Data-Driven Journalism

When I grow up (which is in less than three months now), I want to work for a humanitarian, non-profit organization. Basically I want to do what I did this summer. I want to talk to people who have been affected by natural disasters, economical disasters and disasters in general. I want to hear their stories, and I want to tell them. I want to bring about change in every small way I can. I want to travel the world, and I don't want to do anything that involves a newspaper. So that makes this assignment difficult for me. Generally, I couldn't find any fielded data for any humanitarian organizations; as they are not typical news organizations, this fact shouldn't be surprising. So I've changed it a bit ... I just picked my favorite source for news (CNN) and checked out their fielded data. I have no desire to work for them; my resume won't get sent there unless I haven't found anything in the non-profit world by December. But for this assignment, I wasn't sure what else to do ...

I chose the sports section of CNN; specifically I looked at the scoreboard for ACC football. It's pretty inclusive of everything one would want to know. I can find out who played who for every single week, I can find out the scores and I can find stats on the players and the teams. From a journalistic perspective, I honestly don't think they're missing anything. I used to work on the sports desk for a local paper, and while their standards weren't very high, I could definitely have written an informative article based on the information provided. I also would have called coaches and maybe players for quotes, but you can't include that in a database anyway. So I'll just move on to the next part ...

The data isn't presented in a spreadsheet, so you can't just look at the rows or columns and say, "Oh, here are the entities." I think it would be unreasonable to expect it to be in spreadsheet form; that's not aesthetically pleasing. However, it's still fairly easy to tell what the entities are; they are as follows: the teams playing, when they play(ed) and final score. For games that have yet to be played, they are scored/game and allowed/game.

The properties in this data base are as follows (I'm not listing all of them because this blog would be forever long and I would miss class):
Teams Playing: Wake, Miami, Florida State, Boston College, etc.
When they play(ed): August 23, 2010 - November 28, 2010
Final Score: 53-13, 45-0, 59-6, etc.
Ranking: 13, 20, 16, not ranked, etc.

Honestly this "fielded data" was hard to use to answer all of these questions, so it may not be as good as I had originally thought. If it had been set up in some sort of table, that might have been easier.