David became ProPublica’s first design director in May of 2014. Previously, he worked with numerous startups as a consultant specializing in user experience and responsive web design. Before that, he ...

Nearly all maps are an attempt to represent our environment (generally Earth) in a two-dimensional format. The act of systematically transposing a 3D to a 2D object is called projection, and it’s a ...

If you’re like me, your personal geography of your city is based mostly on its streets, but you’ve never really given their names a second thought. A few months ago, I realized that those street names ...

With the launching of 538, Vox and the New York Times’ Upshot, it seems like the age of data journalism is finally here, greeted with both acclaim and concern by media critics. But data journalism is ...

If you’ve worked in a technical role in news for long enough, you likely remember when the “show your work” spirit was everywhere. Newsroom nerds shared code on GitHub, swapped tips on social media ...

Mixed-race identity is chic right now: Our fictionalized stories are bestsellers, and public figures such as Naomi Osaka and Kamala Harris are a regular part of the national conversation. Heck, we’ve ...

Following the news of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s’ assassination on April 4, 1968, long-simmering racial tensions exploded throughout Washington, D.C. Four days later, 13 people were dead and more ...

A video demo of the data extraction process for this experiment. I convert a ton of text documents like PDFs to spreadsheets. It’s tedious and expensive work. So every time a new iteration of AI ...

(We use this XML intermediate representation for historical reasons. Replacing it with something more efficient is on our to-do list.) At this point, we have a collection of single characters and ...

Back in May of this year, I set myself a challenge: I wanted to try as many applications and libraries and programming languages in the field of data visualization as possible. To compare these tools ...

About this series: Exit interviews are a way for organizations to seek honest critique. This occasional series offers feedback for journalism as an industry, through observations from news nerds who ...

Editor’s note: This article is published in collaboration with MuckRock. You may also be interested in their 2023 review of OCR tools! Extracting tabular data from documents presents a persistent ...