Tag: data journalism
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 […]
How ProPublica exposed racial profiling in pedestrian citations in Florida
Are black people more apt to get ticketed by police for pedestrian violations in Jacksonville, Florida? Yes, a recent ProPublica investigation found, three times as likely as whites. Using months of reporting, […]
Working with The New York Times API in R
Have you ever come across a resource that you didn't know existed, but once you find it you wonder how you ever got along without it? I had this feeling […]
Sentiment analysis of (you guessed it!) Donald Trump’s tweets
In my last post, I demonstrated how to use the twitteR package to collect data from Twitter in R. I have since learned that while twitteR still works, it is […]
Twitter + R
Introducing twitteR If you've worked with R in any capacity, you've probably noticed by now that developers who create R packages love playing with the letter “R” in their naming […]
Welcome to Data Journalism in R
Welcome to Data Journalism in R print(“Hello world”) ## [1] “Hello world” Now that we got that out of the way, welcome to a brand new Storybench vertical, Data Journalism […]
Getting started with Python and Jupyter Notebooks for data analysis
Let’s talk about Python for data analysis. In this tutorial, you will learn some simple data analysis processes while exploring a dataset with Python and Pandas. Before we get started, […]
How Zhimin Huang is bringing a culture of data journalism to China
Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版 At the end of 2013, Chinese newsrooms got a tip that Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s security services, was being investigated for abuse of power […]
How the Financial Times built an interactive app to calculate what parts of your job will be automated
Earlier this year, the Financial Times published a story that examined the impact artificial intelligence will have on jobs. Using data from the McKinsey Global Institute, FT created an interactive app that […]
How to manipulate data with dplyr in R
In the last tutorial we introduced the concept of tidy data, which is characterized by having one observation per row, and one variable per column. We also went over how to change to […]
How The Economist visualized Spotify data on the Beatles on deadline
At the end of last month, the Beatles album “Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band” turned 50. To celebrate, The Economist’s James Tozer published a review and data analysis of […]
How the Hindustan Times is introducing Indian readers to interactive stories
Over the last year, a young team of data journalists and coders at the Hindustan Times have been quietly reinventing the way stories are being told at the Indian paper. […]