college student waiting at health center

Reporter’s Notebook: A guide to investigating colossal topics

Since The Washington Post published “A crisis in campus care” this month, an extensive examination into the health care available to college students, dozens of undergraduates, alumni, parents and faculty have shared on social media and with the Post how their own interactions with their on-campus clinics mirror the findings of the year-long investigation.

map of United States

COVID-19 map offers state, county views

Big Local News, Pitch Interactive and Google News Initiative have produced a map to help newsrooms and readers track the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.

person working on large dataset

Real people are behind the data covering ‘undercovered’ communities

Nausheen Husain, Jan Diehm and Mark Walker are three journalists who cover undercovered communities. Their advice to other reporters who want to do the same: Know when to walk away. The three spoke March 6 at the NICAR conference in New Orleans about best practices for covering underrepresented people and groups as well as where …

story reporters

Conflict or not? A deep dive into the world of forms and data leads to collaboration

Do members of Congress know whether an expert testifying before them has any monetary connections to the outcome of their committee hearings? Do those testifying before them have an affiliation with a group or groups that might want to weaken oversight by an agency or strengthen ties with particular foreign governments? These were some of …

Foreign influence? How we built the database of expert testimony

Our story on truth in testimony forms used a combination of data collection, manual data-entry and and field reporting. To build our Truth in Testimony database, we wrote a computer program to automatically capture the publicly available data about who has testified before House committees, including their Truth in Testimony disclosure forms, from the U.S. …

Introducing The Accountability Project, a new resource for public data

Searching across public data sets can be arduous, particularly on deadline. But any good journalist knows that finding threads among campaign finance data, property records, business ownership and other sources can yield important stories about conflicts of interest, outsized influence and other issues that warrant deeper public scrutiny. That’s why the Investigative Reporting Workshop created …