The phrase “data is all around us” is thrown around often when you first start data journalism or data science. While data is indeed all around us, from social media statistics to daily weather fluctuations, most of the time, it’s difficult, if not impossible to download, clean and analyze as a journalist without a strong technical background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, a student journalist who almost failed out of her first-year computer science class, web scraping was a data journalism skill I never thought I would take up. Open source government data in clean spreadsheets seemed to be the extent of the data I would work on. However, over the past few weeks, I learned how to write a small piece of Python code that helped me scrape some data I had been searching for from a government website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While I still have a lot to learn and do for this project, being able to write this program from scratch and have it actually give me the output I needed was incredibly rewarding. This piece will take you step-by-step through web scraping process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n