Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
-
By what metric?
By Nausheen Husain, Dhrumil Mehta, and Aarushi Sahejpal
Posted onJoin the Data Journalism Teachers’ Club–a new place for data journalism educators to learn together.
-
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.
-
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?
-
How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today
By Dilcia Mercedes
Posted onAn update based on responses from over 600 journalists.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Lessons from a data project: Investigating Toronto’s multimillion-dollar program to improve road safety
By Inori Roy
Posted onPoor record-keeping foiled our FOIA plans. Here’s what we learned through the simple, tedious process of creating data by hand.
-
How we tracked down and mapped historic street signs in New York City’s Chinatown
By Aaron Reiss
Posted on“Small data”—the kind you might have to get out and collect yourself—can uncover the deeply personal history of a place.
-
Q&As and takeaways: Reporting on corporate landlords
By Tyler Dukes
Posted onHighlights from a recent community call conversation.
-
What we learned from a year of Exit Interviews
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onOpenNews events and programs have always welcomed honest talk about careers, identity, and our sense of belonging in an industry that often isn’t kind to workers. This series was another way to convene a community-wide conversation about our newsrooms and what it would take to make them better.
-
What kind of change could we create, if we truly came together?
By Sisi Wei
Posted onWe heard repeatedly in 2020 that people wanted a space dedicated to anti-racism and equity work, where they could also share working knowledge and ask questions. So many people scattered across journalism organizations are already trying to make their newsrooms anti-racist and equitable — what kind of changes could we bring about if we worked together, shared knowledge together, took action together, and helped each other?
-
How California newsrooms teamed up to gather pandemic data
By Vignesh Ramachandran
Posted onData journalists from eight California newsrooms all benefit from a joint data-collection effort. Here’s how the collaboration works to free up more time for local journalism.
-
The conversations local newsrooms should be having about COVID-19 coverage
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onWe spent August and September in conversation with local journalists covering COVID-19, asking what they need most
-
Introducing ‘Leavers’: results from a survey of 101 former journalists of color
By Carla Murphy
Posted onFor the first time in 50 years, Black and other journalists of color (JOC) are waging a public campaign to air newsroom grievances. How do we move away from 50 years of lip service to sustained newsroom diversity? This survey points the way.
-
Tell us what you need to cover COVID-19
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onFor the next several months, OpenNews and Big Local News will work with local journalists to develop resources their newsrooms can use to better cover COVID-19. What should that support look like? We don’t know yet! But you can help us figure it out.
-
Don’t panic. Collaborate.
By Sarah Alvarez, Garance Burke, Matt Kiefer, and Michael Morisy
Posted onThe Covid Public Info project launched this spring, and has alreadycollected input from thousands of individual community members, filed hundreds of public records requests, and compared notes with dozens of journalists. Here are some highlights of what we’ve learned so far, and ways for you to get involved.
-
Memberkit 1.0: Upgrade your analytics and build a data-powered membership program
By Brian Boyer
Posted onA field-tested set of reports, patterns, and techniques that can help your newsroom think about how to execute a data-driven strategy for membership.
-
How We Flipped Media Literacy and Built Community Literacy Instead
By Cirien Saadeh
Posted onWe are building a community with a different relationship to journalism. It’s an approach rooted in community literacy. For our first issue, we’re telling a different story of the MN State Legislature, by training community members to be journalists.
-
How We Visualized the Challenges and Limitations Facing Autonomous Cars
By Chris Alcantara, Youjin Shin, and Aaron Steckelberg
Posted onHow we reported and developed our own visual story to show the public how an autonomous car sees, thinks, and operates—in sometimes unexpected ways.
7 tips for data-driven journalism about LGBTQ+ communities