Full program description
Looking to level up your career and modernize your skills?
The Howard Center Data Journalism Training Program, funded by the Scripps Howard Foundation, helps you add new, modern media skills to your toolbox without the commitment of pursuing a full degree. Under the guidance of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s award-winning faculty, get elite training in data acquisition, analysis and visualization — key reporting and storytelling methods for any newsroom — and study how you can ethically integrate artificial intelligence into your workflow.
The fully online four-course program is accessible to students across the globe. Learn how to use data and AI to improve investigative reporting in your communities.
COMING IN OCTOBER 2025
Where Journalists Find Data
- Skeptical understanding of data and its limitations; who created it; why it was created; using data for purposes other than what it was created for; creating data sets
- Where to get data; how to identify it; validation; build your own
- APIs and scraping — data acquisition
- Data cleaning
- AI cleaning
How Journalists Tell Visual Stories With Data
- How journalists think about data viz, storytelling, general audience targeting, handholding
- Visualization and design fundamentals
- Chart types
- Graphics and mapping with Flourish or Datawrapper
- Basic statistics
How Journalists Ask Questions of Data
- How journalists look and think about idea generation for data
- How to generate data story ideas
- dpylr verbs (actions that allow users to solve data manipulation challenges), and the questions each enables us to ask
- Joins (combining rows from datasets) and what it enables
- Grouping and summarizing (counts, sums and averages)
- Exploratory data visualization
- Text analysis
- Exploratory data visualization
- Basic statistics
COMING IN JANUARY 2026
How and Why Journalists Use Computation and AI
- Introducing computational thinking in journalism. What automation and AI can and can't do
- Text analysis
- Rules-based automated writing
- AI writing
- Programmatic pipelines/notification systems
- Automated analysis