The Most Important Thing I Learned at a Data Journalism Internship
For those of you who don’t know me, Hi! I’m Catherine, and I’m about to graduate from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. I’ve spent my time here studying health and science journalism, video and data.
When I came to CUNY, one of my main goals was to learn data, interactive and coding skills. I started with next to zero skills in this area, so when the time came to find an internship, I doubted I would land one in data. I thought I was too new to the field, with too thin a portfolio. I applied to some anyway, and to my surprise, I was accepted as a Google Journalism Fellow, at a public media outlet called Inside Energy.
If there’s one thing I learned about learning about data from doing a data internship (yes, I wrote that correctly), it’s this:
Lean into the fear.
One of my main tasks this summer was to create Inside Energy’s data repository — its library of all the datasets reporters have used in stories over the time they’ve been operating (a bit more than a year). Inside Energy does great things with data, like this deep dive into blackout data, or this look at drilling wastewater spills amidst the North Dakota oil boom.
After discussions with my supervisor, we decided to move all the data living on various people’s computers and Google Drive folders to GitHub, a platform for open-sourced data and software, and called the project Data Battery. (Probably the thing I’m proudest of all summer is coming up with that name.)
I learned to use GitHub, as many 2016 students may, during the coding modules in my second semester at CUNY — which I highly recommend. You won’t become a front-end developer overnight, but you’ll come out with tools that will give you more control over how your stories look or how your audience might interact with your work, and it can set you on a path to creating your own cool web stuff.
Af first, GitHub was scary. You’re hearing words like “push” and “commit” and “terminal”, and you thought you knew those words, but it turns out most of your knowledge of the English language is suddenly useless.
Whenever you Google how to do something, the Internet talks to you like you’re in the Matrix. You’re so new to everything that troubleshooting feels impossible and frustration is always lurking beyond the next HTML tag.
What I’ve learned is to lean into that feeling. Maybe even love it.
I had a tenuous grasp of GitHub when I was asked to use it to make a major piece of infrastructure, so I had to learn by doing. The process involved creating a workflow for adding data to the repository, and then going through the process myself, to build the beginnings of the library. That was an interesting challenge as well, because it involved looking at dataset other reporters had used, seeing their end product (usually a graph) and writing a clear explanation of how they’d done their analysis.
I was also asked to train the staff to use the repository and to use GitHub. I had to come up with the clearest way to explain these foreign concepts, and then I wrangled as many guinea pigs as I could find to test out my training materials. When the training finally happened, the staff members I worked with were great sports, but you could see the apprehension in them too. It’s not just students who are nervous about new things. I think that’s why it’s so important to be able to push past that initial fear. I don’t have a ton of newsroom experience, but I’m willing to bet that the person who can say, “Yep, I can figure that out,” might turn out to be a valuable employee.
And so I’m trying to keep loving the fear — trying to build scary things with code that are way beyond my actual skill level. Because I suspect that nowhere else but graduate school will I have so many people around me who have the time and willingness to help me, and to say, “Yep, we can figure that out.”
