Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Features
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Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Bots
By
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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What Is the Sound of PunditBot Yapping?
By Jeremy B. Merrill
Posted onThe best PunditBot can do is imitate cable-news pundits or sports commentators filling airtime with useless predictions, largely because it lacks a human’s domain knowledge and ethical drive to use journalism to inform democracy and craft a fairer society. My experiment with PunditBot makes me bearish on independent robotic journalists (and bearish on human TV pundits) but I’m optimistic for a future of human-robot journalism teams.
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How I Investigated Uber Surge Pricing in D.C.
By Jennifer A. Stark
Posted onAs part of my research with the Tow Center, I investigated the geographical and demographic data around how Uber works in D.C., to find out if its wait times varied by neighborhood (and, as a result, by demographic). Here’s how I did it.
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The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers
By Mar Cabra and Erin Kissane
Posted onAs the ICIJ-led consortium prepares for the second major wave of reporting on the Panama Papers, we spoke with Mar Cabra, editor of ICIJ’s Data & Research unit and lead coordinator of the data analysis and infrastructure work behind the leak. In our conversation, Cabra reveals ICIJ’s years-long effort to build a series of secure communication and analysis platforms in support of genuinely global investigative reporting collaborations.
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Why We Built The Record
By Andy Rossback and Ivar Vong
Posted onIntroducing The Record, the Marshall Project’s compendium of reporter-curated criminal justice links.
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Crowdsourcing a Public Records Audit
By Danielle Keeton-Olsen
Posted onFrom a pure reading of Ohio Revised Code 149.43 (B) (2), it would seem that anyone who walks into a public office should run into public employees who are prepared to handle record requests and able to turn them around quickly, if not immediately. Though I had not tried before, my past experiences with email record requests made a speedy, question-free response from an OU office seem like a fantasy. We wanted to test the results.
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Automating XKCD-Style Narrative Charts
By Simon Elvery
Posted onI’ve been exploring how to tell complex stories on the web for quite a long time. When presenting a complex story to an audience, the goal is often to simplify the complexity without sacrificing so much detail that important elements are lost. XKCD’s movie narrative charts do this in a novel and effective way. On one hand, they provide the ability to see the shape of the story in one easily digested image. While at the same time they allow you to drill deeper, getting into the structure and detail of the story.
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How We Made “Meanwhile, Near Saturn”
By Jonathan Keegan
Posted onAt NICAR 2015 I saw Al Shaw’s talk about how he worked with LANDSAT satellite imagery to build “Losing Ground.” Al described how he and his colleagues at ProPublica built a suite of custom tools to work with LANDSAT data to tell the story of the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. I was impressed and inspired by their work, and by Al’s reminder that the decades of data and imagery produced by NASA’s satellites and probes were a public-domain treasure trove that surely held many opportunities for storytelling.
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Animated Spray-Painting Candidates at the Guardian US
By Kenan Davis, Rich Harris, Nadja Popovich, and Kenton Powell
Posted onOver the course of the 2016 US election season, we’ll be highlighting plenty of hardworking projects designed to make elections coverage better for all—like elex and OpenElections—but also the offbeat, playful, and experimental approaches that newsrooms can work on when the basics are under control. Our first entry in the series comes from the Guardian US interactive team, who took a moment to break down their animated results maps that debuted in last week’s Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary.
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Analyzing Emotional Language in 21 Million News Articles
By Yelena Mejova
Posted onAll of us have encountered a particularly emotionally charged news article, with every word betraying the author’s bias. But a single reader would have to be a dedicated follower of a news organization to really understand how much opinion is habitually betrayed in its work. To find out how carefully major news organizations moderate their language in articles on controversial topics, we at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) used computational techniques to analyze millions of articles from 15 large news organizations in the U.S. Some agencies, we found, do not shy from emotion-laden and biased rhetoric—the Huffington Post and Washington Post, for example. But we also found that, on average, the use of highly emotional language is curbed, pointing to possible self-moderation.
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Inside the Wall Street Journal’s Prediction Calculator
By Martin Burch
Posted onWe made an interactive based on a government agency’s method of predicting a person’s race and ethnicity based solely on their name and address. The response from our readers was, fittingly, a little unpredictable.
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How We Made Vigils in Paris, a VR Story
By Graham Roberts
Posted onOn November 20, the New York Times released “Vigils in Paris”—a virtual reality film that captured a city in mourning after the terror attacks a week earlier. It was the first VR project from the Times produced completely in-house. Graham Roberts, senior graphics editor at the Times, spoke with us over email about how they made it, and what the future of VR looks like.
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How We Made Youth Radio’s West Side Stories
By Lo Bénichou, Teresa Chin, and Elisabeth Soep
Posted onWhether in the Bay Area or elsewhere across the country, stories about gentrification tend to reduce the dynamics to one narrative. Newcomers displace longtime residents, erasing history, shifting the economy, and disrupting culture in the process. Focusing on West Oakland, the Youth Radio team behind West Side Stories wanted to surface the many nuanced and sometimes conflicting stories sparked by extreme neighborhood change. Here’s what they made.
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Membrane: An Experiment in Permeable Publishing
By Jane Friedhoff
Posted onOver the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.
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How We Made the 3D Tour de France Interactive
By Andrew Mason
Posted onOur Tour de France 3D interactive brought users right into one of the steepest, toughest, most iconic stages of the race, using WebGL.
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How We Made “Failure Factories”
By Nathaniel Lash and Adam Playford
Posted onFor several weeks, the Tampa Bay Times has been publishing Failure Factories, a series exploring the effects of the Pinellas County school district’s decision to resegregate its schools. On the web we decided to try something new: kicking off the series with a D3-powered graphic that used data to show readers how dire the situation is for black students in south St. Petersburg. We were aiming for a brief and engaging piece that would invest readers in the stories to come. In that sense, our experiment was successful. #FailureFactories was trending in the Tampa Bay region before the first day of the project ran. We heard from readers across the country that they were waiting anxiously for the series, and both the graphic and the 5,000-word first installment in the series have been among the most viewed stories we’ve published this year.
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Rethinking the Building Blocks of a Chronicle Interactive
By Maegan Clawges, Michael Grant, and Aaron Williams
Posted onThe Airbnb Effect, the San Francisco Chronicle’s follow-up story to a 2014 analysis of Airbnb listings in the city, was the first project the Chronicle’s Interactive desk published. The project tested the limits of the Chronicle’s CMS, and it is now the baseline we’re using for our larger enterprise features. Here’s a look at how it got started.
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Demo Sites Are Weird
By Ryan Mark and Kavya Sukumar
Posted onSince the launch of Autotune, we have been approached by people interested in adopting it for their own newsrooms. While a lot of people didn’t mind diving right into the set up, a few people asked us “Is there anywhere I can try this out?”. Fueled by the amazing coffee selection at the most recent OpenNews code convening in Portland, we decided to build a demo site that allows users to try building projects and get a feel for the framework.
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Draw Your Own Election Adventure
By Juan Elosua
Posted onAt La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.
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Introducing Lunchbox
By Tyler Fisher and Livia Labate
Posted onAt the OpenNews July 2015 Code Convening, the NPR Visuals Team built and released a desktop app for creating shareable images across social media platforms.
What does peer support in journalism look like: Insights from U.S. and international experts