Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism

Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism looks to me like a fabulous resource for those folks who always wanted to learn some more R but were afraid to ask. Definitely recommended. ~Carl Howe, Director of Education, RStudio The book can provide a good starting point into working with R. It covers a lot of perspectives that are expected in newsrooms all over the world, especially working with geospatial data. It also provides a lot of good examples and interesting additional resources. The packages used are also mainly part of the standard corpus of R-packages. ~Benedict Witzenberger, Suddeutsche Zeitung I am the data editor of a mid-sized newsroom. I have long wished for an Intro to R book that was geared toward journalists, not data scientists. I've found that fellow journalists are much more likely to pick up on the intricacies of a computing language like R when they encounter it through a relatable example, like visualizing Election Night votes or analyzing a city council budget. Additionally, there are some R functions that simply aren't useful for the quantitative needs of most journalists. This is what I appreciated the most about the book - its practical nature (the title doesn't lie!) Machlis focuses on the concepts that data journalists most frequently encounter and spends little to no time on those they don't...I also appreciated Chapter 17, An R Project from Start to Finish. This chapter is exactly why I've wanted a journalism-specific Intro to R project that I can recommend to my colleagues ~Ryann Jones, Deputy Editor, Data at ProPublica I like the book. It's conversationally written, it walks you through common problems in data journalism and for the most part uses the most common libraries to analyze and visualize data...The book's instructional approach is the real value - it seems aimed at an audience that needs a narrative in order to understand code and analysis. Conveniently, that pretty well describes journalism students and working professionals...I would recommend publication. It advances the field of data journalism and presents a solid text for instructors or practitioners who are interested in R for analysis. ~Matthew Waite I NEED THIS BOOK. I may adopt it as a textbook. ~Alberto Cairo, University of Miami I'm reading this book now and it is terrific. Highly recommended for anyone interested in learning R. I will be using this book in my Data Analysis for Journalists class in the spring. ~Rob Wells, University of Arkansas