Three reasons to learn data visualization

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Eric Fischer

By Sarah Darby

As journalists and communicators, we all want to tell compelling stories. Although many of us specialize in a specific area of storytelling such as convergence, broadcast, print, photo or strategic communication, at some point, we will all be asked to tell stories using new tools and platforms.

As technology evolves, media professionals must also evolve in order to reach audiences. The concept of Computer Assisted Reporting has been around since the 50s, but use of technology in newsrooms looks a lot different than it did then.

A breakdown of online mapping tools for journalists

By Andrew Gibson and Elise Schmelzer

Creative Commons photo courtesy of zabdiel

Journalism professor David Herzog led a workshop Thursday explaining how to build interactive maps with Google Fusion Tables. During his presentation, he mentioned several online cartography tools journalists might find useful.

We've outlined many of those tools below. They're broken into three categories: beginner, intermediate and advanced.

For each, we've listed pros, cons, examples and whether it's free.

Are we missing anything? Tell us in the comments.