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Data-miner journalists via Nieman
Scott Klein argues that journalists should learn to code to unlock stories hidden in the datasets of online activity waiting to be scraped.
You can be a good journalist without being able to do lots of things. But every skill you don’t have leaves a whole class of stories out of your reach. And data stories are usually the ones that are hiding in plain sight.
Scraping websites, cleaning data, and querying Excel-breaking data sets are enormously useful ways to get great stories. If you don’t know how to write software to help you acquire and analyze data, there will always be a limit to the size of stories you can get by yourself.
He makes reference to this one story on the Wall Street Journal that revealed that chainstore Staples would provide different prices based on the physical location associated to your IP address. The WSJ explain their process, a big task that must have been automated:
The Journal simulated visits to Staples.com from all of the more than 42,000 U.S. ZIP Codes, testing the price of a Swingline stapler 20 times in each. In addition, the Journal tested more than 1,000 different products in 10 selected ZIP Codes, 10 times in each location.
Date liked: 2014/01/01 06:01:45
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