Articles

Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.

  1. How to tell good LGBTQ+ stories with bad data

    By Jasmine Mithani and Kae Petrin

    Posted on

    Concepts and methods to help you do rigorous journalism even when the data is tricky, Part 1.

  2. 7 tips for data-driven journalism about LGBTQ+ communities

    By Jasmine Mithani and Kae Petrin

    Posted on

    Concepts and methods to help you do rigorous journalism even when the data is tricky, Part 2.

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

    By Erica Ryan

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    Newsrooms often devote more time to fact-checking during election season—for good reason! These tools can make the most of yours.

  4. By what metric?

    By Nausheen Husain, Dhrumil Mehta, and Aarushi Sahejpal

    Posted on

    Join the Data Journalism Teachers’ Club–a new place for data journalism educators to learn together.

  5. Much of what made social media feel special to journalists is gone. What now?

    By Aditi Mukund

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    At SRCCON 2023, we talked about the spaces we’ve lost, why we miss them, and what we can do to take power back from platforms.

  6. How we used an FOI project to show the public the power they can wield

    By Tom Cardoso

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    Secret Canada is an investigation and a public-service teaching tool. Advice about record requests can inspire your readers, too.

  7. Advice for sharing security advice

    By Martin Shelton

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    How to tailor guidance for your audience, and come up with a plan for keeping it up-to-date.

  8. Covering trans issues well just means doing journalism well

    By Kae Petrin

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    We need more accurate and nuanced stories, and the Trans Journalists Association is building a community and resources to help.

  9. Project Diary: How we made the Wage Theft Monitor

    By Max Siegelbaum

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    How Documented fought for data about businesses that have stolen from their workers, and what you need to know to do this kind of project in your state.

  10. Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found

    By Sanjin Ibrahimovic

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    A side-by-side comparison of five OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from DocumentCloud.

  11. Product manager diary: Learning to work with vendors and development teams outside of your organization

    By Madison Karas

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    How do you balance clear communication, changing needs, decisions that predate you—all while you’re staring down a million support tickets?

  12. A lean newsroom’s blueprint for gathering secure tips

    By Halle Stockton

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    How we wired together Signal, Twilio, and a spare cell phone to create a newsroom number for sources who need privacy.

  13. Magic spreadsheets to help you investigate neighborhood inequities

    By Leon Yin

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    Here’s how to use these tools and techniques to bring “receipts from streets” with little-to-no code.

  14. Collaboration can harness the power of technology and data for better story discovery

    By Marnette Federis

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    An event report from Story Discovery At Scale, bringing people together to work on tools and sustainability for local journalism.

  15. How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today

    By Dilcia Mercedes

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    An update based on responses from over 600 journalists.

  16. Using data to investigate inequality, and building a network to find solutions

    By Delgerzaya Delgerjargal

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    At a recent Open Data Day hackathon in Mongolia, a community grew around their exploration of place, pollution, and transit.

  17. How to tell the story of your work (or, one journalist’s process for career success)

    By Michelle Faust Raghavan

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    From goal-setting and short reflections to perfecting your personal narrative, here’s a five-step process that keeps you ready for opportunities.

  18. Choose Your Own Mad Libs (or, how you can plug data into automated stories and free up lots of reporting time)

    By Mike Stucka

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    From housing prices to weather to employment, templates can generate hundreds of stories at once about numbers that people care about.

  19. Sincerely, Leaders of Color: You need to be a different kind of leader in the bad times

    By P. Kim Bui

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    Our eyes are open to the constant uphill battles our news organizations are facing. Here are some tips to help you navigate as a leader.

  20. I tested how well ChatGPT can pull data out of messy PDFs (and here’s a script so you can too)

    By Brandon Roberts

    Posted on

    Scattered errors and hallucinated data make it an exploratory tool, not a shortcut to analysis.

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