Data Journalism

Analyzing satellite images for a story means treating an overhead picture as evidence, not decoration. You define the claim in testable terms, pull dated … Read more

Knowing how to use court records for investigations is mostly a question of which door you knock on. Define your question, work out which … Read more

Flight tracking data is the broadcast record of where an aircraft was, when it was there, and what it looked like in the air … Read more

Search SEC filings by going to EDGAR, the SEC’s public filing database, looking the company up by name, ticker or CIK number, filtering the … Read more

FBI crime data measures reported crime, not all crime. Every figure in the Uniform Crime Reporting program sits several filters downstream of an actual … Read more

Checking the method before the number is how to read a poll like a journalist. Who ran it, who paid for it, who was … Read more

Census data can tell you how many people live somewhere, how they work, what they earn, what they pay for housing and how they … Read more

Percent change is the difference between two values, divided by the original value, multiplied by 100. A positive result means the new value is … Read more

Most statistics mistakes in news stories are not arithmetic errors. They are framing errors: a percentage printed without its base, a change described in … Read more

Finding the story in a spreadsheet means running a fixed sequence of moves on a dataset — sort, filter, pivot, compute, compare — until … Read more