As you read, there are many ways data journalists end up finding data. It can be through existing databases or through good ol’ fashioned shoe leather reporting. Today we’ll play with a couple tools for making the search for data a bit easier.

First up is Census Reporter. This Knight News Challenge funded project is an amazingly, simple source for local census data. Let’s say we want to find median household income by census track in Knox County. Usually, this would involve digging through the information provided via Census.gov (which is decently well-organized, but not the easiest to work with). With CensusReporter you just answer three questions in the “compare places” tool.

We’ll find that data now.

Next, we’ll look at Data.gov, the U.S. government’s data repository. This should be a starting point for searching for any data, which could be at all related to the federal government.

Let’s take some time to find a piece of data from the repository about University of Tennessee.

When you are looking locally it is a bit more hodge podge. Let’s try to look up some information and think about how we could collect that information.

What kind of information might we want to look up locally? Here are a couple examples:

1) Property tax? Start with the public records online directory.

2) Meth labs? Try the Tenn Meth Task Force.