Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

Features

Fact-checking in 2024? Five tools to help with research and promotion

By Erica Ryan

Posted on February 13, 2024
Newsrooms often devote more time to fact-checking during election season—for good reason! These tools can make the most of yours.
Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found

By Sanjin Ibrahimovic

Posted on October 31, 2023
A side-by-side comparison of five OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from DocumentCloud.
We’re Building a New Central Resource for Public Data

By Jacob Fenton and Jennifer LaFleur

Posted on October 24, 2019
Stories about conflicts of interest, influence, and accountability often require journalists to search across many different datasets, which are rarely in the same place. The Investigative Reporting Workshop created The Accountability Project to make much of that data available in one search.
The Totally Incomplete Guide to Finding and Publishing Data

By Amanda Hickman

Posted on March 19, 2019
Whether you’re a seasoned data journalist or brand new to thinking about data as a source in your reporting, there are exceptional places to find data that you may never have considered.
Our Search for the Best OCR Tool, and What We Found

By Ted Han and Amanda Hickman

Posted on February 19, 2019
We couldn’t find single side by side comparison of the most accessible OCR options, so we ran a handful of documents through seven different tools, and compared the results.
New Open Source Tools for Journalism Educators

By Allison Lichter Joseph

Posted on January 22, 2019
Tools and resources, including a cool deck of cards, to teach journalism or just get yourself out of a rut.
Rebuilding Ad Tech: Open Source, Publisher First

By Amanda Hicks and Aram Zucker-Scharff

Posted on August 14, 2018
A recap of our SRCCON session on how ad tech could be so much better.
Meet Column Setter

By Rob Weychert

Posted on January 23, 2018
A tool that enables rapid prototyping with squeaky-clean code—today we’re making it open source.
Black Box Be Gone: Tools for Human-Optimized Data Analysis

By Hannah Cushman

Posted on December 13, 2017
Choosing the right tools for literate data analysis can make it much easier on your team. Here’s a few suggestions, from the team at DataMade.
Our IKEA-Inspired Kit for Newsroom Processes

By Robin Kwong

Posted on March 9, 2017
As special projects editor at the Financial TImes, I created a project management toolkit for the newsroom, designed to be useful to reporter and editors. My hope is that by doing so we can produce better journalism, create room for experimentation, and learn from our experiences.
Introducing autoEdit: Video Editing Made Better

By Pietro Passarelli

Posted on January 17, 2017
A new Mac OS X desktop app, autoEdit, creates automatic transcription from a video or audio file. The user can then make text selections and export those selections as a video sequence, in the editing software of their choice.
Guri VR: Virtual Reality for the Rest of Us

By Dan Zajdband

Posted on July 19, 2016
Here are three tools for making VR in the open web, whether or not you’re a developer.
“View Source” for Data Visualizations

By Allison McCartney

Posted on May 25, 2016
During the most recent SNDMakes design sprint and prototyping event, teams were prompted to think about how they might expand the news and information design communities. Our team hoped to expand the news and information design communities by giving them a common project for fostering collaboration, and the end result was Visualization Verification View (V³).
Introducing Elex, a Tool to Make Election Coverage Better for Everyone

By Jeremy Bowers and David Eads

Posted on December 10, 2015
“End the elections arms race” has become a rallying cry in American data journalism. Many newsrooms spend tremendous resources writing code to simply load and parse election data. It’s time we stopped worrying about the plumbing and started competing on the interesting parts. We decided it was time we put some code against our beliefs – our contribution is a tool we’re calling Elex. And it needs your help, too.
Better Analytics for Newsrooms with GADash

By Tara Adiseshan and Tiff Fehr

Posted on December 3, 2015
At the New York Times, the Interactive News team wants to build tools that make the world of analytics more accessible to newsroom teams. Earlier this year, members of the team began working on Google Analytics Dashboard (GADash), an app-specific display of key figures, traffic patterns, and charts for some of our custom story presentations, as well as general page reports.
Introducing agate: a Better Data Analysis Library for Journalists

By Christopher Groskopf

Posted on October 27, 2015
Meet agate, a Python data analysis library optimized not for performance, but for the performance of the human who is using it. That means focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. Here’s why you should try it.
The Lure of the One True System

By Robinson Meyer

Posted on September 18, 2015
Across many days at SRCCON, I heard many people express a common wish: a single piece of software that would unify every piece of knowledge in a newsroom. Reporters’ notes, interview transcripts, style guides, story drafts, published articles, and updated corrections: All of it would be eaten by this wonderful engine. It would store notes and publish stories and accumulate knowledge and even handle permissions.
Introducing Tik Tok: Beautiful Timelines, the Easy Way

By Alan Palazzolo

Posted on September 1, 2015
Tik Tok creates elegant vertical timelines by pulling from a variety of data sources. It’s designed for newsroom coders of all levels. If you can copy and paste, you’re on your way.
Building on Data Viz for All

By Julia Smith

Posted on August 10, 2015
Helping newsrooms improve interactive graphics and data visualizations by making them more accessible to all users.
Opening Up Doc2Media

By Juan Elosua

Posted on August 7, 2015
Earlier this year at La Nación, we developed Doc2Media, an app that adds media resources to documents hosted on DocumentCloud. We created it to visualize hearings from a famous trial led by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who died in unclear circumstances hours before testifying against the Argentinian president. After we finished the project, we wanted to extend its functionality and abstract it to a tool that can be used in other projects as well as by other newsrooms.