All Data Journalism Graduates in a Map

This week I got my certificate of completion from the course "Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools"(if you like to know more about data journalism check out my post "3 Great Examples of Data Journalism Stories"). I enjoyed the course a lot, and I am proud of being one of the 1250 people who successfully completed the course. I was a bit surprised we were only 1250 graduates!

3 Great Examples of Data Journalism Stories

Over the last month I've been spending part of my free time learning about an emerging discipline in the areas of data analytics: Data Journalism. I am doing it, firstly because I find the combination "data analysis + journalism" very fascinating, but also because, as a Web Analyst I believe that there are some very important skills I can absorb from Data Journalists (here is a post where I talk about Web Analyst skills).

The aim of this post is to introduce you to this emerging discipline, and show you a couple of practical examples of data journalism. To do so, I've selected 3 published data journalism stories and analysed each of them by answering four key questions:

1. What does the story do?
2. How was it created (methodology)? 
3. How was it illustrated?
4. What technologies were used to create and present the story to readers?   

Free Analytics Education? My Personal Development Plan for 2014

It seems that 2014 will be a great year for analytics professionals. It's not me saying that, but several authoritative sources in the world business. To mention a few of them:

• according to research company Gartner, over the next two years, by 2015, there will be 4.4 million big data jobs available; and just a third of them will be successfully filled.
• data scientist is gonna be the sexiest job of the century, according to Harvard Business Review. Earlier in 2009,  H. Varian (chief economist @Google) said pretty much the same during an interview talking about statisticians.  
• Forbes states that 2014 is gonna be the year of Digital Marketing Analytics and companies need to get prepared for that (if they want to win more shares of the market).
• while many other sources emphasize the importance of relevant education to fill the talent gap in analytics.

For us, digital analysts, I guess this is all great news. But the other EVEN NICER NEWS - and that's the topic of this post - is that lot of this analytics education is freely available through the internet. Ever heard about MOOCs? I have taken a couple of those courses, and beside the zero cost required to enroll, the QUALITY was the thing impressed me the most. A couple of my previous posts actually came from some fantastic assignments I was given as part of the courses.

Going back to 2014, I'd like to suggest 3 courses starting right this month. I have enrolled to all of them, they look very promising and hopefully will be able to complete them all.

1) Google Analytics Platform Principles
2) Making Sense of Data
3) Doing Journalism with Data