A bunch of tools from the new book

An introductory text on data journalism, ethical storytelling and new tools

Hello, reporters. First, I wrote a book!

Samantha Sunne @SamanthaSunne

Data+Journalism, my introductory textbook with @journtoolbox, is available for preorder! Copies will ship in December/January

routledge.comData + Journalism: A Story-Driven Approach to Learning Data ReportingTaking a hands-on and holistic approach to data, Data + Journalism provides a complete guide to reporting data-driven stories. This book offers insights into data journalism from a global perspective, including datasets and interviews with data journalists from countries around the world. Emphasize…

Well, co-wrote it with Mike Reilley of Journalist’s Toolbox fame (whose newsletter you should subscribe to!). It’s full of great reporting tools, as well as the latest tips and tricks on using technology for reporting.

I’ve been keeping it secret for the last year or so, so I wanted to share all the TFRs that were inspired by the making of this book:

• WHOIS History Search - Find out who owned a website back in the day

• RTI Rating - A global (!) directory of FOI laws around the world. They also include “rankings” but I would ignore those

• DB Fiddle - Run SQL queries (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are) in a simple website

• Google Colab - Google Docs for writing code!! No need to install languages or libraries. A blessing

• ExportComments.com - I usually don’t recommend one-off websites, but scraping comments from social media is notoriously hard

• InoReader - Create a dashboard of tweets, Reddit posts, Google search results, and more

Next week we’ll get back to our usual one tool, but these have really been stacking up. If you missed any of these issues, I would recommend checking it out. Until next time!

Did you miss the last TFR? Transcribe audio files, and analyze the transcripts, with the newish Google Pinpoint