Data Journalism | JOMEC
version 2025-26
This is the material and weekly structure for the Data Journalism module taught at Cardiff University's School of Journalism for the MSc in Computational & Data Journalism. It runs for 11 weeks with a four-hour class and a three-hour workshop every week. There are also separate workshops on UK media law, as part of the module. This repository is updated each year and shows the material for the module as last taught. Questions and observations welcome at odonnella4@cardiff.ac.uk or @aodhanlutetiae.
Description
Data journalism at its broadest sees any information in a digitised form as a potential journalistic resource, especially numerical information. Digging for this information with computerised tools and supplementing it with traditional journalistic methods is the task of the data journalist. Stories are generated when imagination and curiosity are combined with numerical and technical skills; this module sees students apply technology to journalistic questions and begin to produce a portfolio of work.
Course outline
Week 1 — Stories in spreadsheets & sourcing news
Week 2 — Stories in spreadsheets & writing news 1
Week 3 — Getting data & FOI
Week 4 — Using numbers & journalism codes
Week 5 — Visualising 1 & subediting
Week 6 — Mapping & writing news 2
Week 7 — Pandas & interviewing
Week 8 — Data law & visualisation 2
Week 9 — Scraping
Week 10 — APIs & press conferences
Week 11 — NLP & feature writing
Course resources
Licence