If you’re a UNL CoJMC student looking for courses in the fall, here’s two I’m teaching you should take a look at:
JOUR407: Investigative and Computer-Assisted Reporting: This class is all about data journalism – emphasis on both parts of that phrase. I’ll show you how to incorporate data and data analysis into your stories, regardless of format. You’ll learn techniques that will help you break a dataset down and interview it like a source. We’ll get our hands dirty with data and we’ll turn those into stories. We’ll add some data visualization to the toolbox as well. The not-close-to-complete syllabus is here.
JOUR491: Intro to Storybots: More and more, publishers are using software bots to write stories. They cover baseball games and earthquakes. The dirty secret is that basic bots are not hard to write. It takes basic programming knowledge and basic journalism knowledge. Combine the two and you can write thousands of stories in a matter of seconds. In this class, we’ll learn how to make our own storybots, we’ll ponder the nature what it means to be human and where this is all going in journalism. Want a taste? Read this. I’ve put the very first sketches of the class online here.