On My Honor, I Have Neither Given Nor Received Aid on This Assignment s1

Data journalism test (April 2, 2014)

This is a “take-home” test. That means you can do it on your own, outside of class. You can use our online textbooks, our class website and any other resources you’d like. But you must not work with or talk to another student in doing this test. All of the answers must be your work – nobody else’s. At my school, VCU, students must agree to the following pledge: “On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this assignment.”

Type or paste your answers into the Word document. Then email me the document, along with your spreadsheet, by Sunday night (April 7).

Your name and student ID number: ______

Ideas from our textbook readings (25 percent)

1. Define data journalism. What does “data journalism mean”? Be brief; keep your answer short – about 50 words.

2. Read this story and look at the graphics. Is this data journalism, or just a “story with numbers”? Why do you think that?

http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/cell-tower-accidents

Internet searching (25 percent)

3. Tell me two online tools to find sources for your stories (people to interview).

4. Suppose you are searching for an Excel file about earthquakes on a Chinese government website. What would you type into Google?

5. What can a journalist find at prnewswire.com? Why would a journalist want to visit this website?

6. Who owns the website“joinalqaeda.com”?

Basic Excel skills (40 percent)

7. Open the spreadsheet “CN doctors and hospital beds by population (for test).xls”. It looks like this: You must create formula to fill in the yellow cells. In other words, sum up the total population for all regions for 2010; then sum up the number of hospital beds, and then the number of doctors. Then create a formula that shows the number of hospital beds for every 1,000 people, and copy that formula down to all of the other cells in Column E.

Fill in the blank:

Nationally, China has _____ hospital beds for every 1,000 people.

Then, copy this worksheet to a new worksheet. Call the new worksheet “Sorted”. Sort all the regions by their number of hospital beds per 1,000 people. (Don’t sort the “national totals” row; leave that at the bottom.) Which three regions have the most hospital beds per 1,000 people? 1. 2. 3.

Which three regions have the fewest hospital beds per 1,000 people? 1. 2. 3.

Save your spreadsheet. Email it to me with your test.

Your story idea (10 percent)

By now, you and your partner should have an assignment for your first data journalism story. Look at the data. Tell me about the data. a) Where did it come from?

b) What questions can you ask this data? What specific ideas do you hope to find in the data?

c) Who could you talk to in doing your story? Can you find an expert in this area? (It could be a NENU professor, or an expert you locate with Google Scholar or another online tool.)