Author: Aleszu Bajak
Media Watch: 538’s Hilary Krieger on covering Donald Trump
Last month, Hilary Krieger, Washington editor for FiveThirtyEight, spoke with students at Northeastern’s School of Journalism about the challenge of covering the Trump administration and how her organization hopes to pull […]
A classroom card game to teach digital storytelling skills
Last weekend, at the Journalism Interactive conference hosted by the University of Maryland, I presented a card game that I have been prototyping for the last year in classrooms from […]
Media Watch: JTA’s Ron Kampeas on covering Donald Trump
On October 12, Ron Kampeas, the Washington bureau chief for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, spoke at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about reporting in Trump’s Washington. Media Watch: Assessing the […]
Media Watch: National Journal’s Brendan Bordelon on covering Donald Trump
On October 5, Brendan Bordelon, a technology and cybersecurity reporter at the National Journal, spoke at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about reporting on cybersecurity and Russia’s meddling in U.S. […]
Media Watch: NPR’s Greg Myre on covering Donald Trump
On September 28, Greg Myre, a national security correspondent for National Public Radio, visited Northeastern University’s School of Journalism to discuss how covering national security has changed since 9/11, whether […]
How to convert a Google Doc to RMarkdown and publish on Github pages
Professors across the country are scrambling to tidy up their syllabi. But how to best share them with students? I’ll be publishing my “Digital Storytelling and Social Media” syllabus on […]
How to build a “magnifying glass” animation with jQuery
Last fall, The New Yorker published a short piece by Rebecca Solnit that features a map modeled after New York City’s subway map that pays homage to the city’s women. […]
How an Italian information designer visualized Bob Dylan lyrics and Pulitzer Prizes
How many different worlds do Bob Dylan’s lyrics paint? How many societal changes and events can one infer by exploring Pulitzer prizewinning stories and photographs? Those are the kinds of […]
Measuring the impact of investigative reporting by local TV news stations
School bus drivers in Texas running red lights? Kansas police departments failing to run background checks on their own officers? Those important – and worrying – stories, run by KXAS-TV […]
How one freelancer uses adventure writing as a vehicle for exploring culture
Kade Krichko feels like he’s been going non-stop since graduating with a journalism degree from Northeastern. After a stint at Powder magazine and several international reporting trips to countries like […]
How Seattle’s KCTS 9 built an interactive website about the sharks of Puget Sound
Did you know that sixgill sharks, which usually keep to the dark, open ocean, are roaming Seattle’s Puget Sound? Last summer, independent filmmaker Michael Werner teamed up with Seattle public […]
How an Argentine real estate platform is building visualizations for Latin American newsrooms
How much will an apartment within walking distance to a subway station cost you in São Paulo? What about a home overlooking a park in Buenos Aires? Those are the […]
How The Economist visualized Spotify data on the Beatles on deadline
At the end of last month, the Beatles album “Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band” turned 50. To celebrate, The Economist’s James Tozer published a review and data analysis of […]
What NPR learned from broadcasting more than 1,375 videos on Facebook Live
“This is totally new for me to join you this way,” said National Public Radio host Robert Siegel while reporting on Facebook Live from Luxembourg just before the Brexit vote last year. That live, […]
Eight interactive stories from Latin America you should check out
From immersive investigative journalism to interactive documentaries that broadcast voices of the voiceless, Latin America boasts a catalog of multimedia projects from which storytellers of all stripes can draw inspiration. Below, […]
How to use ProPublica’s Congress API to see where senators stand on issues
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times used ProPublica’s Congress API to visualize the U.S. Senate’s response to President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey. Released to the public […]
How the L.A. Times tracked down and visualized every congressional statement on James Comey’s firing
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times visualized the U.S. Senate’s response to President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey. To retrieve the statements, the Times used ProPublica’s Congress API, which […]
How Sosolimited built a headline explorer to compare every NYT and WSJ headline of 2016
Earlier this year, Sosolimited, a design studio that creates digital and physical data experiences for the websites and lobbies of companies like Qualcomm, Google and LG, put on a workshop for students […]
Should newspapers be adding confidence intervals to their graphics?
Why do we have such a hard time visualizing uncertainty? Amanda Cox, editor of The Upshot at The New York Times, touched on that theme in her keynote presentation at the OpenVis […]
Five investigative stories produced by Northeastern journalism students this year
Do police departments across Massachusetts have guidelines for using deadly force on the mentally ill? How fast does Boston clean up dead rats in poor neighborhoods? And why is the […]
How to make small multiples in R using geom_line()
We’ve been exploring and visualizing datasets from the fivethirtyeight R package for various Storybench tutorials. (See our tidyr tutorial and our barplot tutorial). Below, we’ve written a tutorial to create a grid of line charts that all use the […]
How to create a barplot in R
In playing with the fivethirtyeight R package for another Storybench tutorial, we learned some basics of plotting a bar chart in R using data from a csv. Below, we’ve outlined the […]
How The Intercept visualized and open-sourced a database of terrorism prosecutions since 9/11
Last month, The Intercept published “Trial and Terror,” a database of – and series of stories about – the 796 people prosecuted for international terrorism by the United States since the attacks of September […]
How to geocode a csv of addresses in R
Sometimes all you want are some lat, long coordinates to map your data. The following tutorial shows you how to batch geocode a csv of addresses in R using the […]
Nine projects that came out of Northeastern’s Media Innovation program this year
Before we bid adieu to our latest cohort of Media Innovation graduate students, we wanted to highlight some of the stellar work they’ve done here at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. We’re still […]
How to create a simple line chart in R
R can be used to explore, clean, analyze and visualize data. The following tutorial will get you started using R’s ggplot2 package to make a simple line chart from a csv of […]
How the L.A. Times mapped new buildings near freeways to highlight health risks
More and more Californians are living near freeways and that’s a problem because those people are breathing in soot and other carcinogens from passing vehicles. That’s according to environmental health […]
Tips on data visualization from the Broad Institute’s Bang Wong
Last month, Bang Wong, creative director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard University, visited Northeastern University for a talk entitled “Art and Science: A partnership catalyzing discovery in biomedicine” hosted […]
Telling the story of plastic bags, plastic forks and “microplastics” polluting our planet
“The average plastic bag is used for only 12 minutes before it is discarded,” writes journalist Konstantin Kakaes in “A Hundred Million Invaders,” a project on plastic pollution published today […]
How Northeastern design students are reimagining public transportation and the experience of “waiting”
Could a bus stop offer you directions to a coffee shop? Why don’t airports superimpose flight information on their windows? And don’t you hate getting out at the wrong subway exit? […]