My name is Sara Shields and I like long walks on the beach with my laptop, iPhone, and camera. 
Seriously. If I had to choose three of my favorite things it would be traveling, animals, and technology. My dream jobs tend to shift on the daily, one week I’ll want to be a videographer for National Geographic, then the next I’ll want to be a web designer for Disney. I have a passion for creativity, and some of my favorite ways to exercise that is through videography, graphic design, and web design. I got my undergraduate degree in Public Relations with a minor in Art and Design. Now I am on a mission to complete my masters in Digital Media. I also have a cat named Bandit who has quite an astonishing mustache.
My favorite part about data journalism is you can make it pretty and appealing to the human eye. No one — at least me — wants to go through pages and pages of documents to find out something. Instead, the journalist should find a way to make it more intriguing to the viewer – such as 
infographics, quizzes, videos, photos, and other interactive media. Data journalism, if done the right way, can help make a complex story interesting, instead of long and drawn out. Last semester I did a project on animal adoptions and gathered data from the Animal Humane Society on intake and animal adoptions in 2015. The data viewed wasn’t very appealing to the eye and didn’t justify what the actual numbers show and mean when just staring at a list of numbers. So I created a cool little chart instead, so that you can visually see the comparison in a graph. This is a very basic example of data journalism, obviously nothing compared to Dollar for Docs and the super awesome Dogs of NYC.
The future of journalism? The force is strong with this one. Even Tim Berners Lee said, “Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you’ll do it that way some times.” Tim Berners Lee is kind of a big deal so let’s listen to him. But we really are going down a path where data journalism is important and should be taught to future journalists. We live in a time where data is fairly easy to get and available to the public, so it’s the journalists job to do what they do best; and that’s tell a story. The next step is just making sure that journalists process that information properly and into actual good content thats interesting to explore.
As far as ideas for data driven projects, I will probably do something that relates to animals or traveling.