Data journalism

As you've no doubt heard, data journalism is becoming a pretty big deal. For awhile people were saying it's the future of journalism. But that future is here. In our Google training we learned how journalists can use Google Trends to see trending stories or come up with their own data analysis and visualizations. This is a powerful tool and not difficult to use. Please check out the brief video on this Google News Lab page.

When it comes to displaying data you may consider a fusion table layered on a Google Map. This is done by merging two or more Google docs spreadsheets and layering the data over a map. The example we used in training was merging a table listing the five boroughs of New York City with a spreadsheet that reported the number of fire department calls to each borough. But there are other methods and uses for fusion tables, as you can learn from this learning module.