Tag: data journalism
Bike-friendly Boston: These five datasets let journalists track the city’s progress
A bike is a simple contraption, but making cities bike-friendly? Not so easy. After decades of cars dominating the streets, integrating bike-friendly traffic lanes and traffic patterns is a slow […]
How Lazaro Gamio of the New York Times visualized the COVID-19 death toll
As the number of Americans who have died of COVID-19 has climbed beyond 500,000, it’s become increasingly difficult to conceptualize this number. The New York Times has been tracking COVID […]
C+J 2021: How the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped data journalism
As COVID-19 cases surged throughout the last year, so did data visualizations. Graphical concepts like flattening the curve became household terms, and even non-epidemiologists began talking about R numbers and […]
How the Parametric Press explains the environmental cost of digital consumption
Have you ever wondered how much carbon dioxide is released when you stream or download eBooks or videos? How about when you opened this article on your phone or computer? […]
A roundup of coronavirus dashboards, datasets and resources
Access and availability of data on the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, are essential for understanding how the virus spreads, who is most likely to get it, […]
How Tifo Football is making soccer analytics easier to digest
Soccer – or football, as most of the world calls it – is the most popular sport in the world. As in other major sports, advanced data analytics are being […]
How Vox visualized sea and land ice loss over the last decade
Last December, Vox published a piece that uses interactive images and charts to visualize the loss of sea and land ice over the last decade. The reporter, Umair Irfan, focuses […]
How Vox explained China’s Belt and Road Initiative
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an infrastructure and development plan that will connect China to the rest of the world — an attempted renaissance of the historic Silk […]
How the Wall Street Journal made the College Board’s adversity scores interactive
The world of higher education reporting got more than its share of news coverage in 2019. Actress Felicity Huffman was sentenced to two weeks in jail for paying Rick Singer, […]
How the Washington Post logs fatal police shootings in the U.S.
The Washington Post first began examining fatal police shootings in the United States in 2015. The newspaper’s investigation that uncovered that the FBI was undercounting half the number of fatal […]
What I learned applying data science to U.S. redistricting
Deciding whether to reelect President Donald Trump isn’t the only choice Americans will have to make when they head to the voting booths this November. More than 5,000 state lawmakers […]
How Vox visualized segregation in the United States
Vox data journalist Alvin Chang, an alum of the Boston Globe and ESPN, has been writing stories about segregation for most of his career. Earlier this year, Chang looked at […]
How designer Nadieh Bremer teaches herself new skills to continue visualizing data in new ways
If you are passionate about telling data-driven stories more engagingly, you should not miss out on Nadieh Bremer, a freelance data visualization designer and artist with a background in astronomy […]
How to build margin of victory election maps with Datawrapper
With the campaign for 2020 in full swing, it’s election map season. I was recently poking around Politico’s 2018 midterm election maps and thought I’d recreate their county-by-county Margin of […]
Facebook political ads reveal an early but limited look at the Democratic playbook
In the first three days since launching his 2020 run for president last week, Joe Biden spent more than $400,000 on Facebook ads. His fellow candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie […]
We need deeper reporting and not just horserace coverage of Pete Buttigieg
The media loves a rising star and Pete Buttigieg is no exception. But is “Mayor Pete” just a flash in the pan? Time will tell, as Margaret Sullivan pointed out […]
Illuminating the road to 2020 through media coverage, candidate tweets and Google searches
Aleszu Bajak Storybench’s editor is Aleszu Bajak, a science journalist and former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is an alum of Science Friday, the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, and […]
Six tools showcased at NICAR 2019 that you should probably learn
When it comes to a major data journalism conference like NICAR, you can probably predict that a few popular data visualization and analysis tools are going to receive a lot […]
How a dataset on lighting strikes taught me to not take data at face value
Being struck by lightning is often used as an example of heavenly retribution because it is so unlikely. The occurrence is simply so rare that it might as well be […]
“There is only so much data can tell us”
Nathaniel Rakich, an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, the data-driven site with a heavy focus on politics and sports, took what some might call a less traditional route to working in […]
Six fascinating projects from the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium in Miami
How often is social media used as a source in news stories? Can a decision-tree algorithm generate tens-of-thousands of 250-word stories? And what is belief-driven data journalism? Those questions lie […]
Scraping HTML tables and downloading files with R
The Department of Criminal Justice in Texas keeps records of every inmate they execute. This tutorial will show you how to scrape that data, which lives in a table on […]
The future of machine learning in journalism
Kevin Wall, a visual journalist at The Boston Globe, is just beginning to use machine learning in his reporting. But the large amounts of data he needs to leverage this […]
How to download song lyrics from Genius using Python
Coding and I are not on the best of terms. After a traumatic three-year stretch in middle school in which I barely scraped by in my computer science classes, I […]
Behind the scenes with Galen Druke and FiveThirtyEight’s Politics podcast
The countdown begins. One week until the midterm elections. The politically curious are torturing themselves by hitting refresh on polling data and clinging to forecast updates from sites like FiveThirtyEight. […]
How the Palm Beach Post unearthed an opioid conspiracy with roots in Florida
Located in one of the states hardest hit by the opioid crisis, Florida’s Palm Beach Post has covered the issue from drug deals in the streets to boardroom deals at Big […]
SXSW: Key takeaways on data journalism from the “news nerds” panel
Nearly every news story you read today involves numbers. Many news outlets, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, have found effective ways of presenting stories with data-heavy […]
How The Boston Globe uncovered fraud at Massachusetts nonprofits
Recently, the Internal Revenue Service made more than 2.3 million forms filed by nonprofits from all over the country available in an online database, open to the public. Todd Wallack, a […]
How ProPublica revealed the threat and extent of toxic military sites across the U.S.
The U.S. military spends over a billion dollars a year to clean up sites it has contaminated with toxic waste or explosives. These sites exist in every state and some […]
How The Pudding discovered swing states will suffer most from job automation
Will robots take your job one day? Probably. But how should that affect your choices in the voting booth? Ilia Blinderman, a data journalist at The Pudding, recently published an […]