The Nerd Blog
How we make stuff.
Secrets for data journalists, developers, newsroom designers, engagement specialists, and more.
Featured
Want to Start a Collaborative Journalism Project? We’re Building Tools to Help.
We’ll be expanding and open-sourcing the tools we created to do Documenting Hate, as well as Electionland, and writing a guide that will let any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations.
Other Entries
Visualizing Toxic Air
Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.
Look Up Nursing Home Staff COVID-19 Vaccination Rates
Now, users can quickly compare staff COVID-19 vaccination and booster rates across states and between nursing homes.
New: View an Organization’s Employees and Officers on Nonprofit Explorer
You can now view key employee and officer salaries for each year right on an organization’s page, and we’ve also added thousands more audits
She Photographed Police Abuse at a 2014 BLM March Then Watched the Image Go Viral During Capitol Riot
The much-shared pairing of photojournalist Natalie Keyssar’s image of a peaceful Black man being assaulted against a photo of white rioters walking free in the Capitol “represents the rage and sadness I feel.”
Meet the Baconator
How to make a dynamically generated news site work like a statically generated one and sleep better at night.
I Spent Three Years Running a Collaboration Across Newsrooms. Here’s What I Learned.
ProPublica worked with close to 200 newsrooms in the U.S. to crowdsource hate crimes and bias incidents as part of our Documenting Hate project. The collaboration is wrapping up, but its lessons are worth remembering.
Building a Database From Scratch: Behind the Scenes With Documenting Hate Partners
News12, The Baltimore Sun, Reveal and HuffPost explained how they built hate incident databases in conjunction with the Documenting Hate project.
Making Collaborative Data Projects Easier: Our New Tool, Collaborate, Is Here
We’re open-sourcing our collaborative reporting software so that newsrooms can work together around large datasets.
Working Together Better: Our Guide to Collaborative Data Journalism
We’ve learned a lot about how to make large-scale collaborations around datasets work, and today we’re giving away all of our secrets.
Making Sense of Messy Data
Angeliki Kastanis, data reporter at the Associated Press, recently explored what legalized pot means for medical users. Here, she describes some of the challenges of telling that story with the data available.
“Your Default Position Should Be Skepticism” and Other Advice for Data Journalists From Hadley Wickham
The chief scientist at RStudio and developer of open source tools for data scientists on bribes, bears and where your next story is hiding.
New: You Can Now Search the Full Text of 3 Million Nonprofit Tax Records for Free
Search the full text of nearly 3 million nonprofit IRS filings, including investments and grants given to other nonprofits.
The Ticket Trap: Front to Back
The project gave us an opportunity to try a bunch of technical approaches that could help a small organization like ours develop sustainable news apps.
Chasing Leads and Herding Cats: Shaping a New Role in the Newsroom
A partner manager is a crucial part of making cross-newsroom collaborations work.
New Partnership Will Help Us Hold Facebook and Campaigns Accountable
Starting today you can download a version of the Firefox browser with the Facebook Political Ad Collector built in.
The Election DataBot: Now Even Easier
We’ll show you what’s really new, what’s important, where races are heating up, where the money is flowing and what news is happening. And those are just our first steps.
Shedding Some Light on Dark Money Political Donors
Political nonprofits don’t have to disclose the names of their donors. But thanks to a good-government group, you can now find out about nearly $763 million in donations to these “dark money” organizations.
Download Chicago’s Parking Ticket Data Yourself
For the first time, the city’s database, which tracks more than 28 million parking and vehicle compliance tickets, is easily available to the public.
How ProPublica Illinois Uses GNU Make to Load 1.4GB of Data Every Day
We’ve open-sourced our code for loading Illinois campaign finance data. The process used to take hours. Learn how Make helped cut that down to less than 30 minutes.
New in the Congress API: Lobbying Registrations and More
Our Congress API now lets programmers access lobbying data. It also lets them find congressional press releases that mention bills.
