Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today

    By Dilcia Mercedes

    Posted on

    An update based on responses from over 600 journalists.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

  16. How to bring new perspectives to journalism

    By Andrew Losowsky and Ariel Zirulnick

    Posted on

    Reflections and lessons from organizing Perspectives LA during ONA 2022.

  17. Sincerely, Leaders of Color: Three things that could be hindering your newsroom’s DEI progress

    By Amanda Zamora

    Posted on

    To get beyond short-lived gains, it’s time to commit to vision-driven goals that lead to real results.

  18. Lessons from a data project: Investigating Toronto’s multimillion-dollar program to improve road safety

    By Inori Roy

    Posted on

    Poor record-keeping foiled our FOIA plans. Here’s what we learned through the simple, tedious process of creating data by hand.

  19. Sincerely, Leaders of Color: How to lead in a Kobayashi Maru scenario

    By Paul Cheung

    Posted on

    Leaders of color are used to a no-win situation. What doesn’t break us only makes us stronger!

  20. How people used the Scholarships+ program in 2022

    By Ryan Pitts

    Posted on

    Our Scholarships+ program offers funding to help people pay for events and programs that develop their work as a journalist with data and code. This recap of the programs we helped people take part in in 2022 is part of our commitment to transparency and trust in our work—and we also think it’s a great source of ideas for community members who want to keep building their networks and careers.

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