Full Index

A flat listing of every curated item on this site, sorted alphabetically by cluster

Community

Discussion groups, chatrooms, mailing lists, and other places where people might know your name

Discussion groups and forums

Discussion groups, including mailing lists and Slack chats.

NICAR-L

A forum for the discussion of subjects related to computer-assisted reporting. It also acts as a posting board for new developments at NICAR, including seminar announcements and database information. Possibly the most active journalism-related listserv.

Rjournos

A Google Group for journalists using R. Invite-only membership (to reduce spam)

r/datasets

r/dataisbeautiful

Organizations

Professional organizations and etc. TK

National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR)

The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting maintains a library of federal databases, employs journalism students, and trains journalists in the practical skills of getting and analyzing electronic information.
Examples

Newsletters

news but by email

Data is Plural

by Jeremy Singer-Vine
A weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.
Examples

Numlock News

by Walt Hickey
Other people cover U.S. politics to death, and you can get that elsewhere, so this newsletter focuses on the bigger stories going on in the background you’re missing.

Portfolios of work

How do data journalism people showcase their work? here you go

Matt Waite

Professor Of Practice, College Of Journalism And Mass Communications, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

Lena Groeger

A journalist, designer and developer living in the Bay Area.

Al Shaw

Al is a designer, developer and reporter who has been working in digital news for over a decade.

Peter Aldhous

science journalist

Maarten Lambrechts

Data Journalist | Data Designer | Visualization Consultant

Ben Welsh

A good example of a portfolio that uses mainly text lists to convey the scope of work and experience.

Job Boards

Where to find work. Are there enough of these though (tailored to data journalism)

NewsNerdery #jobs

IRE Job Center

Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting host an active website for some of the best-trained and highest-profile journalists in the world.

Source OpenNews Jobs

Google Job Search for 'data journalist'

Datasets

Datasets tk tk Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. In aperiam ex explicabo, optio quae, exercitationem enim obcaecati minima mollitia. Minima alias dolores earum dolorum, fugit possimus aperiam debitis repudiandae adipisci!

Data catalogs and search portals

Data Portals, basically (TK curation)

Open Data Network

Search across official city Socrata portals etc etc etc Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Ipsum deserunt, exercitationem ad autem placeat debitis vitae earum doloribus laboriosam quaerat ducimus, quisquam repellendus sint culpa dolorem labore officiis maiores. Fuga.

Examples

MuckRock FOI Requests

Search all Freedom of Information public records requests made by MuckRock users.
Examples

Google Dataset Search

A search tool from Google that left beta in early 2020.

Data.gov.uk

Maybe the biggest and most well-organized public data repository.

ProPublica Data Store

Specific topical datasets

A shortlist of very interesting, or at least, very detailed public datasets across a variety of specific topics and beats.

California Public Sector Salaries

Independent site with the largest and most detailed public pay and pension database for California public employees, including state, city, county, and school district levels.

FEC Campaign Finance Data

money money
Examples

Interactives

tkviz bklasdfj

News Applications

news apps tk Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Basically, an interactive data site that is tied to a database and returns custom results/pages for the user

The Next to Die: Watching Death Row

Nonprofit Explorer: Research Tax-Exempt Organizations

Credibly Accused

Search lists of U.S. Catholic clergy that have been deemed credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct.

Texas Government Salaries Explorer

Census Reporter

ER Inspector: Find and Evaluate Every Emergency Room Near You

Fatal Force

Politifact

Visualizations

Cool charts

512 Paths to the White House

Complete History of the NBA

Human Terrain

Examples

Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”

March 14, 2020 // by Harry Stevens
Without any measures to slow it down, covid-19 will continue to spread exponentially for months. To understand why, it is instructive to simulate the spread of a fake disease through a population.

Outlets

Sites that do data journalism, or are about data journalism TKTK

Journalism outlets

Journalism outlets that have a heavy emphasis on empirical methods and data analysis.

BuzzFeed News

Examples

FiveThirtyEight

ProPublica

The Markup

Examples

Meta outlets

Sites about data journalism.

Source OpenNews

Source is an OpenNews project designed to amplify the impact of journalism code and the community of developers, designers, journalists, and editors who make it. Incubated at the Mozilla Foundation from 2011-2016, OpenNews is now a project of Community Partners.
Examples

Specialty sites

Blogs and other publications more technical and specific to data analysis and visualization, and not necessarily journalism-focused.

The Functional Art

Blog by Alberto Cairo
Examples

Flowing Data

Blog, with lots of interesting links and lessons, including premium content, by Nathan Yau.

Mike Bostock's Blog

lots of good stuff tk
Examples

ProPublica Nerd Blog

Secrets for data journalists, developers, newsroom designers, engagement specialists, and more.

Awards and Compilations

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Quasi vero nam dolores, quis? Vel quia tempore modi, illum incidunt maxime aperiam accusamus nulla dolore repellendus, odit assumenda temporibus sed alias?

Sigma Awards

https://twitter.com/pilhofer/status/1230222608114814977

NICAR Philip Meyer Awards

GEN Data Journalism Awards

Hosted by the Global Editors Network Note: GEN – and these awards – went defunct in 2019.
Examples

ProPublica's Year in (Mostly) Visual Journalism

January 03, 2019 // by

Resources

Tutorials, books, and guides about the practice. Not meant to be a “how-to-code resource” TK TK

Books and Indepth References

Dedicated, in-depth online references, such as books.

Data Journalism Handbook

investigate.ai

Practical data science for journalists (and everyone else)

R for Journalists

This course is designed to give you a sense of all the possibilities from programming in R. It’ll emphasize packages that will help you do data analysis and visualization.

Sports Data Analysis

Code, data, visuals and the Tidyverse for journalists and other storytellers

Math with Spreadsheets for Beginning Reporters

January 01, 1970 // by Matt Waite
A walkthrough of some basic math concepts, how to apply them in a spreadsheet, and how to turn that into a story.

Learn machine learning with free hands-on videos

March 04, 2020 // by John Keefe

Tools

A shortlist of tools; not so much an exhaustive reference but an illustration of the kind of things data journalists typically need to do day-to-day TK

Datawrapper

Why us? Because we empower everyone to create beautiful charts, maps and tables. Including you.

JupyterLab/Notebook

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

Observable

Examples

RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management.

agate

A Python data analysis library that is optimized for humans instead of machines.

Tabula

OpenRefine

Datasette

DataKit

Examples

Apache Tika

csvkit

xsv

Slimmer functionality compared to csvkit, but much faster.

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern

Repos

A selection of open source repositories of data and analysis. Or maybe it should just be news orgs?

BuzzFeedNews/everything

the-pudding/data

Data sets created for stories on The Pudding, open to the public.

associatedpress

fivethirtyeight/data

Listicles

Even more lists and compilations. An appendix of sorts.

Data Journalism Resources from the NICAR 2019 Conference

March 12, 2019 // by

Guides

TK Not quite books, but not quite articles either

ProPublica Data Style Guide

Bad Data Guide

Data literacy tipsheet

Excel Magic

Curriculums and Syllabi

Data journalism as taught in schools and workshops

Some listings here: https://github.com/dannguyen/journalism-syllabi

Digital Frameworks

January 01, 1970 // by David Eads // Northwestern University
An overview of data journalism practice

J298 Data Journalism

January 01, 1970 // by Peter Aldhous Amanda Hickman // UC Berkeley
This course is for students who want to make finding and reporting stories from data part of their toolkit.

Algorithms, Lede Program

A course on algorithms used in journalism, for beginning Python programmers

School of Data Online Courses

Tutorials

Technical walkthroughs

A Gentle Introduction to SQL Using SQLite

This tutorial was crafted by Troy Thibodeaux as a human-friendly introduction to the world of databases and SQL. It introduces database skills from the ground up using SQLite and a small set of data from the world of campaign finance.

First News App

This tutorial will walk you through the process of building an interactive data visualization from a structured dataset.

First Python Notebook

This textbook will guide you through an investigation of money in politics using data from the California Civic Data Coalition.

First Graphics App

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Doloribus sequi ad placeat libero, modi quasi odio minima vitae. Sequi, consequatur? Optio ipsum molestias ea fugiat ex! Vero architecto eveniet quidem!

Beginner Excel tutorial

Lorem ipsum Dolorum dolor, enim impedit sint molestiae aspernatur, doloribus laboriosam maxime, ea delectus suscipit! Sapiente vero fugiat

Regex hands-on at NICAR 2017

by Justin Myers

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Vero numquam officia at laboriosam minima quis pariatur nesciunt. Dicta animi labore, maiores cum mollitia harum officiis ut qui quasi. Obcaecati, at.

Examples

SQL Murder Mystery

The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.

Stories

clusters/stories.html: lorem ipsum TK this is the description field for clusters/stories.html

Profiles

Profiles and Q&As with data journalists, ranging from what they do to how they got where they are.

How 5 Data Dynamos Do Their Jobs

June 12, 2019 // by
Reporters from across the newsroom describe the many ways in which they increasingly rely on datasets and spreadsheets to create groundbreaking work.

Ben Casselman: In Data Journalism, Tech Matters Less Than the People

November 13, 2019 // by Ben Casselman // New York Times

In this “Tech We’re Using” NYT Q&A, economics reporter Ben Casselman describes using R to work with data too big for Excel and to automate the analysis of monthly reports. But Casselman contends that still he gets his best stories and insights the old-fashioned way.

From English To Tech, Sara Simon ’13 Shows What An Open Mind Can Do

February 28, 2019 // by Grace Ramsdell // The Wellesley News

Sara Simon, then with the NYT’s interactive news team, describes her path from 7-month coding academy to web developer for public news, to building tools for research and news gathering at the Times.

Q&A: Quartz’s David Yanofsky on coding as a journalist

May 22, 2017 // by Jon Keegan // Columbia Journalism Review
David has covered a wide variety of topics in his work including pilots taking illegal cockpit selfies on commercial flights, documenting every satellite in orbit around Earth, and tracking private helicopters flying into the Davos conference with a DIY antenna.

Q&A: ProPublica’s Lena Groeger on data visualization and writing about design

July 20, 2017 // by Jon Keegan // Columbia Journalism Review
Groeger joined ProPublica in 2011, and her current, hybrid job title is “journalist/developer/designer.

StoryLab Academy: Data-driven Journalism with Lam Vo

BuzzFeed Fellow, Lam Thuy Vo hosted a Social Media Mining Data-journalism Masterclass in Nairobi

Explorations

Longform explorations with data

They Played Dominoes Outside Their Apartment For Decades. Then The White People Moved In And Police Started Showing Up.

June 29, 2018 // by Lam Thuy Vo // BuzzFeed News

Most 311 data investigations are frivoulous if not outright flawed. Here’s one that works within the limits and weaknesses of the data to tell an important story about racial tensions and gentrification. TK.

Examples

Investigations

Using data to comfort the afflicted and/or afflict the comforted

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders

February 25, 2020 // by Maddy Varner Aaron Sankin //
Insurers are supposed to price based on risk, but Allstate’s algorithm put a thumb on the scale

More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

November 22, 2017 // by Jeff Kao
Examples

The Data Sleuths of San José

May 27, 2015 // by Christian Caryl // Foreign Policy
How three scrappy Costa Rican reporters used the power of data to bring down a system of sleaze.

Essays

How-do-you-Do TK

Connecting with the Dots

by Jacob Harris
Jake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots

What the Fox Knows

March 17, 2014 // by Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism organization. Let me explain what we mean by that, and why we think the intersection of data and journalism is so important.

Design Principles for News Apps & Graphics

May 30, 2013 // by Lena Groeger
Lena Groeger’s lowdown on how to apply classic design principles to your newfangled interactive graphics and apps

Building a Database From Scratch: Behind the Scenes With Documenting Hate Partners

October 23, 2019 // by Rachel Glickhouse

How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets

June 12, 2019 // by NYT Open

How to Prepare for an Engineering Interview at The New York Times

January 30, 2020 // by NYT Open

Mapping coronavirus, responsibly

A data designer’s responsibility during a global crisis

March 25, 2020 // by Tobias van Schneider
As designers, we have a responsibility to visualize information in a simple, accurate and easy-to-understand way. This couldn’t be more true for designers reporting the news during this global crisis.