Beginning A Collaborative Project

When beginning a collaboration be prepared to ask/answer all or some of the following...

What is the objective? What story are you trying to tell?
- Are there clear questions you want to answer?
- Is it a fishing expedition?
- How will the data improve the story?
Where are you in the process? What is the timeframe?
- Are you at the beginning of the reporting process or do you publish tomorrow?
- Is this a daily story? Is this a longer-term piece? Is this exploring?
Describe the data you have?
- Who provided/where did you find?
- How well do you know the data?
- Is the data clean? Is the data dirty?
- Is the data complete?
- What might be missing?
What do you expect to learn? What is the news value?
- Are any of the three kinds of stories possible?
  - Change over time
  - Mr. and Mrs. Outlier
  - Mr. and Mrs. Central Tendency
What outcome do you expect?
- Narrative text?
- Spreadsheet/Pivot Table?
- Chart to understand
- Map to understand
- Profile/Stats
  - Change over time
  - Min
  - Max
  - Mean
  - Median
  - Mode
- Digital presentation/News application
  - "Who is our audience?"
    - Audience can be internal, external or both
  - "What do they need?"
  - "What can we make?"

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