Microsoft News and Power BI have partnered with newsrooms to create data journalism projects, from ICFJ grantees’ works on Kenyan maternal health and climate change effects on U.S. real estate to Politico EU’s continental elections coverage.
Now, the Power BI team has announced that it has released a free toolkit for governments to share COVID-19 data with its citizens. While the toolkit is aimed at government agencies, newsrooms can also leverage this toolkit, and customize and add data to tailor to their audiences.
Agencies in Washington, U.S.A., and Victoria, Australia, have been publishing reports to share numbers and interactive maps for citizens to see at a glance the latest developments.
Microsoft is working with USAFacts to make it easy for anyone to visualize and interact with a national COVID-19 data set. The nonpartisan, not-for-profit civic initiative aims “to present a comprehensive and understandable source of government data” through helpful visualizations, and has aggregated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state and local-level public state agencies.
The toolkit includes an embed code, a Power BI desktop file, the Power BI Desktop and Power BI Publish to Web. As USAFacts updates its dataset, the report automatically refreshes.
Read more about the toolkit and other COVID-19 Power BI dashboards at the Microsoft Power BI blog.
Principal program manager Lukasz Pawlowski serves as the engineering lead for the data journalism program. You can find more of his Power BI posts here.
