The Data Journalism Podcast

One of the most successful published data journalists in the world today, David McCandless has a new book out: Beautiful News. His work is innovative, newsy, current and incredibly popular with readers — but sometimes controversial with what he calls the "chart police".  Alberto and Simon chat with David about why he gets such Marmite-type reactions to his work, how Hans Rosling opened our eyes to the power of data visualisation and the nature of beauty. The music for today's episode is world GDP, made with TwoTone, which turns numbers into tunes.

Election reporting has become one of the most important journalism beats in America as we barrel towards the midterm elections. How can data journalism help? Jessica Huseman has become the face of election reporting in America. Editorial Director at Votebeat, she also owns the data journalism training organistion Friendly State News and previously worked at ProPublica on the Electionland project. Jessica chats with Alberto and Simon about the stakes in election reporting this cycle - and how data makes everything better. The music this episode is made with made with TwoTone and is the sound of Midterm election turnouts from 1790 to 2018. 

Anatoliy Bondarenko is Data editor at Texty.org.ua, an award-winning news and data site in Ukraine, from where he joins Alberto and Simon to discuss his life in a war zone as a data journalist. His team's work to analyse misinformation has won a Sigma data journalism award for best News Application and they are still producing great data journalism today, even as the country is under attack.  Some of his team's pieces include this analysis of satellite images of Russian military bases, an investigation into illegal amber mining in Ukraine  and this interactive on corruption.

How do you make data journalism that matters to people about where they live? In the latest Data Journalism Podcast, Alberto and Simon explore local data journalism with two of the leading practitioners of the field. MaryJo Webster is the data editor for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and has devoted herself to training data journalists. Ben Welsh is the editor of the Data and Graphics Department at the LA Times, who also leads a new data partnership with the Big Local News Project. The music this episode is made with made with TwoTone and is the sound of American Football, based on 538’s NFL ELO ratings.

Scott Klein leads the teams at ProPublica that work at the intersection of journalism and technology. His teams have been recognized with a Peabody Award, several Online Journalism Awards for General Excellence, Malofiej International Infographics Award medals, the Data Journalism Award Jurors Choice Award, as well as Society for News Design Awards of Excellence, including one special recognition for “defining the design language of data-driven news apps.” Scott is also co-founder of DocumentCloud, a service that helps news organizations search, manage and present their source documents. He sits on the board of the Muckrock Foundation. Scott, Alberto and Simon chat about the state of data journalism in 2021, how ProPublica does it and how journalism is at the forefront of innovation. We also talked about these projects: The Atlantic's Covid tracker Which birds are jerks Using old ships logs to record historic weather A room, a bar and a classroom The music this week is based on holiday search interest, and made with TwoTone.

Matt Daniels and Caitlyn Ralph are just two of the team behind The Pudding, a visual collective of great visual data journalism - where you can find great longform data journalism such as this hunt for the internet’s oldest image, this guide to why women’s pockets are inferior and how many times a character says “cool” in Community. And The Pudding crew also have a commercial arm too: Polygraph, which produces visuals such as the ones you can find on this page on the Google Trends site. Alberto and Simon chat visual journalism with Matt and Caitlyn and find out exactly how you can run a design agency and a cool collective in one go. The music this week is based on the inflation time series index published by the Bureau  of Labor Statistics, and made with TwoTone.

Eva Constantaras is a data journalist with Internews and Lighthouse Reports who works around the world to establish data journalism units to tell public interest stories. She has worked with data journalists in Afghanistan, Myanmar and many other places around the world where numbers can make a difference. Eva chats on the podcast about data journalism in failing states and her process to help reporters tell those hidden stories.  Read Eva's chapter for the new version of the Data Journalism Handbook, on data journalism and marginalised communities. The music this week is based on a dataset of numbers of dams that was used as part of this story from Myanmar, and made with TwoTone.

Angeliki Kastanis is a data journalist at The Associated Press and an expert on the US Census.  They talk with Alberto and Simon about what the 2020 Census data released so far told us, offers tips and tricks for getting the most out of it for reporters - and even working as a Census enumerator.  Key links: censusreporter, AP Census Hub The music this week is based on the US Census (data from the Big Local News Project), and made with TwoTone.

Tomorrow (August 12) sees the release of crucial US Census redistricting data - which will shape US government and politics for the next crucial election cycles. It will also give us unique insights into the changing demographic makeup of regions across the US. Alberto and Simon chat with Joe Germuska (executive director at @KnightLab and Project lead @CensusReporter) and Cheryl Phillips (Data/investigative journalism lecturer @Stanford and Founder of @biglocalnews).  Want to know what to expect — and how to tell stories with it? This is the podcast for you. The music this week is based on the US Census (data from the Big Local News Project), and made with TwoTone.

We all know that data visualization is a great tool to explore and make sense of numbers, and also to communicate those numbers to people. But there is also a long historical tradition in visualization that uses graphs, charts, and maps for persuasion. Think, for instance, of Florence Nightingale, who used data and charts to persuade the English authorities to improve the living conditions of soldiers during war.  The persuasive tradition of visualization today continues thanks in part to the work of journalists and designers who work not for the news sides of their companies, but for their opinion sections.  In this episode Alberto and Simon talked to two of them, Stuart Thompson from The New York Times, and Sergio Peçanha, from The Washington Post. How is their work similar to what traditional graphics departments in news organizations do? And how is it different? The music for this episode is Olympic athletes' weights and heights, from this dataset. The tool we use is TwoTone. Try it out!