Features

1. 

   How We Made Losing Ground

   By Brian Jacobs

   Posted on July 21, 2015

   How we tracked down, processed, filtered, revisualized, mashed up, and otherwise handled a boatload of disparate imagery to map changes in the Louisiana coastline backward and forward in time.

2. 

   Introducing Autotune

   By Ryan Mark, Lauren Rabaino, and Kavya Sukumar

   Posted on July 8, 2015

   Today we’re announcing a new project we’ve been working on at Vox Media: Autotune, a centralized management system for charts, graphics, quizzes, and other tools. We built the application to address the problem of reusability in our work. This project is open source and available to everyone.

3. 

   Reported.ly’s Editorial—and Web—Evolution

   By P. Kim Bui

   Posted on June 22, 2015

   Kim Bui breaks down the iterative process reported.ly’s web presence has undergone alongside the team’s editorial evolution.

4. 

   Tracking Amtrak 188

   By Michael Keller

   Posted on May 18, 2015

   How curiosity and tinkering let Al Jazeera America publish historical data for a derailed train’s route without Amtrak’s cooperation.

5. 

   The Strange Tale of FCCliefs

   By Dylan Yep

   Posted on April 3, 2015

   It started as a joke and turned into hashing through thousands of Net Neutrality comments the hard way, then building a chatbot to post them and interact with curious readers.

6. 

   Scraping Nevada

   By Derek Willis

   Posted on January 14, 2015

   Derek Willis breaks down the three stages of scraping (denial, annoyance, and acceptance) while confronting the election-results form from hell.

7. 

   Introducing Bedfellows

   By Nikolas Iubel

   Posted on December 18, 2014

   The financial relationship between PAC contributors and recipients can be difficult to divine from the information reported to the FEC. Bedfellows is a new Python library based on a model developed at The Upshot for understanding those relationships via several different measures.

8. 

   Tag Soup: Using Custom Elements to Cover Elections and Beyond

   By Thomas Wilburn

   Posted on December 16, 2014

   How the Seattle Times’ election page served as a testbed for custom elements in a news app, and what it means for other news apps teams.

9. 

   Reporting from the Youngest Land on Earth

   By Brian Jacobs and Al Shaw

   Posted on December 8, 2014

   How ProPublica and The Lens got the aerial photos they needed to produce Losing Ground.

10. 

    How to Build an App for 14 Member Newsrooms

    By Denise Malan

    Posted on December 4, 2014

    What INN’s newsroom technology team learned about inter-organizational collaboration while building Power Players, and what they’ll do differently next time.

11. Introducing Clarify

    By Geoff Hing and Derek Willis

    Posted on November 25, 2014

    An open source elections-data URL locator and parser for Clarity Elections results, from the team at OpenElections.

12. 

    Introducing MinnPost’s Election Night API

    By Tom Nehil and Alan Palazzolo

    Posted on November 25, 2014

    The Election Night API is a set of tools, configurations, and instructions to collect and serve election results on election night, while still providing an off-season service, and focusing on saving resources as much as possible.

13. 

    Introducing Wherewolf

    By Noah Veltman and Jenny Ye

    Posted on November 25, 2014

    Last week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.

14. Introducing Whippersnapper

    By Katie Park and Kevin Schaul

    Posted on November 24, 2014

    As part of the OpenNews Code Convening held earlier this month, we’re releasing Whippersnapper—an automated screenshot tool to keep a visual history of content on the web. It builds on top of other open source projects to capture and upload screenshots of a web page, giving users creative power to track how the internet visually changes.

15. 

    Tracking a Record Run Throughout the Season

    By John Hancock and Erika Owens

    Posted on November 19, 2014

    At the beginning of the season, it looked like Dallas Cowboys running back DeMarco Murray might break a record this season. John Hancock explains the interactive the Dallas Morning News put together to track Murray’s progress.

16. 

    Stealing the NPR App Template for Fun and (Non-)Profit

    By Kaeti Hinck, Denise Malan, Ryan Nagle, and Adam Schweigert

    Posted on November 18, 2014

    This month, just in time for the election, our team at the Investigative News Network (INN) launched Power Players—a state-by-state exploration of campaign finance and top political donors across the country. Here’s how we used NPR’s App Template to make it work.

17. 

    Introducing Pulp and Pulp Press

    By Michael Keller

    Posted on November 6, 2014

    Al Jazeera America’s Michael Keller explains how his team designed and built its first piece of comics journalism.

18. 

    The Guardian Launches an Open Redesign for US Readers

    By Erin Kissane

    Posted on October 29, 2014

    The new site is responsive, speedy, and fully backed by new tools for journalists. We spoke with the project’s leaders about their experience, the new features, and what they have planned for the future.

19. 

    The Case for Flat Files in Big Data Projects

    By Chris Wilson

    Posted on October 7, 2014

    Time’s Chris Wilson and Pratheek Rebala open up the enormous Open Payments dataset from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services using flat files and Ajax.

20. Package Data Like Software, and the Stories Will Flow Like Wine

    By Agustin Armendariz, Ben Welsh, and Aaron Williams

    Posted on September 24, 2014

    The California Civic Data Coalition issues a challenge.