Assignments and Due Dates - mrsingleton/jour75008 GitHub Wiki

Assignment 1: Community Profile

Students will work alone or in pairs to research and obtain relevant data about a specific community (based in street reporting, community listening, publicly available data, and proprietary data if you have access to it). You must identify at least ten newsworthy data points or characteristics to analyze (is income relevant? educational attainment? is this community anchored in a single location or geographically dispersed?) and points of comparison (neighboring communities, for instance, in the case of a geographically-based community), and find data to quantify those characteristics. You will also validate your findings with experts in the field by doing traditional reporting.

Your final product will be a profile that describes the community from the data and numbers, putting it all in context (what does it mean, show, expose, highlight, prove?).

Assignment 2: Data Driven Story about your Community

How many hospitals have closed in New York State in the last two years? Where were they and who was impacted? Do low-income New Yorkers have better access to fresh produce than they did ten years ago? Which residents can they walk to green markets? Where are the most dangerous intersections in New York City? How many of them are near schools? These are all examples of questions we can answer with data that is already accessible to the public.

For the data driven story, students will work alone or in pairs to identify newsworthy data, pitch and report a story of no more than 1000 words that includes at least two visualizations of that data. The story should have news value and the reporters should demonstrate a clear understanding of the data and its limitations. Students should speak with as many experts as necessary to write responsibly about these numbers.