Story Lab: Making Federal Data a Gold Mine for Your Reporting
Need a state or national statistic? There’s likely a federal data set for that. From fairly intuitive and interactive widgets to dense spreadsheets — and hundreds of data summaries in between — the U.S. Department of Education’s various research programs are a gold mine for reporters on the hunt for facts and figures.
Two dozen reporters took part in the Data at Your Desk two-day workshop co-sponsored by the Education Writers Association and the American Educational Research Association in April 2015. Jill Barshay, a data columnist at The Hechinger Report, and Mikhail Zinshteyn, data journalism program lead at EWA, were on hand for the proceedings to learn about a number of public data sets at the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the Education Department.
