How ProPublica Illinois Uses GNU Make to Load 1.4GB of Data Every Day
by David Eads I avoided using GNU Make in my data journalism work for a long time, partly because the documentation was so obtuse that I couldn’t see how Make, one of many extract-transform-load (ETL)...
View ArticleDownload Chicago’s Parking Ticket Data Yourself
by Katlyn Alo and Melissa Sanchez ProPublica Illinois has been reporting all year on how ticketing in Chicago is pushing tens of thousands of drivers into debt and hitting black and low-income...
View ArticleShedding Some Light on Dark Money Political Donors
by Derek Willis On Wednesday we added details to our FEC Itemizer database on nearly $763 million in contributions to the political nonprofit organizations — also known as 501(c)(4) groups — that have...
View ArticleThe Election DataBot: Now Even Easier
by Derek Willis and Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee We launched the Election DataBot in 2016 with the idea that it would help reporters, researchers and concerned citizens more easily find and tell some of the...
View ArticleNew Partnership Will Help Us Hold Facebook and Campaigns Accountable
by Jeremy B. Merrill We launched a new collaboration on Monday that will make it even easier to be part of our Facebook Political Ad Collector project. In case you don’t know, the Political Ad...
View ArticleChasing Leads and Herding Cats: Shaping a New Role in the Newsroom
by Rachel Glickhouse In this ever-changing industry, new roles are emerging that redefine how we do journalism: audience engagement director, social newsgathering reporter, Snapchat video producer. At...
View ArticleWant to Start a Collaborative Journalism Project? We’re Building Tools to Help.
by Rachel Glickhouse Today we’re announcing new tools, documentation and training to help news organizations collaborate on data journalism projects. Newsrooms, long known for being cutthroat...
View ArticleThe Ticket Trap: Front to Back
by David Eads Millions of motorists in Chicago have gotten a parking ticket. So when we built The Ticket Trap — an interactive news application that lets people explore ticketing patterns across the...
View ArticleNew: You Can Now Search the Full Text of 3 Million Nonprofit Tax Records for...
by Ken Schwencke On Thursday, we launched a new feature for our Nonprofit Explorer database: The ability to search the full text of nearly 3 million electronically filed nonprofit tax filings sent to...
View Article“Your Default Position Should Be Skepticism” and Other Advice for Data...
by Hannah Fresques and Meg Marco So you want to explore the world through data. But how do you actually *do* it? Hadley Wickham is a leading developer of open source tools for data science and works...
View ArticleMaking Sense of Messy Data
Angeliki Kastanis, Associated Press I used to work as a sound mixer on film sets, noticing any hums and beeps that would make an actor’s performance useless after a long day’s work. I could take care...
View ArticleWorking Together Better: Our Guide to Collaborative Data Journalism
by Rachel Glickhouse Today we’re launching a guidebook on how newsrooms can collaborate around large datasets. Since our founding 11 years ago, ProPublica has made collaboration one of the central...
View ArticleMaking Collaborative Data Projects Easier: Our New Tool, Collaborate, Is Here
by Rachel Glickhouse On Wednesday, we’re launching a beta test of a new software tool. It’s called Collaborate, and it makes it possible for multiple newsrooms to work together on data projects....
View ArticleBuilding a Database From Scratch: Behind the Scenes With Documenting Hate...
by Rachel Glickhouse For nearly three years, ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project has given newsrooms around the country access to a database of personal reports sent to us by readers about hate...
View ArticleI Spent Three Years Running a Collaboration Across Newsrooms. Here’s What I...
by Rachel Glickhouse ProPublica’s Documenting Hate collaboration comes to a close next month after nearly three years. It brought together hundreds of newsrooms around the country to cover hate crimes...
View ArticleMeet the Baconator
by Frank Sharpe As a member of the team responsible for keeping ProPublica’s website online, there were times when I wished our site were static. Static sites have a simpler configuration with fewer...
View ArticleShe Photographed Police Abuse at a 2014 BLM March Then Watched the Image Go...
by Lisa Larson-Walker In the midst of Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol, Twitter user @thejuliacarter gave voice to the outrage many felt at the stark difference between what appeared to be the...
View ArticleNew: View an Organization’s Employees and Officers on Nonprofit Explorer
by Andrea Suozzo On Friday, we updated our Nonprofit Explorer database in two big ways. First, we’ve added the ability to view key employees and officers right on an organization’s page. Second, we’ve...
View ArticleLook Up Nursing Home Staff COVID-19 Vaccination Rates
by Ruth Talbot On Thursday, ProPublica added staff COVID-19 vaccination data to the Nursing Home Inspect project. The virus has killed more than 150,000 nursing home residents and staff since the...
View ArticleVisualizing Toxic Air
by Lylla Younes and Al Shaw ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story was co-published with...
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