Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
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How We Built the Data Team Behind the Panama Papers
By Mar Cabra
Posted onThe International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has been producing global investigations for more than 20 years, but it was only three and a half years ago that ICIJ created an in-house data team. Mar Cabra, who was head of the Data & Research Unit from its creation until September this year, recalls how it all started, the iterations on the software based on the reporting needs and the lessons learned along the way.
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How We Made “The Year in Push Alerts”
By Holly Allen, Laura Bennett, and Andrew Kahn
Posted onA few weeks ago, Slate published a year-in-push-alerts feature that captured much of the sense of escalating anxiety and unreality produced by the last year in breaking news.
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How We Made “The Water Drain”
By Lindsay Muscato and Cecilia Reyes
Posted onTo piece together the bigger picture of water usage and how much people pay, the Tribune team used a variety of data sources, including their own survey. They found wide disparities in what residents were paying for water, with the poorest communities paying the most.
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How to Save DNAInfo/Gothamist Bylines
By Erin Kissane
Posted onThe owner of the DNAInfo and Gothamist family of local news websites shut the sites down today, which means that not only are all their 115 journalists out of work, but all their bylines—and all the vital information in their years of reporting—is gone.
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How (and Why) the Financial Times made The Uber Game
By David Blood, Joanna S. Kao, Nicolai Knoll, Robin Kwong, Callum Locke, and Ændrew Rininsland
Posted onAn experiment by the Financial Times led readers through the life of an Uber driver.
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What We Learned from Staring at Social Media Data for a Year
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onThe things you learn from staring at social media data for a year.
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How We Made Cassini’s Grand Tour
By Brian Jacobs
Posted onHow National Geographic made a visualization of Cassini’s trip through the Saturn system.
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How We Made the Washington Post Eclipse-Scroller
By Bonnie Berkowitz, Armand Emamdjomeh, Laris Karklis, Denise Lu, and Tim Meko
Posted onWith the coming eclipse, we wanted to build a very detailed map of the parts of America that would experience totality. We also wanted to show what the shadow of the eclipse would look like as it traversed the country.
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How We Built a Lifetime Eclipse Predictor
By Denise Lu
Posted onThe idea for our lifetime eclipse-finder project is based around a widely used NASA database of eclipse predictions. The data is dense (5,000 years worth) and I was surprised that nobody in the media dataviz community has really taken advantage of the dataset, in recent years at least.
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How We Resurrected a Dragon
By Brian Jacobs
Posted onA 3D dinosaur, brought to life for National Geographic.
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How We Tracked Cable News Chyrons
By Kevin Schaul
Posted onReporting on media bias and the bubbles it creates is nothing new. But last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing provided a rare opportunity to explore a new angle. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all aired former FBI director James Comey’s testimony live and uninterrupted. The graphics team at The Washington Post tracked what each network displayed in its lower third caption panel—also called a chyron—and showed it to readers as the hearing unfolded. (You can see the finished piece here.)
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Competition Be Damned
By Erin Kissane
Posted onLast Wednesday, the Trump Inaugural Committee’s FEC filing appeared on the FEC site in its horrible hand-delivered image-PDF glory. ProPublica’s Derek Willis noted its arrival on Twitter.
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How Reveal Mapped the “Secret” U.S. Border Fence
By Michael Corey
Posted onThe Trump administration’s pursuit of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has brought back a project that I thought I had finished years ago.
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Subverting the Story Model
By Tyler Fisher
Posted onLet’s articulate the problem. There are too many damn Trump stories. The emergence of products like What The Fuck Just Happened Today?, the New York Times’ The Daily and FiveThirtyEight’s TrumpBeat are a clear indication that audiences are clamoring for a more distilled, high-level view of everything happening at once.
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How We Made Nu Source
By Erin Kissane and Ryan Pitts
Posted onHow our small team redesigned Source, with a design refresh and a new navigation and structure that matches the way we publish now.
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Playing with Suspense in Data Visualizations
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onFor a recent story about how Washington Post editor Doris Truong became the center of a partisan online flame war, we wanted to illustrate what happens when a person becomes part of viral false story and subject to online trolling.
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Notes on Working with Big-ish Data
By Mike Stucka
Posted onI finished a project with a home-built table that was about 16GB, some 60 million rows by 110ish fields. It was…big. Sometimes it was painful. Mostly, though, it worked out, and it got us what I think is a damned good story. Anyway, I think it was Ben Welsh who’d observed something like: We have some good tools to work with Big Data, but not great tools for data that’s not quite so big. I ran into that situation.
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How We Made “Rewind the Red Planet”
By Brian Jacobs
Posted onThe mini-series Mars, that aired on the National Geographic Channel in November 2016, imagined what it would be like to live on Mars in the near future. For the interactive narrative Rewind the Red Planet, we endeavored to show Mars as it was before it was a red desert, back to a time when liquid water may have run freely, between three and four billion years ago. We wanted to allow readers to see ancient Mars in its entirety from a planetary scale, how it may have featured a vast northern ocean, or may have had water trapped in expansive glaciers.
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How The Chicago Reporter Made ‘Settling for Misconduct’
By Matt Kiefer and Julia Smith
Posted onIn researching Settling for Misconduct, we had to account for details from hundreds of county and federal court filings, identify thousands of officers named in civil complaints and tally hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary awards. We also needed thorough reporting to connect issues of police misconduct to fiscal accountability. And oh yeah – we had to have a slick web app to present the data to the public.
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What I Learned from Researching Newsroom On-boarding and Off-Boarding Processes
By Sandhya Kambhampati
Posted onAs a Knight-Mozilla fellow, I wanted to do some type of research during my fellowship that could benefit the news community. During my 10-month fellowship in Berlin in 2016, I spent about eight months researching, collecting data and interviewing reporters, editors, managers, and directors about their on-boarding and off-boarding processes.
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