About Len De Groot

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Len De Groot is the Interactive Design & Data Instructor at the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, teaching mid-career journalists and graduate students skills to tell stories on the Web. He has nearly 20 years of newsroom experience and was graphics director for WSFL-TV and the SunSentinel newspaper in South Florida. While there he created and directed news graphics for print, interactive graphics for the paper’s Web site and animated news graphics and packages for a morning television news show and television station promotions.

Core Skills

  • • Course design, instruction and online tutorials
  • • Interactive and multimedia storytelling
  • • Data cleaning, analysis and visualization
  • • HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Protoviz
  • • GIS (ESRI, QGIS, MAPublisher), 3D (LightWave), Adobe Creative Suite (all), VizRT
  • • Project management

Professional accomplishments

  • • freeDive: Designed and developed a tool for making embeddable, user-searchable databases
  • • Rebranded KDMC and redesigned KDMC web site
  • • Contributed chapter to The Multimedia Journalist (publishes early 2012)
  • • Television: Successfully integrated new technology and design skills in three months to launch morning news show.
  • • Online: Developed precinct-level election results maps that updated live on election nights. Developed GIS-based interactive maps that take just hours to complete. Resurrected the Sun-Sentinel’s pioneering multimedia gallery, The Edge, which was awarded the Best News Site by the Florida chapter of the Associated Press. 
  • • Staff development: Extensively cross-trained staff to be proficient journalists and to use a wide range of industry tools, Including LightWave 3D, Flash, and VizRT. Developed reporters and page designers, who learned graphic storytelling, Flash and video editing.
  • • Nearly 30 international awards for news graphics and design  (production and editing) 
  • • Sigma Delta Chi award for Multimedia Storytelling (interactive presentation - shared)
Curriculum Vitae

Stories

Digital media stories published elsewhere by Len De Groot:

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Writing

Content on this site written by Len De Groot (includes contributory writing):

  • Projects

    • Topic Shell Demo
    • Test project for new shell system. Test project for new shell system. Test project for new shell system. Test project for new shell system. Test project for new shell system. ...

  • Tutorials

    • QGIS basics for Journalists
      Published Aug 25, 2011
    • QGIS is a free, open source GIS application that works on most major operating systems. It's a great starting point for journalists who want to explore data with maps. This ...
    • Intro to cleaning data
      Published Aug 16, 2011
    • Understanding how to clean data is an important skill every reporter needs. Learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions.
    • iPhoto
      Published May 13, 2011
    • Hands-on tutorial will give you tools to improve the quality photos and manage your collection as it grows. 
    • WordPress: Photo Galleries
      Published Mar 30, 2011
    • Learn how the WordPress Media Library and galleries work, how to set up and use the NextGen plugin to improve photo management and create slideshows and galleries that can be ...
    • Protovis Templates
      Published Jan 28, 2011
    • Our customizable templates will help you produce interactive JavaScript charts in minutes.
    • Use Google Refine to Export JSON
      Published Jan 11, 2011
    • Google refine is great at cleaning large sets of data. But one amazing under-documented feature is the ability to design and output JSON files.  With Google Refine, you can turn ...
    • Protovis compatibility in Internet Explorer
      Published Jan 7, 2011
    • Protovis is a terrific tool that works well in modern browsers. But it does have some compatibility problems with Internet Explorer 6-8. We'll look at some methods to make your ...
    • Protovis Part 2: Lines and Labels
      Published Oct 7, 2010
    • Tick marks and labels make charts easier to comprehend. Here's how to add them to Protovis JavaScript charts.
    • Protovis JavaScript Charts: Part 1
      Published Sep 29, 2010
    • The Protovis JavaScript Library takes care of the difficult programming so you spend less time writing code and more time visualizing data. This tutorial is designed for beginners with little ...
    • Build 960 design grids in Photoshop
      Published Sep 2, 2010
    • Most modern Web sites are designed and built on a fixed, 960-pixel grid. Building on a grid creates page layouts that are visually consistent and easier for users to navigate. ...
    • Databases of Statistical Information
      Published May 5, 2010
    • This is a directory of online databases of demographic and other statistical information that are publicly available on the web. The directory is organized topically, and includes database with national, ...
    • Build an Interactive Census Map
      Published Apr 22, 2010
    • Step-by-step guide to using geocommons.com to make a an interactive census map. Created by Len De Groot for the Knight Digital Media Center.
    • Build an animated ad in PhotoShop CS4.
      Published Apr 21, 2010
    • Independent bloggers and journalists may find that they need to build an ad to support their work. This tutorial will provide some basic guidelines and instruction on how to build ...
    • Data Visualization: Basics
      Published Mar 3, 2010
    • Interactive graphics give your content context and impact. Learn how to use Google Gadgets to create charts that you can embed in your site. Google Gadgets are free.

  • Blog Posts

    • freeDive updates and future plans
    • Hardly seems like a month has passed since the launch of freeDive. We're pleased at how quickly it has caught on and that it's in use, especially as an experimental ...
    • Five QGIS tips for Mac users
    • QGIS, a free, open-source data mapping application, has supported the Mac for years. But plugins are frequently developed on different platforms and introduce some wonkyness for those of us who ...
    • Intro to data cleaning tutorial
    • We just posted a tutorial that covers the basics of cleaning data in spreadsheets. You'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. ...
    • See our Fellow's July Multimedia Projects
    • The projects created by our Multimedia Reporting and Convergence Workshop fellows have been posted and are available to the public. They reported on Children’s Fairyland, The Crucible art camp, the Cultured Pickle ...
    • Development ends for Protovis
    • The Stanford visualization team has halted development on the Protovis JavaScript library at version 3.3.1. It has shifted it's attention to D3.js. Here's the description from the pjoject site. D3 and Protovis have ...
    • Better timelines through editing
    • Some really smart programmer/journalists at ProPublica recently released an open source interactive timeline tool called TimelineSetter. It does many things very well, including automating timeline creation from a csv file. But ...
    • Census maps that resonate: Q&A with Bob Rebach
    • KDMC Interactive Census Workshop alum Bob Rebach, assistant graphics editor for The Record and Herald News, recently struck gold with an interactive census map. Published on NorthJersey.com, the map illustrates ...
    • Highlights from the Interactive Census Workshop
    • Thanks to all the great participants we had in our first data visualization workshop. The Interactive Census Workshop brought together 23 professionals from around the country, including computer assisted reporters, ...
    • Welcome to Our Web Site Redesign
    • Over the years, our workshops have resulted in the production of hundreds of tutorials and video presentations. The growth of this content also made it more difficult for you, the ...
    • Protovis JavaScript Charts vs Google Gadgets
    • We've been discussing the merits of 3rd party data visualization services at KDMC lately. Services like Many Eyes and Google Docs provide a valuable service by offering easy-to-use visualization tools. ...
    • Interactive Census Workshop
    •   The KDMC at UC Berkeley is offering a customized visual storytelling workshop to train journalists on new ways to process data from the 2010 Census. Fellows will illustrate the ...
    • Can iPhone 4 shoot news video?
    • While the camera on the iPhone 4 is pretty average, iMovie is not. Suddenly, the iPhone can be a serviceable web video camera in breaking news situations or unplanned interviews. ...
    • A Closer Look at Interactive Timelines
    • Free interactive timeline tools like Timetoast and Dipity can do more harm than good when misused. Often, a chronology is confused with a timeline, making it harder for readers to ...

  • Presentations

    (only presentations with slides or webcasts are listed)