14 data tools to help you be a better journalist

University News Last updated 14 November 2014

'Data' may not be the sexiest word in the English language, but it's steadily becoming one of the most useful for modern journalists.

'Data journalism' is increasingly the source of many news stories, with a wealth of free web tools allowing non-technically minded journalists to source, investigate and create new stories and visualisations using public data, leaked documents and social media.

Recently our Online Journalism MA students attended the BBC Data Day, so we thought we'd share a quick run-down of all the tools that were recommended by speakers such as Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Stoneman and our own Paul Bradshaw during the day.

Google Fusion Tables

A great introduction to data mapping, Fusion turns your spreadsheet full of postcodes into an interactive Google Map. For instance, here's a map based on Birmingham's food hygiene ratings.
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Gephi

Not the easiest tool to work with for the lay user, but can allows you to delve into and visualise complex networks of data.
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NetViz

A data visualiser with a built-in Facebook app, to search and mine data from the social network.
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Open Corporates

"The largest open database of companies in the world" according to their website, is potentially an excellent source of data for spotting patterns to investigate. Has an open API too.
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Kimono

A Google Chrome plugin that turns websites into APIs, that developers can build apps with.

import-io

A web scraper that allows you to 'scrape' a website or webpage with a list, to collect data or build your own custom API without coding knowledge. 

Tabula

Extracting tables from PDFs can be a pain. Tabula allows you to do just that.
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DocumentCloud

Another free tool that can helps you scrape PDFs into data that you can use (i.e. view in a spreadsheet). Once imported, it can also scan for names, dates, etc.
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muse

Uncovered a large archive of leaked emails? This tool allows you to scan an email archive for words, patterns and even sentiment.
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OpenRefine

Found some public data in 'XML' or 'JSON' format, such as police crime data or food hygiene ratings? Use OpenRefine Turn it into a workable spreadsheet, which can then be mapped, visualised or investigated.
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Detective.io

Allows you to collate data-driven investigations. One set of journalists used it to create a story and database on migrants who have died at sea on their way to Europe.

StreamTools

Developed by the New York Times, it's "a general purpose, graphical tool for dealing with streams of data."
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IFTTT

'If This Then That' (IFTTT) lets you to automate tasks across dozens of web applications. For instance, social media managers can use it to push every Instagram pic with a given hashtag to a Tumblr, or push tweets that match a search query into a Google spreadsheet.
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LiveSheets

Defining itself as 'numerical Lego', LiveSheets helps you automate the boring, data cleaning tasks often given to interns.