The age of technology has made finding information extremely simple. This makes the life of being a journalist much easier if we need statistics or facts to make our stories more efficient.
A very useful site to find statistics on crime, education, health, housing, and more is statemaster.com. The site, which gets its information from sources such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the National Center for Educational Statistics, makes it extremely easy to find different data on U.S. states and can get as detailed as you want. If there is a need to find the per capita of Austrian refugees in California, statemaster can provide that information.
Another great site to use for local information and statistics is thisweknow.org. Let’s say that you are writing an article and need to know a community’s demographic and unemployment rate to go along with the percentage of homeowners and renters. Type in the city and state, let’s say Racine, WI, and a list of local statistics will pop up. You can even click on specific stats for more detailed and underlying data.
Want to compare detailed data from all fifty states? Datamasher.org gives anyone the opportunity to create “mashups” to compare one set of data to another. You get to choose which categories to mashup, which can help a journalist find the more detailed statistics that they may be looking for to help solidify a point they are trying to make in an article. There are so many different combinations that can be done, so finding the state data necessary for your work should be a breeze compared to five or ten years ago.
Journalism has evolved in recent history with tools like these. No longer do we have to search through books or make numerous phone calls to obtain the information we seek. The Internet has opened up so much in the sense of backing words in an article, especially in the political and community areas of journalism.
Statistical journalists will use these tools as often as possible, just look at Yahoo! News. Their political and national writers are laying down tons of detailed statistics to help their arguments. It’s a great strategy to use if you really want to get a point across. These tools are revolutionizing the journalism world. Thus, the technological age has fully grasped journalists and how we go about writing each new story.
statemaster.com, thisweknow.org, Datamasher.org, Yahoo! News
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