Scraping saves journalists working with data a lot of time, and young reporters with this skill can be at an advantage when looking for newsroom jobs or new projects.
In this post on the Online Journalism blog, Daniel Wainwright of BBC England’s Data Unit goes through the process he used to scrape the data behind his story on noise complaints around Heathrow Airport.
“To anyone new to data journalism, a scraper is as close to magic as you get with a spreadsheet and no wand,” he wrote.
Wainwright’s post is prompted from a talk he gave at Data Journalism UK in November, and his how-to covers his workflow in Google Sheets.
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