The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for its free online data journalism course Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools.

This five-module introductory course gives participants the essential concepts, techniques and skills to effectively work with data and produce compelling stories under tight deadlines. It is open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection who wants to tell stories with data.

This EJC initiative is supported by Google, the Dutch Ministry of Education and the African Media Initiative, and features a stellar line-up of instructors and advisors from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the New York Times, ProPublica, Wired, Twitter, La Nacion Argentina, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Zeit Online, and others.

Josh Hatch, Senior Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and member of the Advisory Board for this course, says:

“Thanks to the European Journalism Centre’s work to foster data journalism’s move into the mainstream, reporters and editors can gain insights from the best in the business. Whether you want to get over your fear of Excel, learn the language of your data geeks, or discover how to tell stories with data visualisations, this course will help journalists and newsrooms learn how to take advantage of these invaluable skills. This is a very good thing.”

The course is planned to start early 2014 and the instruction language will be English. More details about the course and how to register are available at: www.datadrivenjournalism.net/course.

Can’t wait to get started? Refresh your skills by reading the European Journalism Centre and Open Knowledge Foundation’s earlier project, the Data Journalism Handbook before the course starts or stay in touch with happenings in the Data Journalism World via the Data Journalism Mailing List.

This post is cross-posted from Moran Barkai’s post on DataDrivenJournalism.net.

The Data Journalism Handbook has reached a new milestone today with the publication of its third translation, into French, entitled Guide du datajournalisme.

The handbook is a free, collaborative book that aims to help journalists use data to improve journalism. It provides inspiring examples from news organisations across the world and a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers and data analysts. The book is the product of a collaboration between the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation and was published in its original English version about a year ago.

Translated by the French publisher Eyrolles and edited by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, CEO and co-founder of Journalism++, and Editorial Board member of this website, the French edition is augmented with recent examples from French and Belgian publications such as Le Monde, Rue89 and France Soir.

Cover of Guide du datajournalisme, based on graphics by Kate Hudson.

For Kayser-Bril, the need to publish a French edition of the book stems from the particular position of the French press. “France has some of the most pure-players in the news market. French journalists have done many innovating investigations in the past few years. Despite these very positive developments, the feeling still looms that francophone journalism is coming late to the technology party. The French version of the handbook, adding examples from France and Belgium to the original book, gives the French-speaking data journalism community a uniting reference point. The online adaptation, open-sourced on GitHub, will be improved and updated by the community itself to prepare the next versions of the handbook”, said Kayser-Bril.

The French translation of the graphic by Lulu Pinney, showing what is in the book.

Jean Abbiateci, a French freelance journalist and one of the winners of this year’s edition of the Data Journalism Awards, is one of the new authors added to the list of over 70 contributors to the book. In the case study entitled “Une pige de ‘scraping olimpique'”, Abbiateci recounts his work on obtaining and cleaning data for an application for the national public radio, France Info, dedicated to the London 2012 summer Olympics.

Hardcopies of the French edition of the handbook can be purchased from the website of Eyrolles. The book is freely available online on Journalism++ and the /source can be found on GitHub.

A Russian and a Spanish translation of the handbook have already been published and three other translations, into Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, are in progress and will be published later this year.