Friday webinar will teach you how to use free Google Tools to punch up your business and data reporting and graphics

A hands-on digital workshop on Friday, May 13, aims to teach journalists how to use free Google Tools to strengthen your reporting. The workshop goes from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET and costs $10. It's presented by a partnership of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Google News Initiative and is sponsored by the Mid-America Press Institute. Click here for more information or to register.

From the website: "In this hands-on workshop, SPJ Google News Lab trainer Mike Reilley will show you how to use free Google tools that can help your newsroom build interactive charts, maps, visualizations and more. Tools we’ll cover: Google Flourish, Google Dataset Search, Google Fact Check Explorer, Google Trends, MapChecking.com, Google Earth Studio, Earth Engine Timelapse, Public Data Explorer, advanced search, data scraping with Google Sheets and Google Flourish. Prior to the session, set up a free account at http://flourish.studio. Participants will receive handouts with exercises, links to tools and more."

Using those programs, Reilley will teach participants easier ways to scrape data from websites or PDFs and turn it into graphics (some interactive); how to scrape and track both real-time and historic stock-market data; and how to tell visual stories with satellite data, maps, and more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Set up a free Google Earth Studio account as soon as possible, since Google must approve applications before granting access.

Comic illustrates what the temporary expansion of the child tax credit — and its loss — have meant for rural America

Excerpt from Daily Yonder comic by Nhatt Nichols

The expanded child tax credit disproportionately helped rural Americans, so it follows that they were disproportionately hurt when it lapsed at the end of 2021, when the "Build Back Better" bill stalled. Graphic journalist Nhatt Nichols created a comic for The Daily Yonder to illustrate how the refundable credit (meaning that it went to households that didn't earn enough to pay taxes) helped rural Americans, and what's at stake moving forward. Click here to read it.

Journalist's Resource details quick and easy way to create an agriculture graphic for media use

Graphics are a useful tool to enhance a story. Journalist's Resource has put together a simple step-by-step procedure on how to design a time-series graph, using Chartbuilder and readily-available U.S. Department of Agriculture information on Data.gov to quickly and easily build a graph on organic farming.

"We went to Data.gov and searched for 'organic crop,'” John Wihbey writes for Journalist's Resource. "That brought us to a USDA landing page with lots of related datasets. We then hit 'download' on Table 3, which had the acreage estimates, and got an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of rows and columns relating to all manner of organic certified crops and the extent of their acreage." (Graphic created by Journalist's Resource using Data.gov and Chartbuilder)

"The first order of business was to look at the data and observe the trends," Wihbey writes. "We’re not doing data science here, and we’re only looking for illustrative data to provide some context around the rise of organic produce. It’s the kind of chart that could plausibly accompany a daily story—nothing too fancy."

"To get this data into the proper format to make it a time series, however—to clean it up—we had to flip or 'transpose' it, so that the date range was descending in the first column (the vertical field)," Wihbey writes. "We highlighted the row of data in the original and copied it. We then opened up a new sheet (tab at the bottom of the Excel file) and hit 'Paste Special' and clicked 'Transpose.'"

"We then had the basic form of the data we needed," he writes. "We just cut and pasted the cleaned-up data from Excel into the designated field in Chartbuilder and then adjusted the colors and put proper sourcing labels in the 'Chart Options' field. We adjusted the Y (vertical) axis a bit so the units represented were sufficiently fine that they provided useful information. You can then simply hit 'Create Image of the Chart' in the Export field and plug the chart right into your article/website." (Read more)

Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America has data and graphics for more than 60 indicators for your county

If you need fast, accurate, up-to-date information on your rural community's demographics and economics, one of the best places to get it is the Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America, published online by the Economic Research Service of the Department of Agriculture.

The atlas draws the latest data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, including age, race and ethnicity, migration and immigration, education, household size and family composition. ERS has added data about veterans, education, unemployment, income and other demographic characteristics.

It also draws fresh economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources, including information on employment trends, industrial composition, and household income, and from USDA's latest Census of Agriculture, including number and size of farms, operator characteristics, off-farm income, and government payments.

Users can see county-level maps for more than 60 socioeconomic indicators, and pop-up windows with all the indicators for a county; and download maps and other images for online and print publication. Here you can download a spreadsheet containing all the data for a selected county. Go for it!