Nick Tomalin famously said all that was required for success in journalism was “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability”. But it turns out a good pair of shoes and a sensible coat help too! I’m doing inductions this week — welcoming students onto our journalism courses. As you’d expect the sessions are a weird mix of the administrative and the exciting — “Welcome to a profession that can change the world! Have you registered with the uni GP?

Testing a hunch about how often The Guardian links to the ONS was a chance to explore good data journalism practice, revisit some Python and play with the excellent Guardian API. But what did I find out? — When introducing data (and data-driven journalism) to students I always include The Office of National Statistics (ONS) as a go-to source. It's a really accessible gateway to the ‘low hanging fruit’ of government data sources as well as their own data gathering and analysis.

Google sheets is a great starting point for exploring many of the basic processes of data journalism. — In this tutorial, I want to work through an end-to-end process of scraping data from a page, organising it and cleaning it up so we have some structured data to analyse. We’ll use a couple of formulas and some standard spreadsheet tools that make up the backbone for grabbing content…

Using zoom as a ‘kind of’ vision mixer so you can use multiple device demos. — Earlier this week, I had an interesting exchange with BBC mojo guru and trainer Mark Blank Settle about sharing different devices on Zoom. He was training and wanted delegates to be able to see app on Android and iOS phones (ahh, the joy of mixed tech economies). The solution…

A few weeks ago we held an industry event where students got to chat with working journalists and news editors. The inevitable question at these events is ‘what advice would you give students coming into your newsroom’. The answer? Come with ideas. — But the ability to turn that into a good story is as much about experience as it is any ‘innate’ news sense. Journalists grow to understand their audience and, equally as important, the tone and range of the organisation they work for. They learn what works and doesn’t work.

Could an intervals app help keep your podcast or video on track? — This week I’ve been talking to students about planning and timing for a broadcast assignment. They have to work in a team to produce a studio-based news programme. That means scripts, running orders and shouty directors. …

This week I’ve been talking to my MA students about using images. One of the things I wanted to touch on was the way that Google Street view has become a common sight on many local news sites. — The premise is pretty straightforward. If you’ve got a story with a strong ‘where’ element — an accident or crime report — simply dial in the location on Google Maps, switch to Streetview and take a screengrab. Instant location image!

I’m currently terrorising my MA students with some code. I decided to look at a bit of Python, as one of the common languages that pops up in data journalism circles. There’s a couple of things I wanted to try and reflect in the process Avoid where possible, the debates…

This week, I got a bit of time to play around with two new (to me) data journalism tools that have been on my radar. — The first was an out-of-the-box data journalism application called Workbench. The project is the brainchild of computational journalist Jonathan Stray and is backed by Columbia Journalism School. So what does it do? Well, according to the developers, it’s a data journalism platform with built-in training: