Say hello to the new Data Journalism Handbook

In 2018, we will publish a handbook updated for the newsrooms and practices of today. It will be available in four languages as a free open-source download online and edited, like the original, by experts in the field Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru.

To get notified about the call for collaboration and other updates, sign up here.

Back to the future (of data…)

The original Data Journalism Handbook was originally designed as a way to document the best practices of data journalism and teach how different teams did it. It is a key document in the history of data journalism, as important in its way as Philip Meyer’s 1970 classic Precision Journalism, which arguably invented the modern field.

The book was born at a 48 hour workshop at MozFest 2011 in London. It subsequently spilled over into an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners — including from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, La Nación, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Washington Post, the Texas Tribune, Zeit Online and many others.

The Data Journalism Handbook has been digitally downloaded 150,000 times in the past three years and almost a million people have accessed the online version in the same period of time.

On July 31st 2017, we will be opening a call for collaboration to solicit contributions. In 2018, authors and experts will join a Handbook Hack to create and edit content for the new edition. And you won’t have to wait long to start reading the new chapters: we will make them available online as they are completed.

This is just one of a series of initiatives by the data team at the Google News Lab to support data journalism — you can find out more here. We are also partnering with them on our mission to connect journalists with new ideas through initiatives like the News Impact Summits and the News Impact Academy.

To find out more about what the European Journalism Centre is working on this year, check out our 2017 strategy.