ProPublica’s Data Store opened for business nearly a year ago. Our two goals when we launched were to centralize and help people make better sense of the free datasets we make available, and to generate some income to help defray the costs of cleaning and analyzing our data. We’d like to share some news about how things have gone so far.
Since we launched on Feb. 26, 2014, we’ve seen more than 2,000 downloads of free data sets. The income the Data Store generates has become a significant part of our modest annual earned income.
We now have three times as many datasets as when we started. More than half are free to download.
Just in the past few months we’ve added some new datasets as part of launching our data-driven stories and interactives:
- Raw data about political ad spending during the 2012 presidential election, generated by the community around our Free the Files project (a free download)
- Medicare’s Part D prescribing data for 2012, including data for patients 65 and older only (a free download)
- Cleaned Part D prescribing data, which we used in our Prescriber Checkup web application (for purchase)
- Curated credit rating agency comments regarding tobacco bonds, from Cezary Podkul’s story on the subject (free download)
- Cleaned and joined data that compares 2014 and 2015 Affordable Care Act plans (initially for purchase, now free)
- Curated and cleaned data on bank bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis (for purchase)
- A full accounting, available nowhere else, of school desegregation orders, both court-ordered and voluntary, gathered by Nikole Hannah-Jones for our school segregation stories (free download)
- Data from U.S. school districts reporting incidents of restraining and secluding students from Heather Vogell and Annie Waldman’s stories (free download)
The data has proven popular, especially among researchers and our fellow journalists. We’re excited to expand our offerings even more this year.
Have any Data Store questions, comments or suggestions? E-mail us at [email protected].
