Practice your skills on the sport that loves statistics: baseball. You can look at baseball player's salaries and performance figures. Or, if you prefer, see an example of a simple regression on the taste of cheddar cheese, and look at how to use a scatterplot to probe the history of Olympic winners. That's just one of the offerings from Carnegie Mellon University's Statistics Department. A great resource for reporters just starting is the Data and Story Library, a collection of real-life ways that experts crunched data.
There are serious subjects, too from breast cancer to crime to air pollution - and examples about how to investigate them with stats. Start at http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/