Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

Features

Introducing the California Civic Data Coalition

By Agustin Armendariz, Ben Welsh, and Aaron Williams

Posted on September 24, 2014
Launching with two new Django applications ready made to make California campaign finance data easier to access.
Video Synchronization for Collective Viewing

By Brian Chirls

Posted on September 24, 2014
POV’s Brian Chirls on why video sync is a giant pain and how to make it work.
Empire: Lessons from Pushing the Boundaries of Web Video

By

Posted on September 23, 2014
Brian Chirls introduces an ambitious video framework for a challenging interactive documentary.
From the BBC News Labs: Datastringer

By Basile Simon

Posted on September 5, 2014
Basile Simon walks through the process of building a new tool that aims to help reporters cover beats, and that was prompted by work by Knight-Mozilla Fellows and a presentation at Hacks/Hackers London.
Comparing the Net Cost of College

By Soo Oh, Erika Owens, and Beckie Supiano

Posted on August 26, 2014
The Chronicle of Higher Education set out to compare net cost of colleges and found an unexpected discrepancy. The team describes the piece they created to help explain the difficulty in comparing net costs.
When the News Calls for Raw Data

By Tom Giratikanon, Erin Kissane, and Jeremy Singer-Vine

Posted on August 21, 2014
We spoke with the NYT and BuzzFeed about recent data postings prompted by the news from Ferguson, MO.
How (and Why) We Made Twitter Reverb

By Simon Rogers

Posted on August 13, 2014
Twitter’s Simon Rogers introduces Reverb and walks through his team’s design and development work with Periscopic.
Announcing Raster Support for Simple Tiles

By Jeff Larson

Posted on July 24, 2014
Live from SRCCON an update you want to know about.
How We Made “Disappearing Rio Grande”

By Ryan D. Murphy

Posted on July 23, 2014
Last December, Colin McDonald pitched an opportunity for The Texas Tribune to partner on an ambitious project–he kayaks, canoes, and walks the Rio Grande’s entire 1,900-mile course, and we create a platform that makes it possible for him and his team to publish their reports on the journey. After a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the Disappearing Rio Grande project was born.
Planting the Next Crop of Newsroom Coders

By Erin Kissane

Posted on July 17, 2014
We are exactly one month away from the August 16th deadline for applying for the 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellowships, and this is the perfect time for you—the people actively wrangling data, building news apps, and designing interactives in newsrooms—to help chase amazing candidates toward the Fellowship application. We’ve assembled a one-stop shop of your arguments for joining development teams in news organizations, along with some of our former Fellows’ experiences and exhortations to future candidates.
All About the WSJ’s Penalty Kick Interactive

By Chris Canipe and Tom Meagher

Posted on July 3, 2014
In the days before the World Cup’s knockout stages, with their potential for games to end in shootout finishes, The Wall Street Journal unveiled an app that visualized the tendencies of the top penalty kicks takers on the teams advancing in the tournament. Chris Canipe, senior news apps developer on the Wall Street Journal’s interactive graphics desk, talked with me about the thinking behind the project and how he and his colleagues put it together. What follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.
The NYT’s Detroit Foreclosure Interactive

By Erin Kissane

Posted on June 30, 2014
Last week, the New York Times published an interactive photo-mosaic of 43,634 Detroit properties at serious risk of foreclosure. As you scroll down the page, viewing neighborhood after neighborhood, the number of properties and the total amount owed on them adds up at the top of the page. We contacted Matthew Bloch and Haeyoun Park at the Times to ask about the making of the interactive and the design choices they made along the way.
Mandy Brown and Trei Brundrett on Vox Product

By Mandy Brown, Trei Brundrett, and Erin Kissane

Posted on June 26, 2014
On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it was acquiring the technology and co-founding team of the late and much-missed collaborative writing tool Editorially. We chatted with Editorially’s Mandy Brown and Vox Media’s Trei Brundrett about the team’s next steps, the probability of open sourcing more code, and the internal Vox hack week going on at this very moment.
3D Printing/Printed Explainer at the WSJ

By Jonathan Keegan

Posted on June 18, 2014
Mini hit the web, and it reached newsstands today. It was accompanied by an explainer video that demystifies 3D printing tech, and a downloadable, printable 3D model of a sales growth chart from the review itself. The combination of hardware and data was irresistable, so we chatted with Jon Keegan about the project’s origins and their physical-digital plans for future features.
Covering the European Elections with Linked Data

By Basile Simon

Posted on June 17, 2014
The BBC News Labs team explores ways of exposing linked data in public-facing election coverage, and encounters some interesting challenges.
Behind the Scenes of “Fewer Helmets, More Deaths”

By Alastair Dant and Hannah Fairfield

Posted on May 20, 2014
A visualization story on what happens when states repeal their universal helmet laws attracted some attention last month for both its content and unusual (but well-received) design. We thought it might amuse readers to see how heavily iterated it was, and how certain decision points along the way helped us to sculpt a design that was mobile-centric without compromising fluidity in the desktop version.
Lessons from the Project Thunderdome Shutdown

By Tom Meagher

Posted on May 20, 2014
Project Thunderdome’s former data editor on the ongoing rescue effort for Thunderdome news apps and the things he’d do differently the next time.
GDELT and the Problem of Decontextualized Data

By Daniel Solomon

Posted on May 14, 2014
Two recent FiveThirtyEight data journalism stories on Nigerian kidnappings use GDELT data in ways that don’t account for that dataset’s sources and biases. Here’s why that matters.
Meet Bloomberg’s Dataview

By Jeremy Scott Diamond

Posted on April 23, 2014
One of our most recent works, “How Americans Die,” is an instance of what we call a “dataview.” The impetus behind dataview was a hope to provide clear and concise storytelling, while giving the supporting data more prominence and explorability.
Finding Evidence of Climate Change in a Billion Rows of Data

By Brian Abelson

Posted on April 22, 2014
Seeking to contribute to the climate change conversation, the team at Enigma started to brainstorm ways we could produce a data-driven story on how climate change has played out in the United States. Browsing through NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, we discovered the Global Historical Climatology Network which collects, aggregates, and standardizes daily weather information from more than 90,000 weather stations, dating as far back as 1800. While we come across many incredible public datasets in our work at Enigma, this one immediately stood out for its remarkable combination of geographic granularity and temporal breadth