Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

  1. How we used an FOI project to show the public the power they can wield

    By Tom Cardoso

    Posted on

    Secret Canada is an investigation and a public-service teaching tool. Advice about record requests can inspire your readers, too.

  2. Advice for sharing security advice

    By Martin Shelton

    Posted on

    How to tailor guidance for your audience, and come up with a plan for keeping it up-to-date.

  3. Covering trans issues well just means doing journalism well

    By Kae Petrin

    Posted on

    We need more accurate and nuanced stories, and the Trans Journalists Association is building a community and resources to help.

  4. Project Diary: How we made the Wage Theft Monitor

    By Max Siegelbaum

    Posted on

    How Documented fought for data about businesses that have stolen from their workers, and what you need to know to do this kind of project in your state.

  5. Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found

    By Sanjin Ibrahimovic

    Posted on

    A side-by-side comparison of five OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from DocumentCloud.

  6. Product manager diary: Learning to work with vendors and development teams outside of your organization

    By Madison Karas

    Posted on

    How do you balance clear communication, changing needs, decisions that predate you—all while you’re staring down a million support tickets?

  7. A lean newsroom’s blueprint for gathering secure tips

    By Halle Stockton

    Posted on

    How we wired together Signal, Twilio, and a spare cell phone to create a newsroom number for sources who need privacy.

  8. Magic spreadsheets to help you investigate neighborhood inequities

    By Leon Yin

    Posted on

    Here’s how to use these tools and techniques to bring “receipts from streets” with little-to-no code.

  9. Collaboration can harness the power of technology and data for better story discovery

    By Marnette Federis

    Posted on

    An event report from Story Discovery At Scale, bringing people together to work on tools and sustainability for local journalism.

  10. How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today

    By Dilcia Mercedes

    Posted on

    An update based on responses from over 600 journalists.

  11. Using data to investigate inequality, and building a network to find solutions

    By Delgerzaya Delgerjargal

    Posted on

    At a recent Open Data Day hackathon in Mongolia, a community grew around their exploration of place, pollution, and transit.

  12. How to tell the story of your work (or, one journalist’s process for career success)

    By Michelle Faust Raghavan

    Posted on

    From goal-setting and short reflections to perfecting your personal narrative, here’s a five-step process that keeps you ready for opportunities.

  13. Choose Your Own Mad Libs (or, how you can plug data into automated stories and free up lots of reporting time)

    By Mike Stucka

    Posted on

    From housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.

  14. Sincerely, Leaders of Color: You need to be a different kind of leader in the bad times

    By P. Kim Bui

    Posted on

    Our eyes are open to the constant uphill battles our news organizations are facing. Here are some tips to help you navigate as a leader.

  15. I tested how well ChatGPT can pull data out of messy PDFs (and here’s a script so you can too)

    By Brandon Roberts

    Posted on

    Scattered errors and hallucinated data make it an exploratory tool, not a shortcut to analysis.

  16. 2022 News Nerd Survey: Overall findings

    By Mago Torres

    Posted on

    In this third iteration of the News Nerd Survey, we hear from 603 respondents about their work in the field.

  17. Story recipe: U.S. schools restrain and seclude students thousands of times per school day—how often where you live?

    By Emilie  Munson, Ying  Zhao, and Matt Rocheleau

    Posted on

    Where to find the data, how to explore it, and questions to ask to report the story for your community.

  18. Sincerely, Leaders of Color: Keep DEI a priority, even when the economy says otherwise

    By Joanne Griffith

    Posted on

    When news organizations say they support diversity efforts but their actions say otherwise, teams and communities lose faith.

  19. Apply to join the Covering Science Slack community

    By Siri Carpenter and Rachel Zamzow

    Posted on

    Get free peer mentoring support for reporting on science stories. Apply by February 8.

  20. How coding can change the very journalism we do

    By Anastasia Valeeva

    Posted on

    From faster work that others can replicate to multi-story databases, here’s what I learned during my fellowship with a data team.

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