This is part 1 of an occasional series looking at useful tools for journalists. You can find the rest of the series here: The Journalism Toolbox
As the world of journalism changes many journalists are looking to learn new skills; skills better suited to an industry

The past couple of years have seen a fair amount of mud-slinging between the Times Media Group (TMG) and Independent Media but this week it reached a new crescendo.
It began with a piece by Financial Mail’s Ann Crotty in which she asked if Independent

Laura Grant and I have just finished a brand new data and visualisation project on the effect coal has on carbon emissions in Bric countries. The data part was all the work of Laura while I spent a lot of time scratching my head of D3.js code (I’m still no expert but I learned a lot).

As part of another, bigger, project I was playing around with some ideas in d3.js and created this simple comparison between the provincial pass rates for Matric 2015 and the national pass average. The blue circle is set to equal 100%, no matter how many students there were in each province. The red circle reflects the pass rate for each province as a percentage.

Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs may be heavy on snark, but it also stands at the intersection of some important trends — the retro intimacy of email, the dance of new and old media, and the next wave of aggregation.

NPR’s social media desk looks back at 2015 and shares some of the many lessons it learned over the course of the year. Put some time aside for this because this is a pretty detailed list of lessons.

Whatever software you’re using, there’s simply no excuse for accepting the defaults and not trying to make your charts look more professional. But where do you start? It’s easy to look at great design and agree that it’s great, but when you’re looking at an Excel

HuffPost Live is dead. With its eight-hour-a-day streaming network, Huffington Post tried to do what every media company out there is scrambling to figure out: video. But, like too many of its desperate peers, HuffPo did exactly the wrong thing: It aped television news—worse, cable news.

This year’s key developments will centre on online video, mobile apps and further moves towards distributed content. Mounting problems around online display advertising will lead to a burst of innovation around journalism business models.

Delayed Gratification takes its inspiration from the Slow Food movement, which is about promoting sustainable and high quality produce over mass food production. The idea is to put a new spin on topics that have already been extensively covered by the mainstream media through contextual analysis, along with original reporting, and charge £36 a year