Tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting.

Want to see all of the data we have reported? Here's all the data we've covered over the last two years, that's almost 600 spreadsheets linked from one spreadsheet

"(..) This shows where the real money is. Not in quality reporting, but more in a product for a massive audience that translates into eyeballs (what a term) that, in turn, will be monetized — especially if you add a good layer of software algorithms to the product. (..)"

Two years ago, a dozen of the country’s major corporations, including Caterpillar, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, banded together with several of the nation’s leading environmental groups to form a group called the United States Climate Action Partnership. According to the group’s Web site, USCAP’s mission is to encourage “the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s a nice thought and by signing onto it USCAP’s members got a lot of nice press (including in The New Yorker). But a recent analysis of campaign giving by the non-profit group Clean Air Watch suggests that USCAP’s corporate members do not take USCAP’s goals terribly seriously. In fact, they seem to be devoting considerable resources to undermining them.

Writers, pop stars, lawyers and politicians from across the party spectrum yesterday issued a call to arms. They joined the largest ever campaign across Britain to warn of the erosion of freedoms and the emergence of surveillance techniques

Simon Rogers gathers some of the key figures driving the political agenda in the United States. Download the data or access the API to build your own charts and visualizations.

The digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Photoshopping can alter our media reality. However: "change the caption and you change the meaning of the photographs. You don’t need Photoshop. That’s the disturbing part. Captions do the heavy lifting as far as deception is concerned. The pictures merely provide the window-dressing. The unending series of errors engendered by falsely captioned photographs are rarely remarked on."

"No, not to be funny and snarky, but to be bold and to do a better job of cutting through the fog."

Deze internationale verklaring is wereldkundig gemaakt als een standaard van beroepsgedrag door journalisten in hun werkzaamheid van bijeenbrengen, verzenden, verspreiden en commentariëren van nieuws en inlichtingen en in het beschrijven van gebeurteniss