by Valerie Cooper

On behalf of the Data and News Society, I sat down with American journalist George Rodrigue, who visited Hong Kong as part of HKBU’s Pulitzer Prize Winners Workshop this past week. We spoke about his career as a data journalist. Rodrigue, the editor of The Plain Dealer in Ohio, began using data to tell news stories in the 1970s, and the skills have helped earn him two Pulitzer Prizes. You can read more about his work here: http://ppww.hkbu.edu.hk/eng/BIO/2016speakers/GeorgeRodrigue.html. The interview has been edited for brevity.

VC: How did you get started in data journalism?

GR: The first thing that I ever did actually was a project at the University of Virginia where we surveyed students about the quality of specific off-campus housing that was kind of like consumer reports – how safe they are, how sanitary they are, all that stuff – and that seemed to fill a need, so I just kept looking for chances to do that kind of stuff as time passed.

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