Elections and Data Journalism

Video of Gizmodo's Michael Nunez talking about the story. Here's the original story. 

Here's a Reuter's story about it. 

Here's Zuckerberg's response on Facebook. 



The below 2 images are from Jonathan Stray's piece.


Percentage of online media mentions and percentage primary voters supporting each candidate, Q4 2015. Source.













Media is not all powerful, despite what the close correlation suggests.

The chart above is from FiveThirtyEight. The article explains "our approach at FiveThirtyEight will be quantitative — there will be plenty of numbers at this site. But using numbers is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce good works of journalism."

What are the steps in data journalism? Collection, organization, explanation

Why is explanation so difficult? 

Exercise: 

Find a story that has to do with the election at one of the below sites and analyze it for the following: What combination of the above graph does the story employ? How is data used as an explanation or prediction of something? Are there other ways the data could be explained that would give the story a different frame? 

Please then post a 400-600 word analysis with links to the course blog. 

http://www.nytimes.com/section/upshot

http://www.vox.com/

http://fivethirtyeight.com/