“Every data point has a story” — Umar Hassan on data-driven journalism
By: Tom Fair
Tags: Programming, Journalism, Data, Data Journalism, Bcu

We’ve all got a picture in our head of what a journalist is - a correspondent standing outside of Number 10, an interviewer grilling a minister on breakfast TV, or a newsreader in a booth doing the drive-time bulletins.

But as data becomes easier to access, being able to filter, understand, and present it is turning into a key skill for a journalist — one that I’ve barely begun to get my head around. Umar Hassan, a data-driven journalist from Birmingham, breaks it down for me.

Umar Hassan, a data-driven journalist from Birmingham.

What is data journalism?

“In it’s simplest form, it means finding stories with numbers and using a computational thinking approach to bring these stories together.” Umar says that this approach can apply to far more “normal” stories than you might realise. For example, what would our understanding of the Coronavirus outbreak be like without infection rate graphs?

Finding and sorting the numbers is only half the job — you need to be able to present them to your audience in meaningful ways. One of Umar’s favourite data journalism pieces of the last few months, from Tortoise, does this well. “They did an excellent piece a couple of months back about how much wealth the Royal family has, and how much money they make from different ventures. I thought that was a really fascinating piece of data journalism, because it was the visuals were brilliant, but it had a really nice storytelling play to it. So it was teaching us about a subject that that we’re all quite interested in, which is our Royal family, but it broke down the numbers of how much they earn in a very accessible, easy to read way.”

What makes a good data-driven journalist?

On the face of it, you might think that being a maths wizard is the most important part of data journalism — but Umar thinks otherwise. “You need to be able to humanise the data. Yes, the numbers are great, you can easily create great visualisations, but at the end of the day, it’s about people. Every data point has a story to share about humans or businesses.”

After storytelling comes natural curiosity. “You need to be a lifelong learner. You cannot go into this line of journalism, if you’re not willing to learn stuff constantly. If you go into this line of journalism with your pants down, you can easily be found out!”

And finally, there are the technical skills. “I think you just need some basic maths knowledge. So you need to be able to know how to add, subtract, divide and do times tables. And so long as you can learn different tools and programming languages, within time, you should be alright.”

Umar uses Tableau, the Python programming language, and Microsoft Excel for his work. He practices his skills through online community challenges, such as Makeover Monday — they publish data sets for journalists to turn into graphs, charts and graphics to share on Twitter.

How does a data-driven story come together?

I asked Umar how he’s used his skills to make a story — from the initial thought up to publication. “I can remember five years ago when I was doing a story about the Rugby World Cup, looking at the number of Midlands-based players in the Rugby World Cup squads from 1987 to 2011. I worked with Paul Bradshaw who scraped the data for me from ESPN Scrum. And then I sort of cleaned up the data using a pivot table, and put together an infographic to explain how many Birmingham- or Midlands-based rugby players were in England World Cup squads, and apparently one of the Rugby World Cup Winners actually came from Solihull when when they won in 2003. The next World Cup was just around the corner, so I had to turn it around quite quickly!”

Umar with sports presenter Jim Rosenthal

How do you get good at data-driven journalism?

Just like anyone who wants to learn a new skill, it needs some graft. “Practice!” Umar says. “Start a blog. I think if you can spend about half an hour to an hour learning a particular programming language every day, it will help you go places — you’re just you’re just going to instantly soak up the knowledge.”