Seventeen reporters and editors from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia participated in the training, led by Lawrence Marzouk and Crina Boros. Marzouk and Boros are authors of the recently-published BIRN Albania guide, ‘Getting Started in Data Journalism’, which aims to introduce journalists to data-driven reporting techniques that are essential fror contemporary investigative journalism.
As an editor for BIRN, Marzouk leads a cross-border team of journalists, sending huge volumes of freedom of information requests, scraping data and using traditional reporting methods to delve into high-level corruption in the Balkans and beyond.
Boros is an intrepid investigative journalist who reports on conflicts of interest, vulnerable groups, problematic policies and the use of public funds.
The three-day training course gave the journalists an intensive introduction to data journalism, which ranged from its definition to the location of credible sources of data, the mining of data, open data, wall gardens and the databases that hold information that is most valuable to investigative reporters.
Boros also held a crash course in Excel sheets and descriptive statistics as a powerful tool for data reporters, with added real-world exercises using trade and airline industry data.
A special session was held by Boros on Pivot Tables and how they can analyse big data sources.