[EVENT] CAR 2017 - How to Use Polls and Rankings

Join Ipsos at The Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference for the very latest in technological advances and data-driven tools journalists need to dig deeper into stories and give readers, viewers and their online audience the information they're demanding.

Ipsos’ Chris Jackson and Matt Carmichael will give you the tools you need to quickly sort out what polls, surveys and rankings are worth covering. 

How to use polls and rankings – and how to tell the good from bad

Quick survey: how many of you are inundated with press releases about polls, rankings, and best-of lists? You know your readers love that kind of thing, but you don’t want to mislead them with bad data or overstating the results. Maybe the election has you questioning its value in general. We’ll give you the tools you need to quickly sort out what’s worth covering. But let’s go further: You’ll see some real-life examples of even more interesting ways to incorporate this data into your story-telling and reporting.

In their presentation at NICAR2017, Ipsos’ Chris Jackson and Matt Carmichael together with Peter Gade of the Gaylord Family Endowed Professor in Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, shared tips on how journalists can bring back accuracy and good journalism in the age of fake news. The group discussed two key sources of error in polling — sampling errors and measurement errors — and how journalists can learn to spot them and interpret polls accurately in their stories. They further shared examples from Ipsos’ work with media outlets to show the variety of ways polling and survey data can be used in the context of good journalism.

Download the presentation: Three wrongs and some rights.

For more conference details, please visit NICAR’s website.