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

• WCBS New York’s Digital Content Creator Maggie Cole on laying the path for a new roleJanuary 14, 2025
  Local television stations all across the country are asking what they can do to draw in younger audiences. To answer that question, Northeastern University’s Reinventing Local TV News Project (RLTVN) placed four fellows in newsrooms across New York, Chicago and Boston. These fellows create content exclusively for the stations’ digital platforms including streaming channels and
• Streaming Content Producer Angela Chen on reinventing local TV news for the streaming generation at ABC7 ChicagoDecember 6, 2024
  Northeastern University’s Reinventing Local TV News Project (RLTVN) wants to revolutionize local TV news to appeal to younger audiences. In partnership with leading newsrooms in Boston, New York and Chicago, the project has funded year-long fellowships for three producers and one animator. At the heart of this effort is a focus on over-the-top content —
• “Wrestling with the past”: How Chris Dalla Riva uncovered the deeper story in Rolling Stones’ GOAT music album rankingsNovember 22, 2024
  At first glance, it’s just a list — a familiar sight to music lovers and critics everywhere, another ranking of the 500 greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, created in 2003, 2012 and 2020. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary list.  In “What Makes an Album
• The election is going to be close — or is it? CNN political data reporter Harry Enten on the science and art of polling.October 31, 2024
  The U.S. presidential election is five days away, and it’s going to be close. Or is it?  CNN Senior Political Data Reporter Harry Enten noted last week that despite polling showing a historically close race, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could still capture more than 300 out of 538 electoral votes – a relative

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