6th Edition

Data for Journalists A Practical Guide for Computer-Assisted Reporting

By Brant Houston Copyright 2026
250 Pages 168 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

250 Pages 168 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

250 Pages 168 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Now in its sixth edition, Data for Journalists is a straightforward and effective guide to using data for news stories. This concise textbook addresses all the key basic skills that data journalists need, including how to find and scrape data, how to build a database, how to visualize data, and how to use spreadsheets and database managers – before launching into coding and... Read more

1. What Data Journalism and Computer-Assisted Reporting Is and Why Journalists Use It

2. Online Resources: Researching and Finding Data on the Internet

3. Getting Data Not on the Web: How to Find and Negotiate for Data

4. Building Your Own Database: How to Develop Exclusive Sources

5. Spreadsheets, Part 1: Basic Math and Data Analysis for Journalists

6. Spreadsheets, Part 2: More Math that Matters

7. The Database Manager, Part 1: Searching and Summarizing

8. Database Managers, Part 2: Matchmaking and Advanced Queries

9. Basic Data Visualization: Charts, Maps, and Social Network Analysis

10. Dirty Data: How to Fact Check Your Data and Clean It

11. How to Report and Write with Data

Appendix A: Unstructured Data: Analyzing Text and Social Media

Appendix B: Coding and Artificial Intelligence

Biography

Brant Houston is a Professor and the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, where he teaches journalism and oversees an online newsroom. An award-winning journalist, he was an investigative reporter at U.S. newspapers for 17 years. For more than a decade, he served as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a now 5,000-member association headquartered at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he also taught investigative and data reporting. Houston has conducted more than 400 seminars for professional journalists and students in 30 countries, and he is a co-founder of networks of nonprofit newsrooms and educators throughout the world.  He is also the author of Changes in Models for Journalism: Reinventing the Newsroom and co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases, and Techniques.