This won’t be about tools, or methods.
The need to not be embarrassed to Google simple things, or to learn a tool fast to do the job (or to learn colour theory – yes. Seriously).
There are loads of other articles on that.
This is just stuff I’ve picked up over time:
- Ask good questions. If you ask BS questions, you’ll get BS answers. Ask good questions of your data; of the topic; of the problem – and you’ll get good answers.
- This is the business of telling a good story. A factual, empirical story, but a story nonetheless. Stories are what cut through the noise of information (and data) overwhelm.
- Absorb the problem. Before I was a data journalist I was a ghostwriter. Before I was a ghostwriter, I was a copywriter. And before all that I studied Physics. The one thing they all have in common? A need to absorb the problem. To read everything you can find on it. To ask several questions. To go on long walks. To bounce ideas off of people. That’s when you get the surprisingly simple insight that no-one else has landed on.
- Visuals are nice – use them.
- But you don’t need to always use visuals to make your point. E.g. in storytelling – a six word story is still a story and a 500,000 word epic tome is also a story. With data journalism, just a key insight is enough. E.g. You are as likely to win the jackpot as you are to be struck as lightning (1 in ~14 million); you are 2,200 times more likely to be in a car accident than in a plane crash.
- You can’t do this alone. Even Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants (and he was very arrogant). The story you tell is as good as the insights you have. The insights you get from your data are as good as the questions you ask. And your questions are as good as your knowledge. You don’t know everything. Ask others for help.
- Procrastinate by writing on LinkedIn 😉 … just joking. But procrastinate by doing what you love. Some who see this will know I consume data stories about world events and share them via social media. Other than on the job, I’ve arguably learned a lot more from doing that, than any course taken, or book read.
- Fix time, flex scope. The good story shipped is far better than the perfect analysis provided. See point 2) you’re in the business of telling a good story, not an MSc paper. Don’t tell factual inaccuracies, but you don’t need to spend all your time finding that one piece of data…
- …Except when its a *killer* insight you’re after. You’ll know it when it happens. (What? You thought there’s such a thing as learnings with no exceptions?)
- On the same topic – there’s always a proxy way to find your answer. Think of John Snow and the Broad Street Pump. He couldn’t measure infectious disease. He couldn’t identify cholera under a microscope (nor would he have known to do so). But he could map out case counts on a map, and identify that Cholera was spreading via water. Infectious disease was found via proxy means. You might not find the dataset you want – but that doesn’t stop you from telling the story.
- Contextualise your findings. See what I did in that previous point? A little reminder of why something is important goes a long way. Also, people’s brains turn off when they read numbers – make a real-life comparison – The height of a person to the height of the Eiffel Tower for example.
- Questions. One more time. On top of asking good ones, don’t be scared to ask stupid questions. Be that person who’ll ask the question they’re embarrassed to ask. Clarify your understanding. Get multiple perspectives. It’s scary. Ignore the people who say that no one judges stupid questions – there are people who still do. But that stupid question can save you A LOT of time later. Believe me. And remember: you’re in the business of telling a good story. You can uncover surprising things from simple questions. And those surprising things can lead to better questions…
It’s all about telling a story. It’s all about answering questions. It’s definitely not simple. It’s definitely not easy.
But it’s so so so so worth doing.