One piece of advice that I didn’t think of but would be very beneficial for me as a data journalist was Sean Mussenden’s advice to index our data fields before sorting them. His idea to rank order the rows, starting from one to how ever many rows you have, is a great and quick way of organizing your data back to its original work. I think this would be helpful when we start diving into data that has a plethora of entries and organization could get a little hectic.
Another piece of advice I really enjoyed, not only as a data journalist but as an editor, was Mussenden’s advice to take a break from analyzing the data. He said to step away from Excel sheets for 10 minutes every hour. I just think that’s a good lifestyle choice to make. I’m foreseeing myself being very busy this semester, and this tip reassures me that it’s ok to take small breaks.
One thing I wondered when reading through these pages was can data be used to explain why something happens? I know it can help prove a point or explain something, but when reading through the Numbers in the Newsroom page, I became more cautious about interpreting data after seeing all the different bases that I could choose from for a story.
Your question, “One thing I wondered when reading through these pages was can data be used to explain why something happens?” I think I get what you are asking. I would have a problem assigning any causal link in a piece of hard-news journalism. I could never write “the stock market rose today because of the strong jobs report.” There are a million factors in the stock market and we cannot know for certain why the stock market rose. It is the product of many different individual transactions. We did write, however, “the stock market rose today AMID a new strong jobs report.” The causal link here is implied. It is an important nuance.