Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
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How Usability Testing Can Improve News Stories
By Clarisa Diaz
Posted onWorking in the news cycle often leaves little time to design different iterations of story ideas, and even less time to test them with an audience. But as an author or designer—and as a media outlet which provides a public service, like WNYC at New York Public Radio—we have a responsibility to know how the public might understand and engage with our stories. The reason to make time for some kind of usability testing is because it makes our work better and increases its impact on the audience we serve.
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The Twitterverse of Donald Trump, In 26,234 Tweets
By Lam Thuy Vo
Posted onWe wanted to get a better idea of where President-elect Donald Trump gets his information. So we analyzed everything he has tweeted since he launched his campaign to take a look at the links he has shared and the news sources they came from. But first, we had to get the tweets.
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How The Los Angeles Times Transformed its Publishing Tools with a UX Design Approach
By H. Charley Bodkin
Posted onThe Los Angeles Times created a new publishing system by focusing on the needs of editors and reporters, supporting great journalism with better tools.
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How (And Why) We Built A World Series Simulator
By Chris Hagan
Posted onWe created a tool that allowed users to peek under the hood of the MLB playoffs by simulating the postseason as many times as they wanted, which we hope taught even baseball fans something new about their sport.
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How NPR Transcribes and Fact-Checks the Debates, Live
By Tyler Fisher
Posted onFor the presidential debate season, NPR is providing live transcripts of the debate with embedded fact checks and annotations throughout each debate night. Coordinating the workflow between live transcriptions, live fact-checking, and a live-updating page inside of our CMS was no small undertaking, resulting in what may have been our team’s most complicated technical architecture yet.
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Elephants Count: Designing the Elephant Atlas
By Jane Friedhoff
Posted onHow we designed a visualization platform and API to share data about the alarming decline of elephant populations across Africa.
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Now This Is a Story All About How We Found the Wet Princes of Bel Air
By Michael Corey
Posted onHow Reveal found Los Angeles’s biggest residential water users by using satellite imagery, QGIS and more: a non-layman’s guide.
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GIFfable Audio at SRCCON
By Jane Friedhoff
Posted onOur SRCCON session was sparked by our work on an audio-sharing tool called Shortcut, which is a tool that makes it easy for podcast fans to share their favorite moments on social media. What seemed like a relatively straightforward project ended up spiraling out into a set of super-interesting questions around design, technology, and reasons why people share.
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How We Rebuilt the Wall Street Journal’s Graphics Team
By Stuart A. Thompson
Posted onThe Wall Street Journal recently took steps to merge our print graphics department with our interactive team. Our new team is simply named Graphics.
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How the Guardian Made RioRun
By Aliza Aufrichtig, Kenan Davis, Jan Diehm, Rich Harris, Lauren Leatherby, and Nadja Popovich
Posted onRioRun is an “interactive podcast” that takes you on a guided tour of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic marathon course—all 26.2 miles of it—as you run. Here’s how we made it.
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How We Made “Make it Stop”
By Gabriel Florit, Elaina Natario, and Michael Workman
Posted onThe Boston Globe’s newsroom development team built “Make it Stop,” a powerful editorial statement on gun control after the Orlando shootings, in just 13 hours. Here’s how they did it — and the tools and workflows they made well in advance to enable (extremely) rapid development.
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News nerds, what do you need?
By Erika Owens
Posted onWe’d love to learn more about your experience as part of the journalism-code community through an exciting new survey
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Investigating 13,000 “Good” Nursing Homes in Germany
By Sandhya Kambhampati
Posted onWe built a web platform to help readers make better, more informed decisions about nursing homes for their loved ones.
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Tracking Title IX Investigations
By Joshua Hatch
Posted onThe Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest news application, which tracks the U.S. Department of Education’s investigations into how colleges handle reports of sexual assault under the gender-equity law Title IX, grew out of extensive reporting on the subject. For us, it’s a testament to the power of collaboration and experimentation—here’s how it came together, why we rebuilt it shortly after launching it, and what we learned in the process.
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How We Built a Police Reform Tracker on a Platform Made for Rap Lyrics
By Darryl Holliday
Posted onHow do you turn a groundbreaking 200-page report on police misconduct into a set of actionable, trackable reforms? City Bureau’s solution: an accountability tracker tool built on Genius, an annotations platform best known for decoding rap lyrics.
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The Hamilton Algorithm
By Joel Eastwood and Erik Hinton
Posted onThe secret weapon wielded by the Enterprise Visuals team at the Wall Street Journal is collaboration. A lot of it. For our latest project, which dissects the rhyme schemes of the hit musical Hamilton, our team of designers, developers and data journalists worked together to create a new data visualization type that could capture the lyrical complexity of rhyming verse.
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How We Built the New ProPublica Mobile Apps
By David Sleight
Posted onA few weeks ago, ProPublica rolled out new versions of our app for iOS and Android. (If you haven’t tried them yet, stop reading this and go download them immediately!) Rebuilt and redesigned from scratch, they’re the result of a fundamental rethink that kicked off late last year.
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All Aboard the Twitterbot
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Posted onThe @choochoobot is a Twitter account that posts emoji trains sweeping through emoji landscapes. Here’s what it tells us about making bots these days.
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Simbot, Give Me Five
By Yian Shang and Elena Zheleva
Posted onAt Vox Media, data science and data engineering are working together to build products with editors’ and journalists’ needs in mind. One such experimental product is a Slackbot that enables editors to discover relevant content on demand.
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Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Bots
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Posted onThe Platte Basin Timelapse Project started in March 2011 with the goal of placing timelapse cameras throughout the basin and documenting time passing along one of Nebraska’s most important water resources. Now, they have more than 40 cameras placed, each taking photos during daylight, every day, every hour, all year long. Over the life of the project, they’ve gathered more than a million images and terabytes of data.
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