Cookies, good data practices, and award-worthiness 🍪🏆🍪🏆

THE BEST OF THE WEB FOR DATA JOURNALISTS

Nice to meet you!
This is something I wrote for my mailing list, The Data Journalism Newsletter. If you like it, sign up here to get emails like these auto-magically in your inbox every Sunday. Enjoy!

A week of deadline stress and firsts

This week tech editor Joost Schellevis and myself worked on a story about websites that use tracking cookies without asking for permission (NL/EN). Our NOS Stories colleagues - who focus on 13 - 18 year olds - made a YouTube video (NL) about it. (image) With a tight deadline, we got to see the good, the bad and the ugly of data journalism - in this case meaning good story, messy data, and a lack of sleep. Anyway, we made it and so it became a week of firsts: the first time a story I worked on opened the eight o'clock news and the first push message.

Working on this production did keep me from reading the data work by others - hence this meta newsletter that does not feature data productions by others. Another first, I guess... :)

Amanda Hickman made a round up of good links that illustrate the most common data problems. Because as she explains: “there are a whole lot of different ways to misunderstand or be duped by data”. :)
As new data editor at the New York Times, Amanda Cox hopes to publish both ambitious enterprise stories, investigations as well as everyday news stories. I'm especially looking forward to the latter... Read the full profile on Amanda Cox here.
The European edition of The Google News Initiative Fellowship is here. If you are a student looking to do a data-driven journalism fellowship at a newsroom in Europe, you can apply now.
Trying to learn R? This site might help: R for journalism.
All data publishing entities be hold: the Institute of Network Cultures has published a book on good data practices. It's quite a read, but the included Good Data Manifesto sums it up nicely: good data are open, respectful (in the end it's always about people), and are useful and fit the purpose served.
With little over a month left to submit your work for the Data Journalism Awards, now seems the right time to ask what makes a data journalism production award-worthy? The short answer? Good journalism.

Happy Sunday!

Winny

PS. I'll be at NICAR next week. If you're there too, let's meet. If you're not, I promise that my next newsletter will be packed with NICAR goodies.