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Author: Yan Wu

Yan Wu is an interactive journalist with NJ Advance Media. Previously, she worked for the Boston Globe. Before enrolling in the Media Innovation graduate program at Northeastern University, she was an editor and journalist in China.

How we plotted 17,000 data points in 3D to explore police use of force in New Jersey

Last November, I pushed my first commit to Github having no idea what I was in for: creating visualizations with more than 17,000 data points representing police officers who had […]

January 3, 2019April 10, 2019 Yan Wu Behind the scenes

How the Wall Street Journal filmed a 360-degree video on mixed martial arts

Last month, The Wall Street Journal published a 360-degree video to accompany “The New Queen of the UFC Defends Her Crown,” a 2,200-word article on Amanda Nunes, a top female […]

August 10, 2017August 8, 2017 Yan Wu Behind the scenes

How to get more bang for your buck out of science photographs

Do science pictures need to be pretty? Is there ever a case for retouching a science photograph? And do good images help researchers get attention for their work? Yes, yes and […]

May 2, 2017 Yan Wu Insights

How one French data visualization studio is bridging narrative and statistics

Could a quiz help explain the massive amounts of money controlled by Fifa, the international soccer organization? Could a visualization help French citizens imagine the makeup of a future government? And […]

April 28, 2017May 1, 2017 Yan Wu Behind the scenes

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

The Wall Street Journal recently published an interactive graphic showing the Trump family’s more than 500 potential conflicts of interest. In it, a galaxy of dots and lines show the complicated relationships […]

March 11, 2017April 26, 2017 Yan Wu Behind the scenes

One computer scientist’s strategies for improving network visualizations

We are living in a world that is awash in data. To present complex information, people use visualizations that help detect trends, clusters, gaps and outliers almost instantly. But are these […]

March 7, 2017May 28, 2019 Yan Wu Insights, Research

Using animation to protect sources while telling true stories of gay life in China

The tremendous anti-gay stigma in mainland China has made it difficult for stories about homosexuality to emerge in the Chinese media outlets, even though pockets of tolerance are beginning to […]

February 20, 2017April 26, 2017 Yan Wu Insights

How a Chinese news app has users earning money reading and sharing news

Bingdu is a Chinese news app that allows users both to read the news and make money off their experience. It was downloaded nearly 5 million times within two months of its launch […]

December 21, 2016April 26, 2017 Yan Wu Insights

How The New York Times made the #thisis2016 video of Asian-Americans responding to racism

After a woman told his family to “go back to China” last month, Michael Luo, deputy Metro editor and an editor on the Race Related team at The New York Times, […]

November 15, 2016November 16, 2016 Yan Wu Behind the scenes

How machine learning could change journalism

A fact-checking tool built into a content management system, text “filters” that could detect spam messages, a search engine that could give results according to a user’s level of education. Walter […]

November 3, 2016November 3, 2016 Yan Wu Insights

A new video storytelling platform tries to make filmmaking easier

The University of Arizona recently licensed a new social media and video platform called Filmstacker. It helps users upload their own video, search for other video clips, and assemble them into their […]

October 21, 2016October 21, 2016 Yan Wu Insights

How a photojournalist is using cartooning in international reporting

The harrowing cartoon images in Ca$h Cow, a series about a Tanzania girl who was abducted and then raped and beaten every day for eleven months represent a new genre […]

October 18, 2016October 18, 2016 Yan Wu Insights

How the AP experimented with 360 video after the Chelsea bombing in NYC

At 2:52 a.m on September 18, less than seven hours after the bombings in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the Associated Press uploaded to Facebook a one-minute-long 360-degree video of people reacting to the explosion. […]

October 3, 2016October 3, 2016 Yan Wu Behind the scenes, Insights, Interviews
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.

Storybench on Twitter
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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