Since its launch in April 2011, the Data Journalism Blog has come a long way. Started as a postgraduate project from City University, London, it is now considered as a reference for data journalism news and is read by journalists, designers and other data enthusiasts from over 58 countries.
As the founder and editor of the DJB, I got to meet incredible people in the world of journalism and to participate to compelling projects such as the Data Journalism Handbook. This website has been a great way for me to share my passion for data journalism with others and to set up an independent platform dedicated to the skills needed to work with data in the newsrooms.
Among the great opportunities that the Data Journalism Blog generated for me was the chance to work for Bloomberg News, one of the biggest media organisations in the world, as their new Web Producer for the EMEA zone. My role involves, among other tasks, working on interactive data visualisations for their websites Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com.
I am delighted to be joining their team and my work at Bloomberg will be one of the most exciting. But it will also be very time-consuming and rather impossible for me to keep up with this blog and develop it to its full potential. I’m therefore a bit sad and weirdly emotional to say goodbye to the DJB today.
But instead of letting this platform die out of my lack of attention, I decided to hand it over to the next generation of data journalists! I met with postgraduates in Interactive Journalism at City University in London and agreed to give them control over the future content of this website. Being a City alumni myself, I understand how important it is to have a platform where your work can be appreciated and I hope the DJB will give just that to this group of aspiring data journalists.
From now on, the very talented John Burn Murdoch and Neha-Tamara Patel, who both write for the Guardian on a regular basis, will be in charge of publishing new content on the website and developing the DJB community further with help from their classmates at City.
The Data Journalism Blog is now set for a life of its own and I can only thank again John and Neha as well as their course leader Jonathan Hewett for taking on the challenge. I’d also like to thank the readers for their support and the many journalists, editors, programmers and other data geeks for their help throughout this journey.
John and Neha will tell you a bit more about the future of the DJB in this introductory post…
I hope to meet many of you again in the future, until then, Aurevoir…
Marianne Bouchart
Founder of the Data Journalism Blog
email: marianne_bouchart@mac.om
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