ABOUT

Tell us who you are!

Hi, I'm Tobi. I'm 24 and I currently work at the Guardian as a data journalist.

So what do you actually do?

I work as part of the Guardian's data projects team. As data journalist, our main role within the newsroom is to use structured information, usually in the form of datasets, as a way of storytelling.

What has your career path been?

At university I was involved in all sorts of student media, and in my second year, I successfully applied to undertake some work experience at the Guardian. A year after, I was accepted onto their Scott Trust Bursary scheme, and completed a masters in Interactive Journalism at City.

Then, I was on a trainee contract at the Guardian, working across different desks which included news, data projects, and podcasts. Afterwards I gained a role on the data projects team.

What is the best part of your job?

The work we do isn't tied to a specific journalism beat, which means we get to work on such a wide variety of stories, ranging from social affairs, to science, to covering inequality.

We also have space to pitch our own stories in areas we're interested in, and we're privileged in the sense that our work allows us to be creative.

Why do you do your job?

The main reason I wanted to get into journalism is that I've always had an interest in thoroughly reporting on underserved communities who may not see the experiences of their communities reflected in the media we consume.

One piece of advice for someone starting in your role?

Read really widely - readings news reports from all sorts of places is a great way to spark story ideas and areas you'd be interested in investigating further.

Also try not to compare yourself too much to other journalists. Journalism is such a front-facing job, and so it can be easy to get bogged down doom-scrolling on Twitter.

DAY IN THE LIFE

I usually start around 9am, and try to write down a to-do list of everything which I know needs to get done today. I also make sure to grab a coffee, and inevitably scroll on twitter and browse a few news websites, before getting started.

Depending on the day, we also keep a eye on any scheduled data releases that we may need to report on. For example, at around 9:30am on Tuesdays the ONS updates their deaths in England and Wales data, which includes Covid-19. So if it's a Tuesday, I would usually go through this release and update our own excel sheets with the new information.

At 10am, I usually try and listen into conference, which is where the editor-in-chief goes through what's upcoming in the day's paper, and then there's a discussion on a current-affairs issue which is led by the journalists who have reported on the topic in discussion.

It's pretty interesting, and quite a privilege to be able to hear first-hand an in-depth discussion on the issues everyone's talking about.

We then have a data projects team meeting around 10:30am, where we have a catch-up and discuss what we've got upcoming.

The rest of the day is pretty varied depending on what we're working on. It could sometimes be a shorter turnaround piece we need to get over the line, or for a longer term project, we would conduct research, make calls etc.

The data we use for stories come from a multitude of sources: freedom of information requests, open-sourced data which we may combine with other datasets to compare a particular variable, or scraping a website to build our own dataset.