Data Skills for Media Professionals

KEN BLAKE, PHD, is Associate Professor of Journalism and Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee State University. He researches public opinion and teaches undergraduate courses in writing and reporting, as well as a graduate course in empirical media theory.JASON REINEKE, PHD, is Associate Professor of Journalism and Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee State University. He teaches an undergraduate course in free expression, as well as a graduate course in quantitative research methods, and has published in some of the field's top academic journals.

• Preface ix1 Basic Data Analysis 1Some Example Data 1An Introductory Tool: Google Sheets 3Getting the Data into a Google Sheet 4Getting a Fixed Copy of the Data 9Formatting the Data 11Cleaning the Data 12Planning your Analysis 13Filtering 14Calculating 17Labeling and Tidying Up 21Sorting 22Where’s the “Save” Button? 24Writing About the Analysis Results 24Recap 26References 262 Data Visualization 27Preparing Your Data 28Making a Column Chart 29Publishing the Chart to the Web 33Choosing the Right Type of Chart 35Recap 41References 413 Making Online Maps 43Downloading a Shapefile 44Importing the Shapefile into QGIS 45Examining the Shapefile and Joining it with the Unemployment Data 47Customizing and Publishing the Map File with Google My Maps 54Mapping Specific Points with Latitude and Longitude Coordinates 64Mapping Specific Points with Addresses 73Making a Map When You Have no Geolocation Data to Import 77Recap 83References 844 Microsoft Excel and PivotTables 85Introducing PivotTables 85Getting Started: Aggregating Contributions by City 89Using the PivotTable Tool’s “Filters” Box 92Using the PivotTable Tool’s “Columns” Box 94Investigating Relatedness 96Spotting the Absence of a Relationship 105Downloading Campaign Finance Data from the Federal Election Commission 107Excel vs. Google Sheets 111Recap 112References 1135 Matching Records with Excel’s VLOOKUP 115Overview 118Aggregating each Candidate’s Donations by Source 119Using VLOOKUP 122Using Filters to Create a Classification Column 127VLOOKUP Pitfalls 129Recap 131References 1316 Google Sheets and Inferential Statistics 133Sampling and Assumptions of Inferential Statistics 134Getting the Data and Installing the XLMiner Google Sheets Add‐on 136Computing and Understanding Basic Inferential Statistics 138Descriptive Statistics and Confidence Intervals 140The One‐sample T‐test 143The One‐sample Chi‐square Test 148Knowing which Test to Use 152Computing and Understanding Basic Bivariate Statistics 154Two‐sample T‐tests 154Chi‐square Analysis of a PivotTable 158Correlation Between Two Continuous Variables: Regression 164Recap 169References 1707 Other Functions, Tools and Techniques 171DATE, NOW, and DATEDIF 171AVERAGE, STDEV, MEDIAN, MIN, MAX 173RAND 175LEFT, MID, and RIGHT 175The “Text to Columns” Wizard 177CONCATENATE 179IF and IFS 180IFERROR 182COMBIN and PERMUT 183Google Forms 184Comparing Numbers Over Time 187Adjusting for Inflation 187Adjusting for Population Changes 188Recap 190References 190Index 191

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