We all know that data visualization is a great tool to explore and make sense of numbers, and also to communicate those numbers to people. But there is also a long historical tradition in visualization that uses graphs, charts, and maps for persuasion. Think, for instance, of Florence Nightingale, who used data and charts to persuade the English authorities to improve the living conditions of soldiers during war.  The persuasive tradition of visualization today continues thanks in part to the work of journalists and designers who work not for the news sides of their companies, but for their opinion sections.  In this episode Alberto and Simon talked to two of them, Stuart Thompson from The New York Times, and Sergio Peçanha, from The Washington Post. How is their work similar to what traditional graphics departments in news organizations do? And how is it different? The music for this episode is Olympic athletes' weights and heights, from this dataset. The tool we use is TwoTone. Try it out!

In the latest episode of the pod, Alberto and Simon get to grips with COVID19 data and the challenges of reporting on the numbers during a pandemic.  Financial Times senior visual journalist John Burn-Murdoch explains how he hunts for the key data and talks through what he thinks we will see happening next.  The Covid Tracking Project's co-founder Alexis Madrigal talks about how to gather data where there is none — and how misinformation flourishes in a vacuum. The music that opens this episode is the sound of Covid vaccination rates data from the CDC (listen to the full tune here). You can create your own data tunes with Two Tone.

In this episode Alberto and Simon talk to Lam Thuy Vo, a polymath data journalist who works for Buzzfeed and teaches at CUNY. We discussed her data-driven investigative stories, her quantified self projects, and her interest in providing learning resources for data journalists from underrepresented communities.  Next, we talked to visualization designers Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer about their recent book ‘Data Sketches' (and how to avoid working with or for a-holes). Here's a great example of their work for The Guardian. The music that opens this second episode is the sound of Covid vaccination rates data from the CDC (listen to the full tune here). You can create your own data tunes with Two Tone.

In this first episode, we go inside the Sigma Awards - the only global award for data journalism. Joining Alberto and Simon are journalists Gina Chua, Aron Pilhofer, Kuek Ser Kuang Keng and Marianne Bouchart to discuss the state of data journalism today, the point of awards and what's happening next. The music is based on historic data of the US economy, such as GDP and revenue. You can create your own with Two Tone here. Download the full track.

New: welcome to The Data Journalism Podcast, the first podcast devoted to doing journalism with numbers. Hosts Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers  will explore the latest in data journalism. You will meet the world’s top data journalists - and you will find out how they do what they do. Subscribe to see how data is changing the world of journalism forever.