1. Thanks to David Herzog Missouri School of Journalism and NICAR

2.  Getting and sharing  Cleaning  Analyzing  Visualizing and mapping

3.  Don’t have to buy/license your own software  No software to install (for the most part)  Web service hosts data  Data accessible  Can share with the world

4.  Give up control of data ◦ Read the terms of service ◦ Legal constraints ◦ Data might be public  Downtime for web applications  Services go out of business/lose traction  Poor documentation and clunky user interfaces