Objectives and Outcomes

Objectives

Your overall goal in this course is to learn the purposes and possibilities of producing content that is considered interactive. You are expected to take a proactive approach to this goal so that you gain valuable skills and become familiar with data-driven reporting, digital storytelling, and web-based journalism.

Outcomes

Throughout this course you will build functioning interactive tools related to a story and subject area that you choose to cover. By doing so, you will gain tech savviness and also work toward completing your interactive reporting package.

• Learn key techniques for producing data journalism.
• Build news stories with graphics, maps, and multimedia.
• Combine investigative methods with basic programming skills.

More Specifics

Students will understand how to:

• Develop intuitive content packages for the web
• Report and produce stories with data and interactivity
• Produce basic maps and charts that offer insight
• Employ math and queries to analyze data effectively
• Use data responsibly and accurately
• Create basic HTML web pages
• Manipulate HTML pages using CSS
• Use an FTP client to publish content online
• Construct a website using WordPress
• Incorporate external JavaScript libraries to create basic interactions
• Craft specific questions to ensure they get useful technical assistance

Analyze data to expose

• Patterns (predictable measures)
• Trends (upward or downward changes)
• Outliers (freak anomalies)

Three things to know

• What your data says and means?
• What you want to say about your data?
• What data your readers need to know?