The Nerd Blog
How we make stuff.
Secrets for data journalists, developers, newsroom designers, engagement specialists, and more.
Featured
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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.
All Entries
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.”
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Meet the Baconator
How to make a dynamically generated news site work like a statically generated one and sleep better at night.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Get an Inside Look at the Department of Defense’s Struggle to Fix Pollution at More Than 39,000 Sites
For the first time, the Pentagon’s internal database used to track its environmental problems is available to the public.
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How You Can Keep Track of the Money Political Committees Spend at Trump Properties
Our FEC Itemizer Database now tracks spending at hotels, restaurants and other facilities owned by the Trump Organization.
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What Is Congress Talking About?
We’re using data to track the things Congress talks a disproportionate amount about every week.
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New in Nonprofit Explorer: People Search
You can now search for people who work for nonprofit organizations.
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New Widget Helps You Follow the Money in the Illinois Governor’s Race
We’ve created a widget you can use to track fundraising and spending in the Illinois governor’s race, which is on track to break records.
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Meet Column Setter
We developed an open source tool for building custom responsive grids that work in older browsers.
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Reinventing Represent
We asked readers to help us reconceive and redesign an interactive database that tracks Congress. Here’s how the process worked.
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Lobbying Database Reporting Recipe
We’ve made it easier to sift through thousands of lobbying registration disclosures. Here’s a guide for journalists, researchers and citizens looking for stories in the data.
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Covering the Midterms With Election DataBot
It’s not too early to think about reporting on the midterm elections. Get a head start using our free, near-real-time database.
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More Machine Learning About Congress’ Priorities
We keep training machine learning models on Congress. Find out what this one learned about lawmakers’ top issues.
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Announcing Free Videos and Training Materials From the ProPublica Data Institute
Couldn’t come to the ProPublica Data Institute? Now you can learn some of the lessons from home.
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Chamber of Secrets: Teaching a Machine What Congress Cares About
Want to know what distinctive topics your members of Congress are concerned about? Represent’s got you covered.
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City Bureau and ProPublica Illinois Partner on Public Meeting Data
Why City Bureau and ProPublica are partnering on a community tool to make public meeting data more accessible.
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Introducing Our Data Journalism Advisers
Announcing four researchers who will advise us on our data-journalism projects.
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Welcome to the New ProPublica.org
A new publishing system brings a refreshed design and improved features to our site.
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Bulk Downloads of Congressional Data Now Available
Download information on every bill introduced in each session of Congress, in a single file, with our new bulk bill data set.
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Nonprofit Explorer Update: Full Text of 1.9 Million Records
We’ve updated Nonprofit Explorer. Here’s what’s new.
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Keep an Eye On Your State’s Congressional Delegation
We’ve added new features to our Represent project, including full-text bill search, and a way to keep track of your state’s entire congressional delegation on one page. We’ve also got news about the Congress API.
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How (and Why) We’re Collecting Cook County Jail Data
ProPublica Illinois is restarting a collaborative data collection project to better understand what happens to inmates at Cook County Jail.
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Authenticating Email Using DKIM and ARC, or How We Analyzed the Kasowitz Emails
Last week we needed to authenticate some emails sent by the President’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. Here’s how we did it.
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New in Our Congress API: Bill Subjects, Personal Explanations and Sunsetting Sunlight
What you need to know about some new features in our Congress API, as well as details on our plans to turn off the Sunlight Congress API on Aug. 31.
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New in the Congress API: Congressional Statements and More
Get data on House and Senate press releases and more bill information.
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Congress API Update
Here’s a status update for developers who use the Sunlight Congress API.
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Introducing the Vital Signs API
We made one tool for patients — and another one for computers.
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Learn Data, Design and Code for Journalism. Apply for ProPublica’s 2017 Data Institute!
ProPublica is proud to open applications for our 2017 Data Institute, a free 11-day intensive workshop on how to use data, design and programming for journalism.
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ProPublica’s on IFTTT
We’re relaunching a service that lets you make notifications when some key real-world things happen in Washington.
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Sunlight Labs Takeover Update
A status update on the projects we took over from the Sunlight Foundation
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Presenting Hell and High Water VR
A team at USC has created a new virtual-reality experience based on our Houston storm vulnerability project.
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A New Way to Keep an Eye on Who Represents You in Congress
We’re launching a new interactive database that you can use to track congressional votes, bills and members.
