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

2020 Election Tracker

• 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
• How news media are setting the 2020 election agenda: Chasing daily controversies, often burying policyNovember 11, 2019
  It’s a paradox of examining political coverage. Are news media just reporting what the political candidates are talking about? Or does political journalism really set the agenda by selecting stories around specific news items, scandals and issues du jour? Our topic analysis of ~10,000 news articles on the 2020 Democratic candidates, published between March and
• Facebook continues to run political ads with misinformationOctober 24, 2019
  Facebook claims it has enacted measures to stem the spread of misinformation on its platform since the 2016 election. But the platform seems to be applying a different set of standards to politicians. Earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign released an ad on Facebook falsely claiming that Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump for re-election
• Even before Ukraine news, Joe Biden was the 2020 candidate with the most media coverageOctober 16, 2019
  Former Vice President Joe Biden has dominated the mainstream media’s coverage in the last month, even before the whistleblower’s complaint was reported in The Washington Post, prior to the Wall Street Journal suggesting that President Donald Trump urged the Ukranian President to work with personal Attorney Rudy Giuliani, and before the White House released the

Reinventing TV

• The Reinventing Local TV News Project is hiring researchersJuly 10, 2023
  The Reinventing Local TV News Project is back. The initiative, at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, is aimed at exploring the future of streaming video news content and reaching a younger audience. Now, the project is entering its third phase of research by partnering with three leading news stations across New York, Chicago and Boston..
• Interested in doing graduate work in video innovation? Apply now for a Video Innovation Scholarship in Fall 2023!January 5, 2023
  For prospective graduate students interested in video innovation — new techniques and approaches in journalistic storytelling and documentary, as well as VR, AR, and XR — Northeastern’s School of Journalism is offering special Video Innovation Scholarships. Funded Scholars will get deep research experience while earning their MS in Media Innovation & Data Communication or MA
• The TV Animator: Chris Chmura Breaking Ground in Traditional Video-Storytelling Methods to Grow AudiencesMarch 7, 2022
  Over the last few years, local television news stations have been finding ways to implement graphics and animation more effectively to tell their stories while trying to engage a younger audience. It’s an effective strategy backed up by research from the Reinventing Local TV News Project at Northeastern University. Newsrooms are hiring animators, designers, and
• New-age storytelling: How Bianca Graulau used social media to reinvent reporting during the pandemicSeptember 3, 2021
  The coronavirus pandemic has impacted most industries, forcing professionals to adapt to new forms of remote work culture. Even journalists have had to adapt. This has reinforced the importance of digital platforms in journalism and how reliant people have become on social media as the primary means of communication. While many media publications are still

Climate Journalism Lab

• 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
• How The New York Times visualized racist historical redlining and urban heatSeptember 17, 2020
  In late August, The New York Times published “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” a visual reckoning on historical redlining, persistent racial inequality and who feels increased urban heat across U.S. cities today. The project, led by Times climate graphics editor Nadja Popovich and Times climate reporter Brad Plumer, opens with a

Data Journalsim in R

• How to use R to dig for story ideasSeptember 19, 2023
  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
• How to calculate a rolling average in RJune 22, 2020
  Rolling or moving averages are a way to reduce noise and smooth time series data. During the Covid-19 pandemic, rolling averages have been used by researchers and journalists around the world to understand and visualize cases and deaths. This post will cover how to compute and visualize rolling averages for the new confirmed cases and
• Update: How to geocode a CSV of addresses in RJune 13, 2020
  This post is an update from the previous post, “How to geocode a CSV of addresses in R”. We will be using the ggmap package again, and be sure to investigate the usage and billing policy for Google’s Geocoding API. The API now has a pay-as-you-go model, and every account gets a certain number of requests free per month, For
• How to use hierarchical cluster analysis on time series dataDecember 13, 2019
  Which cities have experienced similar patterns in violent crime rates over time? That kind of analysis, based on time series data, can be done using hierarchical cluster analysis, a statistical technique that, roughly speaking, builds clusters based on the distance between each pair of observations. Basically, in agglomerative hierarchical clustering, you start out with every