What tools should an aspiring data journalist/analyst utilize to get in the door?

Hi all!

I am very excited to be taking a deep dive into the world of coding through FreeCodeCamp in an effort to develop my brain around data analytics and visualization. My background is in social media (servicing customers in the digital space) and TV journalism, so you can imagine that this is worlds apart from what I am used to!

I wanted to reach out to you all to see if there are any people who have gotten a foot in the door in newsrooms either through this course load or through additional training. If so, I have a few questions:

What tools do you find useful for scrubbing data? I am learning more that SQL seems very helpful for this set.
What exactly is the difference between data analytics and data science?
What type of certifications or specializations help in this area of coding and development?

Thanks for your help with a moderately clueless mind! I cannot believe how fascinating this world has become to me in the three weeks that I’ve begun to dig into this.

-JD

I can’t contribute much but when I saw this my first thought was reaching out to (or at least following) Dan Sinker (https://twitter.com/dansinker) and looking into the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project.

That’s a great start! Thanks, @DenMcH!