Data Journalism Bootcamp for Binus International students

Communications program, Binus University International, successfully hosted Data Journalism Bootcamp 2022, the first ever bootcamp for university students to learn and practice data journalism skills.

The bootcamp served as the main agenda for Comm Space 2022, the student-centered annual event organized by the program.

Using the theme “accelerating your career in data journalism”, the bootcamp invited professionals to be the speakers and mentors who exposed students to the world of Data Journalism as well as gave hands-on training in doing a data journalism work.

This event took place for 4 days from 5 to 6 and 8 to 9 December with the following speakers with their respective topics:

On the first day, students were introduced to data journalism by Mr. Aria who talked about the reason data is used in journalism nowadays. He mentioned that data in journalism is important because “the information that we are trying to deliver can be more than what is seen with data displayed.” Mr. Aria also mentioned that data journalism can be a “new way of storytelling” for complex information to help readers understand easily.

The second session on the first day was about Data Gathering and Data Cleaning by Mr. Alfons. Students were taught how to do basic data gathering and data cleaning. He gave tips on how to do specific data searching on google by using keywords and advanced settings to get the data needed based on our needs. Students also tried to search for data based on the topic. This helps the students to able to conduct social research using a communication perspective.

On day two of Comm Space 2022, Mr. Yearry was invited to explain and demonstrate data analytics by using Google Spreadsheet. Students were shown how to organize data on spreadsheets. In short, he explained that the most important thing is to come up with the problem and find the solution and relevant data. Organizing the data is also important in order to come up with a good infographic that can be used in journalism.

On 7^th December 2022, Mr. Lugas was invited to talk about data visualization by using Flourish. It is a website to visualize data by using different infographic elements, such as bar graphs, pie charts, timelines and many more. In this session, Mr. Lugas gave a demonstration on how to make bar graphs on Flourish by importing the data that has been previously collected and organized. By using infographic elements, journalism articles can be easily understood.

On the last day of Comm Space 2022, Ms. Aghnia introduced the students to Satellite Imagery and how to make them with Flourish. Ms. Aghnia mentioned that satellite imagery in journalism articles can be used to display changes that happened over time to a certain area or even to display winning areas during an election period. Even though the process was complicated, students were amazed with the result of the imagery.

Lastly, Mr. Adi talked about the Developing Data Journalism Project and Idea Brainstorming. In this session, he mentioned that visual graphics cannot be interpreted if the data shown were unrelated to the main topic which is the reason to always stick to the main idea during research. The students were invited to do research based on a topic of their liking and do research and brainstorm based on the main ideas related to it.

The bootcamp was held onsite and online with approximately 20 students attending the event. As a form of appreciation, the speakers received gifts from the Communication department of BINUS International. With this event, students have gained more knowledge on data journalism and visualization as a whole.

Contributitor: Helsa Cang (B2026)

Editor: Lily El Ferawati