Identify two things in these articles below you found interesting or important to your work as a journalist or a researcher:

The first thing I noticed upon reading the two articles, was the importance of paying close attention to detail, and being meticulous in one’s work. By that, I mean that as a journalist, one has the responsibility to ensure that the data they are reporting is accurate. In order to make sure that one’s data being reported is accurate, one must not only double-check their information, but check it many many times. The information being obtained must be “re-ran by scratch” in order to ensure that the information is indeed correctly obtained. The reason why it is important to do this is to protect one’s credibility in reporting. A non-credible reporter is about as useful as an unsharpened pencil. It’s good for one to have confidence in the data that has been obtained, however their must be a reason behind being confident in the data.

Which leads me to my next point of the importance of understanding the data one is working with. It is important for one to always keep all things considered when working with a data set. Things that are important to consider are: the source, outliers, how the information was obtained, why it was obtained, the size of the data set (who/what all the data represents), etc. If a reporter does not understand the information they are working with to begin with, it’s going to be pretty hard for that reporter to make a logical claim or analysis from the information they were given. Of course one can skew information to make it look a certain way if they’re trying to have a particular angle on a story, however this is an obvious violation of ethical values in journalism, and a clear use of deception, which of course is discouraged and hurts credibility.

Additionally, the importance of saving multiple copies of your work in a spreadsheet, and saving separate copies after making a big change to your data is vital. I can contest that this is indeed an important thing to do from experience, and getting so far along in my analysis of work that I made a mistake somewhere down the line and cannot recall when where or how I did it. Certainly, the original and first copy of the spreadsheet should go untampered, so one can go back to the original start where it all began. Which, in part also goes hand in hand with making sure one does not do too much at a time, because it can cause for one to make a careless mistake, that mistake goes unnoticed, and then you wind up in a situation similar to mine, having mistakes in your information and not knowing where you went wrong.

I can end this with my last finding of the importance of asking for help, and not being ashamed to do so. It is of the utmost importance to make sure what you’re doing is correct–if you don’t understand something, ask for help. It’s better to resolve the issue immediately then to allow it to snowball and get worse.