The Data Times (Round 5)
Summary
The Data Times will be a simple, clean tool for community journalists to get up and running with data-driven journalism, discovering data subsets focused to their area and topic, guiding users through the first steps of building a visually-engaging, data-grounded argument. In doing so, it will spotlight local and topical data, equipping community journalists to complete the transparency loop - building the fact-grounded insights on which local democracy depends.
The solution
Transparency is being undermined by the combination of sheer data quantity and a skills deficit in pulling out the best data for analysis. Local news reporters have repeatedly faced this challenge when seeing a wall of data sources, without knowing how or where to start. Many community journalists do not have time or funds to become data experts before launching in. This limits the scope for quality data journalism at a local level. By automating repetitive steps in accessible tools, this project will help journalists to integrate data into their research workflows, incisively and with reduced assistance.