Learn more about the on-going projects StoryBench is tackling.

2020 Election Tracker

• How The Washington Post visualized the Republican primary debatesDecember 6, 2023
  From the very first moments of the Aug. 23 Republican primary debate, Hannah Dormido was furiously scribbling in her notebook. Each time Trump’s name was mentioned, check. Hunter Biden, check. Ukraine, check. Her process is a cluttered scramble, but the finished product is a clean, easily-digestible series of visuals explaining the debate’s key themes and
• 5 ways news organizations are visualizing election dataNovember 2, 2023
  Believe it or not, the first presidential primary is only three months away.  Let us take a look at five smart ways that news organizations are presenting election data, such as candidates’ profiles, voting demographics and districting, so you can make your data visualizations more powerful and better inform readers. Let users try out different scenarios
• How to analyze the screen times of presidential candidatesOctober 31, 2023
  Who and what is being discussed on cable television news can reveal a lot about our current media landscape or political state of affairs.  The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, built by Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab and John S. Knight Fellowship Program, provides the data for us to look at trends in cable news
• Reopen schools narrative spreads across shadowy local news sitesAugust 26, 2020
  Americans are divided about reopening schools this fall and polls show that this disagreement falls along party lines with Republicans more in favor of children returning to schools. Which is why it wasn’t surprising when we found a pro-school reopening narrative popping up this summer on a large network of local and business news websites

Reinventing TV

• How Grist uses scrollytelling in its story on stolen Indigenous land to engage with its audienceOctober 10, 2024
  Scrollytelling has become a way for journalists and media outlets to engage their audience, and online platforms in a way that will keep their readers locked into the story. While Grist, an independent, non-profit media organization, utilizes this innovative technique, they don’t lose sight of the core of their story.  Founded in 1999 by Chip
• “The news has a boring problem”: Sean McLaughlin has big ideas to save TV newsJuly 17, 2024
  Tired of the constant, unvaried nature of today’s television newscasts, Sean McLaughlin – former anchor, reporter, and news director for various news stations – has dedicated his recent career to innovating newsrooms nationwide, going so far as to eliminate anchor roles and changing the newscast format.  Most recently, he served as the senior vice president
• Learning from TikTok: Lessons for TV News in How #BookTok Broke Big on Social MediaMay 22, 2024
  Growing up, Kayla Agnoli’s head was always buried in a book. She spent hours immersed in different worlds, captivated by different storylines. While her time was spent transporting herself through literature, her classmates couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just watch TV.  Joining TikTok gave her a community of over 6,000 followers and 627.4k likes, where
• How Vox uses animation to make complicated topics digestible for everyoneApril 18, 2024
  With almost 12 million subscribers on YouTube, Vox has established itself as one of the most prominent video media outlets. Explainer videos such as “Why we all need subtitles now” and “Teaching in the US vs. the rest of the world” have garnered millions of views with thousands of comments.  It is no surprise that

Climate Journalism Lab

• The Shore Line Project turns the tide on environmental discourseFebruary 29, 2024
  Shorelines are where half the world’s population lives, bursting with attractive greenery and many natural resources. But they are facing inherent risk due to rising seas and violent storms. A compelling interactive documentary, “The Shore Line” utilizes powerful visualization techniques to unravel the intricate web of challenges and connections between communities and their shorelines in
• How Felippe Rodrigues at New Zealand’s Stuff brought to life a chart of Earth’s changing temperatureNovember 27, 2022
  In conversations about climate change, climate skeptics frequently raise the point that the temperature has always fluctuated and has been on the rise for millennia. In fact, this is true. But the average temperature of the Earth has never risen so drastically or as quickly as it has during the last 100 years. Felippe Rodrigues,
• Scrollytelling innovation: New York Times journalists on climate change, visualization, and intense teamworkNovember 1, 2022
  As visual storytelling libraries clutter newsroom servers, multimedia projects involving data visualizations, photos, videos, and even augmented reality components are becoming more and more popular. But it is unclear to today’s up-and-coming journalists whether those interested in reporting are also expected to master these complex technologies. “The Coming California Megastorm,” a New York Times story
• How the Allen Coral Atlas is mapping and monitoring coral reefs worldwideOctober 20, 2020
  Although coral reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor, their importance extends well beyond their size. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 500 million people survive on coral reefs for income, and their economic value in the U.S. is estimated at $3.4 billion each year. More importantly, healthy coral reefs

Data Journalsim in R

• Turning your small-multiple charts into maps using ROctober 1, 2024
  The geofacet R package provides a way to flexibly visualize data for different geographical regions, combining multiple small charts into a map.
• Getting started with stringr for textual analysis in RFebruary 8, 2024
  Manipulating characters – a.k.a. non-numerical data – is an essential skill for anyone looking to visualize or analyze text data. This tutorial will go over a few of the base R functions for manipulating strings in R, and introduce the stringr package from the tidyverse. The datasets being used are being analyzed as part of
• How to use R to analyze racial profiling at police stopsNovember 21, 2023
  Working as a data journalist for Eye on Ohio, along with a team of reporters at the Cincinnati Enquirer, I developed a project on the role of racial profiling in police stops in Ohio’s largest cities. The work was part of Stanford University’s open policing project. Stanford developed the base R script for this —
• How to analyze the screen times of presidential candidatesOctober 31, 2023
  Who and what is being discussed on cable television news can reveal a lot about our current media landscape or political state of affairs.  The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, built by Stanford University’s Computer Graphics Lab and John S. Knight Fellowship Program, provides the data for us to look at trends in cable news