This class will teach those data-driven journalism skills and along the way create impact by supporting local journalism.
This class will have three main components. Students will:
As part of the classes, students will participate as a newsroom. We will discuss a variety of project options, decide together on the main projects and work together to collect and wrangle and analyze data for story.
For the output of the class, students will contribute to a paper, presentation or journalism draft for each component of the course.
For each journalism project, student reporters will work together with the professor and other working journalists to decide on and report out stories through data analysis and reporting. By the end of the quarter, each project team will have either a strong story pitch with related analysis or a draft of a story and story recipe (how-to document) that may be published.
For the data collection portion, each student will submit a one-page paper outlining their individual process in pursuing records. Success is gauged by persistence and effort, not successfully obtaining data or documents.
Finally, the class will work together to draft a paper outlining the challenges, benefits and future possibilities for the Workbench platform.