versions of tools for a given task (e.g., libraries for obtaining data from Twitter’s API). Tools often build and expand on previous ones (e.g., extensions and add-ons for the D3 data visualization library). Coding in data journalism is thus an ongoing learning process which takes time and energy, on top of an initial investment of time to learn.

Working With Deadlines
Delivering on time is an essential part of the job in journalism. Coding, as reporting, can be unpredictable. Regardless of your level of experience, delays can—and invariably will—happen.
One challenge for beginners is slowdown caused by learning a new way to work. When setting off to do something new, particularly in the beginning of your learning, make sure you leave yourself enough time to be able to complete your task with a tool you know (e.g., spreadsheet). If you are just starting to learn and strapped for time, you may want to use a familiar tool and wait until you have more time to experiment.