Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
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How we used an FOI project to show the public the power they can wield
By Tom Cardoso
Posted onSecret Canada is an investigation and a public-service teaching tool. Advice about record requests can inspire your readers, too.
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Advice for sharing security advice
By Martin Shelton
Posted onHow to tailor guidance for your audience, and come up with a plan for keeping it up-to-date.
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Covering trans issues well just means doing journalism well
By Kae Petrin
Posted onWe need more accurate and nuanced stories, and the Trans Journalists Association is building a community and resources to help.
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Project Diary: How we made the Wage Theft Monitor
By Max Siegelbaum
Posted onHow 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.
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Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found
By Sanjin Ibrahimovic
Posted onA side-by-side comparison of five OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from DocumentCloud.
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Product manager diary: Learning to work with vendors and development teams outside of your organization
By Madison Karas
Posted onHow do you balance clear communication, changing needs, decisions that predate you—all while you’re staring down a million support tickets?
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A lean newsroom’s blueprint for gathering secure tips
By Halle Stockton
Posted onHow we wired together Signal, Twilio, and a spare cell phone to create a newsroom number for sources who need privacy.
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Magic spreadsheets to help you investigate neighborhood inequities
By Leon Yin
Posted onHere’s how to use these tools and techniques to bring “receipts from streets” with little-to-no code.
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Collaboration can harness the power of technology and data for better story discovery
By Marnette Federis
Posted onAn event report from Story Discovery At Scale, bringing people together to work on tools and sustainability for local journalism.
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How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today
By Dilcia Mercedes
Posted onAn update based on responses from over 600 journalists.
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Using data to investigate inequality, and building a network to find solutions
By Delgerzaya Delgerjargal
Posted onAt a recent Open Data Day hackathon in Mongolia, a community grew around their exploration of place, pollution, and transit.
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How to tell the story of your work (or, one journalist’s process for career success)
By Michelle Faust Raghavan
Posted onFrom goal-setting and short reflections to perfecting your personal narrative, here’s a five-step process that keeps you ready for opportunities.
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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 onFrom housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.
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Sincerely, Leaders of Color: You need to be a different kind of leader in the bad times
By P. Kim Bui
Posted onOur eyes are open to the constant uphill battles our news organizations are facing. Here are some tips to help you navigate as a leader.
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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 onScattered errors and hallucinated data make it an exploratory tool, not a shortcut to analysis.
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2022 News Nerd Survey: Overall findings
By Mago Torres
Posted onIn this third iteration of the News Nerd Survey, we hear from 603 respondents about their work in the field.
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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 onWhere to find the data, how to explore it, and questions to ask to report the story for your community.
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Sincerely, Leaders of Color: Keep DEI a priority, even when the economy says otherwise
By Joanne Griffith
Posted onWhen news organizations say they support diversity efforts but their actions say otherwise, teams and communities lose faith.
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Apply to join the Covering Science Slack community
By Siri Carpenter and Rachel Zamzow
Posted onGet free peer mentoring support for reporting on science stories. Apply by February 8.
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How coding can change the very journalism we do
By Anastasia Valeeva
Posted onFrom faster work that others can replicate to multi-story databases, here’s what I learned during my fellowship with a data team.