Hello, hacks and hackers! John Wihbey, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, surveyed journalists for his new book The Social Fact: News and Knowledge in a Networked World, where he explores how “the structure of news, information, and knowledge and their flow through society are changing.”

from the wise and talented @wihbey - get his book! Journalists know they need to get better with data and statistics, but they have a long way to go https://t.co/3rK5dsLAzD via @NiemanLab

— maggie mulvihill (@maggiemulvihill) May 4, 2019

In this write-up in NiemanLab, he found that most journalists thought it was “very important” to be able to interpret statistics from sources and research studies. Unfortunately, most also reported that they were not very well equipped to do so.

Happening this week:

• New Orleans is drinking coffee and learning digital tools

Worth a read:

• To illustrate possibilities with R’s ggplot2 data viz package, Etoma Egot created a data viz dashboard using the Titanic dataset that includes characteristics from passengers, like age, sex, class and survival (Towards Data Science)
• Netflix’s TechBlog wrote a post about how they use Python and include links to several of the tools they employ (Netflix TechBlog)
• Andrea Wenzel, a Temple University professor, talked to 58 news consumers around the US to see how they deal with fake news online (NiemanLab)

“He said that while in the past, he had thought 'you had to hang your hat on something,' he now was feeling closer to the rather more destabilizing idea that 'there’s no such thing as truth.'" https://t.co/N1TI6mEnvm

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) May 3, 2019

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