
Want to start a small data journalism team in your newsroom? - danso
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/04/want-to-start-a-small-data-journalism-team-in-your-newsroom-here-are-8-steps/
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danso
I was one of Scott's early hires and he knows what he's talking about.
ProPublica was conceived [1] as a place to do the old-school, indepth
investigative journalism that newspapers did before newspaper revenue started
tanking. I was hired as a web producer and ProPublica's work would still be
going on today with a traditional web presence. But news application
development was not necessarily baked into that mission. Now the developers
work as journalistic peers with the investigative reporters, as well as
developing tech, designing and deploying applications. That wouldn't be the
case if Scott hadn't continued to emphasize that there's more to his group
than just maintaining the website...such advocacy is needed even in a small,
flat-hierarchy, forward-thinking organization.

[1] [https://www.propublica.org/about/press-
release1](https://www.propublica.org/about/press-release1)

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nxzero
Tech innovation isn't completely a rarity in the news biz. For example,
Django, a python web framework, was created by devs at the Lawrence Journal-
World newspaper. While I don't know for sure, I'd be very surprised to learn
that someone up the chain was advocating there efforts at some point in its
dev/adoption at the paper.

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chris_wot
I'd love to see a news source that solely backs up their sources with cited
data, and shows full methodologies for gaining that data.

There would need to be a way of anonymising sources, not sure how you'd get
around that problem.

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nxzero
Very possible I missed it, but a story using data science in my opinion should
be open source and reproducible using something like a data science notebook
script.

This article reads as data scientist should be editors, which in my opinion
makes zero sense. Sure understanding story is important, but editing ledes is
a waste of time.

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danso
Editing is a core component of a lot of professions, including data
scientists:

[http://www.john-foreman.com/blog/the-forgotten-job-of-a-
data...](http://www.john-foreman.com/blog/the-forgotten-job-of-a-data-
scientist-editing)

> _Data science is a young occupation that could stand to take from these
> older pursuits. Whether it’s writing, cooking, or painting, editing is a
> core component of becoming a master of the discipline. Knowing when to hold
> back._

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nxzero
Data scienists working with editors on a story makes more sense. While not
critical to the point, as far as I'm able to tell, John's never done any
journalism.

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chris_wot
Umm... is that some rootkit code being used as the hero image on this
article?!?

Are they illegally hacking, or data mining? :P

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nxzero
Wow, that's really, really, strange...

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chris_wot
Nah, just a mistake :-)

