Title: Don't Let Your Data Fool You
The job of a data journalist is to turn data into a story by finding some sort of pattern. If you start with a spreadsheet of cancer rates, the story might be "people living near oil refineries had three times the rate of lung cancer." Or it might not be, because you could be mis-interpreting the data in some way. Think of headlines like "crime rates fall," "humans are causing climate change," or "countries with more guns have more deaths by firearms." What exactly are these headlines claiming, and are these stories true?
Data doesn't speak for itself, or the data journalist would not be needed. Instead it must be interpreted. This is the process of selecting and obtaining the relevant data, finding the interesting facts or patterns, putting them in context, and explaining what they mean. But there are many ways this process can go wrong and, sorry to say, professional journalists s