Data, data, everywhere, and quite a lot to drink in.
The Global Editors Network, has launched the Data Journalism Den, a new online community focused on spotlighting good data-driven journalism and datasets and connecting data journalists for news stories, advice, and even jobs. The Den is open in beta now, and its community is free to join.
Building on its active Slack community of data journalists, where it hosts monthly speaker series for anyone in the Slack, the Den is trying to facilitate more active collaborations and more frequent discussions between journalists. Its “Matchmaking” section will allow Den members to request feedback on projects, submit calls for partners, or even ask for funding.
“When people think of collaborative journalism these days, they think of these big projects like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, where you have hundreds of journalists working together across different countries. That’s a big project to manage,” Teemu Henriksson of GEN, who was brought on to oversee the project, told me when we spoke ahead of the launch. “We’d like to be able to facilitate many smaller collaborations. Data journalists can go on our site for a project they’d like to create, but maybe don’t have the resources available for. They can specify what kind of needs they have, from manpower to skills to assistance to funding.”
The Hub will also offer a regular email newsletter that will pull together examples of good data journalism being done around the world, as well as surface new tools, data-related services, and insightful discussions around data reporting happening elsewhere online.
There are plans for a “data store,” modeled in part on ProPublica’s data shop, where it sells valuable datasets. A lot of work often goes into putting together and cleaning a dataset, which may combine several different sources, and the dataset could still be useful to a wider community of data journalists after the original set of news stories based off the data have been published.
A jobs section is also forthcoming.
The project is supported in part by Google’s Digital News Initiative. You can join and read more about the Den here.
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