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 Georgia Makely is Using Podcasting to Bring Fashion’s Untold Stories to a New GenerationJune 3, 2026
  Fashion has always had gatekeepers. The editors who decide what’s in. The publications that decide who matters. The press dinners where the right people talk to each other. Georgia Makely has spent her career inside those rooms. As Global Director of Digital and Media at Ford Models, she sits across from stylists, editors, and emerging
• How The Washington Post combined data and human stories to cover Hurricane Helene’s aftermath May 27, 2026
  Climate change is both vast and personal making it an ideal  for immersive stories that combine visuals, data and human narratives. Behind these seamless interactive pieces is collaboration, data analysis and firsthand reporting.  We spoke to Brady Dennis, a Washington Post climate reporter about how his team created its immersive story about Hurricane Helene, “The
• How Wall Street Journal Social Media Editor, Gianna Barberia, is Expanding EngagementMay 20, 2026
  Newsrooms across the country need to meet their audience where they are. For many consumers of news today, that means on their phones, on social media.  But posting engaging content on social media requires its own unique set of skills, strategies and editing techniques. That’s where Gianna Barberia, a social media editor at the Wall
• Emily Sweeney is a stahApril 21, 2026
  On March 28, a masked thief broke into an $18 million mansion in Beverly. On March 31, Emily Sweeney—a Northeastern University journalism graduate who first joined The Boston Globe as a co-op—reported the story in a video posted to the outlet’s Instagram account. The clip went viral, not because of the heist’s cinematic absurdity, but

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

• Build a Census Tract-Level Map with R in Just 10 MinutesFebruary 17, 2026
  If you have ever opened the U.S. Census website looking for tract-level data, you know how quickly things can get overwhelming. Tables, codes, geographies, shapefiles, downloads: before you even ask a question, you are already having to decide which tools you need to answer it. Inspired by a video explainer by Kyle Walker, this  tutorial
• How to Analyze bluesky Posts and Trends with RNovember 4, 2025
  If the only things you’re doing on bluesky are scrolling, liking and posting, then you are still riding a bike with training wheels. Hear me out. There are several simple and free tools out there that let you take advantage of bluesky’s secret weapon: its open-source skeleton. A how-to A few firehose ideas: First, you’re probably
• Easily clean up messy databases with fuzzy matching in RSeptember 16, 2025
  One of the biggest challenges working with text data is the many different ways that people can enter the exact same information. A human knows that “St. Lucie, Florida,” “Saint Lucie, FL,” and “St Lucy, Florida” are probably all the same place, but a computer doesn’t. “Fuzzy” matching pulls similarities between the letters in words and
• How to use R to dig for story ideasSeptember 2, 2025
  Many people think of R as a way to visualize data, but it can also be a useful tool to explore datasets and seek possible story ideas. At the 2023 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, Charles Minshew, the digital storytelling editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, walked through using basic R code to question datasets. Knowing