Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

Features

Shields Up: Developing Security Skepticism

By Martin Shelton

Posted on April 7, 2017
A little fear can motivate us to take action. But as consumers of security news, even the most well-intentioned reporting can scare us into paralysis—or worse, encourage us to adopt behaviors that promote a false sense of security.
Cleaner, Smarter Spreadsheets Start with Structure

By Sandhya Kambhampati

Posted on March 23, 2017
Make better spreadsheets by thinking about structure, from the beginning.
Ms. Management: This Isn’t the Diverse Newsroom You’re Looking For

By Stacy-Marie Ishmael

Posted on March 16, 2017
The first column in the “Ms. Management” series: how newsroom managers can take more tangible steps to increase newsroom diversity.
Shields Up: You Are Worthy of a Data Breach

By Martin Shelton

Posted on March 8, 2017
You know what’s the biggest security threat to journalists? Modesty.
Tracking Vermont’s Cabinet Votes, the Hands-Free Way

By Sara Simon

Posted on February 17, 2017
Little Vermont’s been in the limelight lately—C-SPAN style. Between Sen. Bernie Sanders, now more well-known now than ever, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior-most member of the Senate Judiciary committee, my team here at Vermont Public Radio knew that the new administration’s cabinet nomination process would be of key interest our audience. We knew we wanted to track our senators’ roles throughout.
You Talking to Me?

By Stacy-Marie Ishmael

Posted on February 16, 2017
From BuzzFeed’s BuzzBot, an emoji-heavy offering designed to deliver updates about the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to CNN’s more traditional approach, news bots were suddenly everywhere. And then they weren’t.
Building an Annotation Tool on a Dime

By Kavya Sukumar

Posted on February 14, 2017
Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, Vox published the inuagural address with annotations from Vox’s policy writers.
Low-Budget Natural Language Processing

By Dan Zajdband

Posted on November 22, 2016
We can take advantage of our human ability to analyze natural language and use really simple techniques to assist and amaze our users. Here are a couple of ways to use these techniques in your own projects.
Digital Self-Defense for Journalists: An Introduction

By Martin Shelton

Posted on July 14, 2016
Digital self-defense is becoming an important part of the journalistic toolkit. Beyond risks to everyone’s digital lives—webcam hacking, email breaches, identity theft—people who work in newsrooms have even more at stake. Newsrooms are some of the biggest targets in the world for state-sponsored digital attacks, as well as more routine threats. Here’s how to build stronger roadblocks, making it harder for others to access our data without consent.
Feats Thru Sheets: The Wonders of Go-To Templates

By Carla Astudillo

Posted on July 12, 2016
When you’re part of a tiny digital team, you find ways to make life easier for everyone in the newsroom. That’s why I created Feats Thru Sheets, an interactive, filterable, searchable database that can be reskinned for different types of stories and updated solely by reporters.
How We Made a Bot that Pours Wine on Television

By

Posted on April 29, 2016
How I built a WineBOT for NBC News’ Today show that’s powered by a hashtag battle.
Peda(bot)gically Speaking: Teaching Computational and Data Journalism with Bots

By Nicholas Diakopoulos

Posted on April 25, 2016
Bots encapsulate how data and computing can work together, in journalism. And when we use bots to teach concepts and skills in computational journalism, we’re actually teaching two kinds of thinking: editorial and computational.
How La Nación Listened to 20,000 (Possibly Interesting) Audio Files

By Juan Elosua and Francis Tseng

Posted on February 8, 2016
With about 20,000 unlabeled audio files to classify, as part of a big breaking story, we created a process to help us focus on the files we actually needed.
Why Mobile Data Visualization Shouldn’t Hurt

By Ashley Wu

Posted on November 24, 2015
As data journalists, we tend to focus on visualizing our numbers as beautifully and comprehensively as possible for desktops. We pour over D3.js line charts. We spend hours getting the tooltips on our maps to look just right. And right before our deadlines, we’ll throw in some CSS media queries for mobile screens and call it a day. I know I’ve been a culprit of this method more than once. One of my favorite sessions at Mozilla Festival this year was Aaron Williams’ “Crafting New Visualization Techniques for Mobile Web” where he emphasized a mobile-first, desktop-second focus to data visualization.
The Whole of Work

By Mandy Brown

Posted on September 23, 2015
In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton interviews a number of workers at a biscuit manufacturing company and concludes, unsurprisingly enough, that the place is rather dreary. The difference between a happy home cook and our listless biscuit manufacturing employee comes down to what Ursula Franklin describes in The Real World of Technology as holistic versus prescriptive technologies. In a holistic technology, a single person or small group of people carry through an entire process, from inception to sweeping the crumbs off the floor, making their own decisions and adapting along the way.
Unlearning

By Tiff Fehr

Posted on September 23, 2015
As with most of our well-meant advice, we tend to target people at the heights or depths of mindsets—in this case, you on your career path. We don’t do as earnest a job of giving constructive advice for people in the middle, those metaphorically on a plateau or simply soldiering up a small hill.
Writing the Patch for Communication Gaps

By Michael Grant

Posted on September 22, 2015
Don’t let a debrief go to waste. The SF Chronicle’s Michael Grant explains how to dig deeper, solve longstanding communication problems, and support the development and implementation of new ideas.
The Myth of the Sole and Useful Story

By Robinson Meyer

Posted on September 22, 2015
A newspaper investigation is a messy thing, and it generates a lot of stuff—papers, reports, spreadsheets, interview transcripts—that never sees publication. Should that change now that many publications work primarily online?
Good Code Runs on Good Communication

By Rachel Schallom

Posted on September 17, 2015
When I started the interactive team at the Sun Sentinel in 2013, I thought the biggest challenge would be the code. I was wrong. Experimentation, no matter the size, requires creating new processes and collaborating in new ways. For the next two years, I worked closely with reporters and editors to plan, shape and create interactive journalism, retooling the already fantastic journalism coming out of the newsroom to reach audiences in a sophisticated way online. Most of the time we were successful; occasionally it didn’t work out. The biggest thing I learned was that getting things done in a newsroom only works when everyone is on the same team.
Guerrilla QA for Tiny Teams

By Tracie Lee

Posted on September 17, 2015
QA can be okay. We promise. Here’s how Serious Eats makes QA happen, even with a small team.