10 NICAR lightning talks to guide you through cats, statistical resampling, fear of math, and more | Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Foundation at Harvard

ABOUT SUBSCRIBE

Business Models

Audience & Social

Aggregation & Discovery

Reporting & Production

10 NICAR lightning talks to guide you through cats, statistical resampling, fear of math, and more

Have you always wanted to read a book a week for a year or make better, faster-loading maps? Look no further.

By Shan Wang @shansquared March 21, 2016, 9:26 a.m.

RELATED ARTICLE

Google is changing up search. What does that mean for news publishers?

This year’s NICAR conference was in sunny Denver, and as promised, the sessions offered a little (or a lot) for everyone, from journalists looking for guidance on a stalled FOIA processes to those in search of advanced Python training to those who need advice on refining their interactives for mobile.

To break up the intensity of the sessions, NICAR also puts on the delightful lightning talks: five-minute presentations from attendees on topics of their choice, voted on by the NICAR community. The ten talks this year ran the gamut, and despite their length, were packed with useful tips and practical tools (cats featured prominently), as well as ideas for broadening how we think about data-driven journalism. Below are the talks from this year.

Gregor Aisch of The New York Times on the future of ‘interactive news’

Jonathan Stray of the Overview project and Columbia on one trick that will solve every statistics problem

Christopher Groskopf of Quartz on using lookup to save journalists from repetitive work such as mapping postal codes to state names

Ariana Giorgi of the Chronicle of Higher Education with a quick-hits guide for newsrooms considering integrating automation

Ken Schwencke of The Thrust on using vector tiles for your maps

Dan Nguyen of Stanford on regular expressions and exploring data

Nicole Zhu of Northwestern University’s Knight Lab on how to push yourself to read 52 books in 52 weeks

Adam Playford of the Tampa Bay Times on what his team learned from its Failure Factories investigation

Jennifer LaFleur of the Center for Investigative Reporting on using cats to explain statistical concepts

Ryann Grochowski Jones of ProPublica on how to overcome your fear of math

Photo of lightning striking downtown Denver via Brian Panpantino used under a Creative Commons license.

POSTED March 21, 2016, 9:26 a.m.

SEE MORE ON Reporting & Production

Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.

Google is changing up search. What does that mean for news publishers?

A shift to AI-generated search results will decrease the traffic that Google sends to publishers’ sites, as more people get what they need straight from the Google search page instead.

The Athletic’s live audio rooms bring sports talk radio into this century

The Athletic’s first live room took place in September 2021. By January 2022, they’d done 100. Today, they’re closing in on 1,000.

In Spain, a new data-powered news outlet aims to increase accountability reporting

Demócrata.es, launched in March, publishes data-driven reporting and plans to expand.