The Nerd Blog
How we make stuff.
Secrets for data journalists, developers, newsroom designers, engagement specialists, and more.
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News Applications Fellow
We’re looking for a News Applications Fellow to work with us starting this fall.
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Resources for Investigating Tax-Exempt Organizations
In addition to our Nonprofit Explorer interactive database, here are some resources for researching charities and other tax-exempt organizations.
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A Super-Simple Tool to Search Instagram by Time and Location
We wrote a little tool to search for Instagram photos taken at certain times and places
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Tracking State Bills Takes a Village: The Legislature Tracker Gets Launched in N.Y.
The MinnPost's open source Legislature Project makes it easy for newsrooms and individuals to identify and keep track of bills. Welcome, New York edition.
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Latest P5 Resident Working on Open Source Legislation Tracker
Our P5 Resident this month is Alan Palazzolo from MinnPost. He’s the fifth P5 Resident.
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ProPublica Projects — and P5 Projects — Finalists for Data Journalism Awards
The Global Editors Network announced finalists for its 2013 Data Journalism Awards. On the shortlist are three projects from ProPublica and two projects from former Residents in our P5 Program.
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HeartSaver: Experimenting with News Games to Tell a Story
HeartSaver, ProPublica's entry into the April 2013 GEN hack day, lets players steer New York City heart attack victims to the closest hospitals.
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Meet the New Blog (Same as the Old Blog)
Today we debut a ProPublica Nerd Blog redesign, which includes a new look for our main landing page as well as our article pages. We wanted to create both a better reading experience, as well as to help you find what you're looking for more easily.
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Heart of Nerd Darkness: Why Updating Dollars for Docs Was So Difficult
We updated Dollars for Docs last week. Why is updating it so difficult?
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No Windows. One Exit. Free Drinks: Casino-Driven Design for Crowdsourcing
Casino-Driven Design, a technique we developed for Free the Files, cuts away all distraction and drives the user's attention toward staying focused on a single task.
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Between Human and Machine: Thoughts on Malofiej 21 Day 2
One of the main undercurrents during the Malofiej World Infographic Summit was the tension between illustrative graphics, often borne out of photographs and sketches, and data visualization, whose raw material is often the very machine-based spreadsheet.
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Outsider CAR: Quick Thoughts on Malofiej 21 Day 1
While the big graphics teams presented at the Malofiej Infographic Summit in Pamplona, Spain, there were also examples of artists and designers applying their own brand of CAR.
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Casey Thomas, P5 Resident
The fourth P5 Resident started a project in the ProPublica offices today. He's Casey Thomas from AxisPhilly.
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RIP EveryBlock
EveryBlock is gone, here's how we archive our apps.
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New Year’s Resolution: Learn to Code
Want to learn to code this year? Here's our handy beginner's guide to get you started.
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Use Our Nursing Home Inspect Widget on Your Site
We made it easy to search nursing home inspection reports right from your own website.
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Why (and How) We Use Creative Commons for Our Stories
ProPublica has made important use of Creative Commons since our launch four and a half years ago.
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Anatomy of a News Map
Behind the scenes on our great migration graphic.
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Pair Programming Participant #2: Ricardo Brom
The second participant in ProPublica's Pair Programming Project is Ricardo Brom from La Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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New Open Source Project: Daybreak, a Simple Key/Value Database for Ruby
A couple of weeks ago, in an article about the science behind the Message Machine project, we mentioned the custom key-value store we built to store non-relational data. Today, we're open sourcing the library which we're calling Daybreak.
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P5 Project Application
Use this form to apply to be a participant in the P5 program.
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Pair Programming Participant #1: Julius Troeger
On Monday the first participant in the ProPublica Pair Programming Project started. He is Julius Troeger from Germany.
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Election Day Interactives We’re Watching
Here's a list of amazing interactive election day projects our colleagues at other organizations have launched.
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How ProPublica’s Message Machine Reverse Engineers Political Microtargeting
How the message machine works.
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Introducing a Free the Files API
Today we're opening a Free The Files API which will offer developers access to markets, stations, committees and filings data from our crowdsourced app
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Adventure Awaits: Another ProPublica News Apps Fellowship
Starting later this year, ProPublica is going to be part of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellowship program. The OpenNews Fellow will work as a member of our news applications team on major journalism projects and will also get to travel the world attending hack days and conferences.
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The ProPublica Pair Programming Project
Come code with us! The ProPublica Pair Programming Project — or P5 — opens the ProPublica News Apps desk to newsroom coders who want to work on a ProPublica project, or to finish a project of their own, from the ProPublica offices in New York.
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Knight Foundation Grant to Support ProPublica’s News Applications Desk
We’re very pleased to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has made a grant to support ProPublica’s news applications desk.
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How a Map That Wasn’t a Map Became a Map
Why and how we mapped state money for homeowners.
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Useful Code Snippets
At ProPublica we sometimes share small, simple snippets of using GitHub "Gists."
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Untangling a Web of FEC Data
Our Tangled Web graphic shows the 200 biggest recipients of expenditure money from the five major presidential campaigns (Gingrich, Obama, Paul, Romney and Santorum), as well as from major super PACs, from around the middle of 2011 through February, 2012.
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Introducing StateFace
Today we released a font that you can use to include small state map shapes as a design element in a web application. It’s called StateFace.
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Some Thoughts on Timelines
Three different approaches to presenting stories over time.
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Announcing Simpler Tiles
Today, we're releasing Ruby bindings for Simple Tiles, so you can generate tiles from Ruby.
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Showing You the Money (Faster)
We pitched in on some new features in the New York Times' Campaign Finance API and its Ruby wrapper, CampaignCash.
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Anatomy of a Stepper Graphic
A small library for stepper graphics.
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SOPA Opera Update: Opposition Surges
SOPA Blackout Day led to a surge in opposition among members of Congress.
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SOPA Opera: Which Legislators Support SOPA and PIPA?
In the next few weeks, among the most talked-about legislation will be the Stop Online Piracy Act — commonly referred to as SOPA — which, if passed, would give the Attorney General the authority to block access to foreign websites deemed to be dedicated to copyright infringement.
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Announcing the ProPublica News Apps Fellowship
The ProPublica News Apps desk is looking for a smart, technically-savvy journalist to join our team for a pilot project we’re calling a News Applications Fellowship.
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Adaptive Design, Fixed Widths and Tablets
If you're trying to make your fixed-width site adaptive, there are some things you need to know about the viewport tag.
