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Common mistakes journalists make when using statistics

Book "How to lie with statistitcs"

Image by Carla Pedret© Statistics are everywhere, and journalists – especially data journalists – should know how to interpret them. Numbers are like any other source, and journalists should have the knowledge to find out when they are misleading. How can journalists improve their use of statistics? What are the most common mistakes? As statisticians are the best ones to answer …

Basic maths for data journalists to find stories in spreadsheets

Image by Tom Brown/Flick

Image by Tom Brown/Flickr Data journalists should know how to use Excel or the free spreadsheet software Google sheets to clean and process data. Some data sets will tell us a story with only some sorting or creating a pivot table while others require some maths. In this post, you will find some examples of basic formulas to analyse data and find stories …