The brilliant Jenny Price of On Wisconsin is here today to talk feature writing. Here is a terrific piece of hers that covers the cost of college.

J335 welcomes Laurel White, WPR State Capitol reporter. Laurel is a terrific, creative storyteller who will talk with us about natural sound, audio and multimedia reporting.

Here are the tools Megan Duncan was talking about today in J335 – enjoy!

Data visualization tools I talked about today:

No experience necessary

• Google Sheets. Use the chart function right on the sheet to make very easy charts that are semi-customizable. You can save the image as a .png.
• Google Fusion Tables. Put your data and your charts in one place. Also, there’s a work around for websites that don’t allow you to embed JavaScript but do allow Google Gagets (i.e. WordPress) tutorials here: https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/184641?hl=en&ref_topic=1652595
• https://flourish.studio/. New. Still working out bugs. But, pretty and very easy. Images are downloadable.

Need to learn programming language

• https://jsfiddle.net/
  • JSFiddle (meaning JavaScript) is a language you could learn in a weekend well enough to make a visualization. However, you won’t be able to put JavaScript onto a J-school or WordPress website. You need to own your own server space.
• https://shiny.rstudio.com/
  • Shiny creates an interactive app and posts it to the web for you. You don’t need your own server space. However, you do need to know R. This language has a much steeper learning curve than JavaScript.

Other fun visualization tools

• https://go.localfocus.nl/#/
  • In Dutch, but you’ll figure it out. Specifically, awesome for maps. Allows audience interaction.
• https://www.charted.co/
  • No-code necessary JavaScript visualizations. But, you can’t save images, only embed them.

Today we welcome CapTimes reporter Jessie Opoien. Jessie is a terrific political reporter who wrote the two stories we read for last Thursday’s class. She tweets @jessieopie.

Welcome to J335! We are going to do a great deal of reporting this semester. Take some time to look around the website, read the syllabus and look at the course schedule. We’ll begin by talking about what news is and by thinking about what your goals are for the semester.

Here are some ASF tools that you might want to familiarize yourself with as we get going this smester.