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Author: Aleszu Bajak

Storybench’s editor is Aleszu Bajak, a science journalist and former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is an alum of Science Friday, the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, and is passionate about breaking down the divide between journalists, developers and designers.

Media Watch: Seung Min Kim on covering Donald Trump

Last month, Politico reporter Seung Min Kim spoke at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about how the press is and should be covering Donald Trump. Media Watch: Assessing the Press […]

December 28, 2017December 27, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

Media Watch: Robert Faturechi on covering Donald Trump

Last month, ProPublica reporter Robert Faturechi spoke at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about the journalistic perils of interviewing Donald Trump. Media Watch: Assessing the Press in the Trump Era is […]

December 18, 2017December 19, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

Seven projects that Northeastern’s journalism graduate students produced this semester

Before we break for the holidays, we wanted to highlight some of the stellar work our graduate students have done here at Northeastern’s School of Journalism as part of courses taught by […]

December 15, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Research

Tips and takeaways from last week’s investigative journalism conference

Last Friday, Northeastern University’s School of Journalism invited an all-star roster of journalists and editors to discuss investigative reporting in the Age of Trump. Entitled “Is Trump Making Investigative Reporting […]

November 20, 2017November 20, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Insights, Research

Media Watch: Charlie Pierce on covering Donald Trump

Last month, Esquire politics blogger Charlie Pierce spoke at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about how the press is and should be covering Donald Trump. Media Watch: Assessing the Press […]

November 15, 2017November 15, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

Media Watch: Ethan Bronner on covering Donald Trump

Last month, Bloomberg News senior editor Ethan Bronner spoke with students at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism about the job of covering the Trump administration. Media Watch: Assessing the Press […]

November 7, 2017November 7, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

How one data-driven art and technology company is understanding cities with AI

Should New York have more than five boroughs? Are zip codes too large? As part of the Northeastern University Visualization Consortium‘s Fall 2017 speaker series, Mahir Yavuz spoke about Topos, the data-driven […]

November 3, 2017November 3, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Research

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 […]

November 2, 2017November 2, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

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 […]

October 23, 2017January 2, 2018 Aleszu Bajak Research

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 […]

October 19, 2017October 17, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Interviews, Media Watch

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. […]

October 17, 2017October 17, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Insights, Media Watch

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 […]

October 12, 2017October 12, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Media Watch, Research

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 […]

August 25, 2017March 23, 2018 Aleszu Bajak How to

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. […]

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017 Aleszu Bajak How to

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 […]

July 17, 2017July 20, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes, Interviews

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 […]

July 12, 2017July 12, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Reinventing Local TV News

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 […]

July 11, 2017July 11, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Interviews, Research

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 […]

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes, Reinventing Local TV News

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 […]

July 5, 2017July 5, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes

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 […]

June 16, 2017June 16, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes

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, […]

June 6, 2017June 6, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Insights, Reinventing Local TV News

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, […]

June 2, 2017June 1, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Roundups

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 […]

May 25, 2017May 25, 2017 Aleszu Bajak How to

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 […]

May 25, 2017June 1, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes

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 […]

May 23, 2017May 23, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes

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 […]

May 19, 2017May 19, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Insights

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 […]

May 17, 2017May 17, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Research

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 […]

May 15, 2017March 23, 2018 Aleszu Bajak How to

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 […]

May 13, 2017March 23, 2018 Aleszu Bajak How to

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 […]

May 10, 2017May 10, 2017 Aleszu Bajak Behind the scenes

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What is Storybench?
Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data visualization and investigative journalism to virtual reality and the digital humanities. In addition to in-depth features and interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the newsroom or classroom.

We also publish research we're running at Northeastern's School of Journalism along with collaborators in data science, communication studies, computational social sciences and information design. These projects include the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact, the Climate Journalism Lab, the 2020 Storybench Election Coverage Tracker and the Reinventing Local TV News project.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
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Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker

The Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker intends to keep tabs on the political coverage of the 2020 presidential election by covering media trends and using various data sources to explore media narratives.

Instead of keeping track of who’s ahead in the horse race, we’ll be turning our focus to those covering the horse race – the media outlets themselves and various proxies for public attention. Follow along here.

Best of Storybench

How the Wall Street Journal visualized 500+ conflicts of interest of the Trumps

Women on the 2020 campaign trail are being treated more negatively by the media

Getting started with data visualization in R using ggplot2

Understanding what makes a visualization memorable

Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document

 

Projects

Over the next two years we’ll be surveying the media’s coverage of the candidates and the issues. Follow along here.

 


The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here.

 

The Climate Journalism Lab

The Climate Journalism Lab aims to examine and unpack the trends, tools and techniques employed by reporters and organizations covering climate change.

 

Join us at Northeastern!

Want to write for Storybench and probe the frontiers of media innovation? Apply for one of our graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Rolling admissions, no GREs required and financial aid available. Email here.

Interviews

Pizza, Press & Politics is our weekly speaker series at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Watch interviews with David Filipov, Mike Workman, Jenn Smith, Martha Durkee-Neuman, Susan Labandibar, John Ward, Marc Fortier, Carol Gregory, Ling-Mei Wong and Elana Gordon.

Collaborative, Open, Mobile

Over the last three years, Storybench has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects.

They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. Read our paper here.

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What is Storybench?
Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data visualization and investigative journalism to virtual reality and the digital humanities. In addition to in-depth features and interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the newsroom or classroom.

We also publish research we're running at Northeastern's School of Journalism along with collaborators in data science, communication studies, computational social sciences and information design. These projects include the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact, the Climate Journalism Lab, the 2020 Storybench Election Coverage Tracker and the Reinventing Local TV News project.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

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