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02/16/2018

How to leverage Google tools for visual reporting

Mike ReilleyPhoto: Mike Reilley

By Lauren Fisher, Ohio University

With an unprecedented amount of data and information available online and at reporters’ fingertips, the potential for great storytelling these days is endless. The question is: how do reporters use that data to effectively convey their ideas?

Google News Lab trainer Mike Reilley hosted an interactive training panel focused on helping journalists maximize the potential of Google’s online tools.

Reilley, who travels to newsrooms and college campuses to educate reporters on news gathering using Google tools, meets with Google’s team twice a year to provide feedback on their products.

“They’re brilliant coders,” Reilley said. “They’re smart people. But they’re not storytellers.”

For quickly pulling large amounts of data from web pages into spreadsheets, Reilley recommended the free “scraper” extension for Google Chrome.

The scraper tool, Reilley said, is especially useful for pulling data from websites that store their numbers within “big, ugly grids of information.”

“Government agencies will do this on purpose,” Reilley said. “They know it’s hard for people to extract data from it.”

As panel attendees scraped lines of data from an online table, there was an audible gasp from the crowd.

“You just scraped 550 lines of a government database in about 3 seconds.” Reilley said.

Reilley also recommends scraping data into Google Sheets, rather than Excel, which has a “fifty-fifty chance” of error.

For scraping data from PDFs, Reilley recommends the downloadable “tabula” tool — a free alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro.

“It’s kind of a Ferrari of PDF scraper tools,” Reilley said. “I hate PDFs with the power of 1,000 suns. They’re the most useless document I’ve ever seen”

Google My Maps, which functions as a custom map generator, is a powerhouse for plotting data and locations in a visually appealing and interactive way.

Reporters often make the mistake of dismissing maps as toys — these toys, however, can save lives during natural disasters and other dangerous situations, Reilley said. And even on an everyday basis, incorporating interactive maps can drive page views and increase web traffic.

“The more interactives you have on your web, the more time they’re going to spend on that page.” Reilley said.

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