Tag Archives: computer aided reporting


This post by Tony Hirst should be recommended reading for every journalist interested in the potential of computers for reporting.

Why? Because it shows you how you can use Google spreadsheets to interrogate data as if it was a database; and because it demonstrates the importance of news organisations releasing data to their users.

Put aside any intimidation you might feel at the mention of APIs and query languages. What it boils down to is this: you can alter the web address of a Google spreadsheet to filter the data and find the story.

Simple as that. 

Hirst uses the example of the spreadsheet of MPs expenses recently released by The Guardian (they’ve also published Lords expenses). By altering the URLs this is what he generates (I’m quoting his bullet points):

OK, you need to know the words to use (and if you have a link to an easy reference for these let me know*), but this is still a lot easier than using programming languages and databases.

As I say, this also illustrates the importance of publishing raw data so users can interrogate it in their own ways, which is precisely what The Guardian’s Data Store has been doing, meaning that people like Tony can create interfaces like this.


*Tony has very generously created this page which helps you formulate your search – and generates the URL. If you were working on a different spreadsheet you could just replace the spreadsheet URL and change any column references accordingly.

UPDATE: Tony also has a version which allows you to pick from Guardian datasets.


I’m launching an MA in Online Journalism




And then I fleshed it out:









Let’s get a conversation going.

The services of the ‘semantic web’


Continue reading

The next step to the ‘semantic web’

There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation.  It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it.  At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.

Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory.  Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us.  Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.

Continue reading

Sport and data – now it’s more than just ‘interactive’







Thanks to Alex Lockwood for the tip-off.

The future of investigative journalism: databases and algorithms

There’s a great article over at Miller-McCune on investigative journalism and what you might variously call computer assisted reporting and database journalism. Worth reading in full, the really interesting stuff comes further in, which I’ve quoted below in full:



“Now, in the post-Google Age, Allison sees the possibility that computer algorithms can sort through the huge amounts of databased information available on the Internet, providing public interest reporters with sets of potential story leads they otherwise might never have found. The programs could only enhance, not replace, the reporter, who would still have to cultivate the human sources and provide the context and verification needed for quality journalism. But the data-mining programs could make the reporters more efficient — and, perhaps, a less appealing target for media company bean counters looking for someone to lay off. “I think that this is much more a tool to inform reporters,” Allison says, “so they can do their jobs better.”

“… After he fills the endowed chair for the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies, [James] Hamilton hopes the new professor can help him grow an academic field that provides generations of new tools for the investigative journalist and public interest-minded citizen. The investigative algorithms could be based in part on a sort of reverse engineering, taking advantage of experience with previous investigative stories and corruption cases and looking for combinations of data that have, in the past, been connected to politicians or institutions that were incompetent or venal. “The whole idea is that we would be doing research and development in a scalable, open-source way,” he says. “We would try to promote tools that journalists and others could use.”

Hat tip to Nick Booth 


new journalists for new information

new journalists for new information



