Congratulations to Mark Hansen and Wayne Lee on their Modern Statistics and the Modern Newsroom grant.

Congratulations to Mark Hansen and Wayne Lee on their Modern Statistics and the Modern Newsroom grant.

Over the next year, they will create a course joint with Columbia Journalism School and the Department of Statistics. For statistics students, the class will introduce investigative and reporting skills, creating new forms of practice for the profession, and opening new career paths. For journalism, the class will bring much needed formal technical training, deepening a reporter’s capacity for finding and telling stories in a world awash in data and the artifacts of statistical work. Through this class we also have a unique opportunity to explore the core beliefs of both disciplines — examining the “myth of objectivity” and the implicit biases of a reporter, and the subjectivity in data, its collection and modeling.

The Modern Statistics and the Modern Newsroom course is made possible by the Columbia Data Science InstituteColumbia Entrepreneurship, and the Collaboratory Fellows Fund.