Getting started with data journalism doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. In fact, if you have a Gmail account, you have access to two free, easy-to-use Google apps, “Sheets” and “My Maps,” that can get an appreciable amount of data journalism done.

This half-hour video comes from “An intro to data journalism: Analyzing, visualizing and mapping data using Google Sheets,” a presentation I gave during the 2019 Southeast Journalism Association Conference at Middle Tennessee State University.

Below is a read-only version of the spreadsheet shown in the first part of the video. You can create your own by downloading and importing the “MTSU Crime Totals 2016 2017.xlsx” dataset. For annual totals of crimes at MTSU and other Tennessee colleges and universities, see the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s Publications page.

The video shows how to make this interactive visualization of the 2017 MTSU crime data:

… and this interactive map, made using Google My Maps and information from MTSU’s daily campus crime summary, detailed crime log and campus map.

Other maps shown in the video include this map of structurally deficient bridges in St. Louis, based on data from the National Bridge inventory:

… and this one, showing 2018 general election U.S. Senate race voting results by Rutherford County precinct:

Making the last two maps involves using the free QGIS mapping application to edit the shape files used to represent the St. Louis and Rutherford County Precinct borders. You can download QGIS for Mac or PC platforms from the QGIS Main Page. Shape file sources abound, but one of the best is the U.S. Census Bureau’s Cartographic Boundary Shape Files page.

For an in-depth, start-to-finish course on analyzing, graphing and mapping data with Google Sheets, My Maps and QGIS, see this video series: