Storytelling with Data Visualization: Context is King

Data is like a freeze-dried version of reality, abstracted sometimes to the point where it can be hard to recognize and understand. It needs some rehydration before it becomes tasty (or even just palatable) storytelling material again —…

A Quantitative Turn in Journalism?

Journalists are seeing an explosion of quantitative data about how readers interact with what they write. To date, much of the conversation about metrics and news has focused on the dangers of using metrics to guide news judgment or, on the other hand, the risks of…

Algorithmic Defamation: The Case of the Shameless Autocomplete

In Germany, a man recently won a legal battle with Google over the fact that when you searched for his name, the autocomplete suggestions connected him to “scientology” and “fraud,” — two things that he felt had defamatory…

The Rhetoric of Data

In the 1830’s abolitionists discovered the rhetorical potential of re-conceptualizing southern newspaper advertisements as data. They “took an undifferentiated pile of ads for runaway slaves, wherein dates and places were of primary importance … and transformed them into data about the…

How to Predict News Article Traffic

What if you could predict the number of future visits to your news article by looking at recent…

Ethics, Laws, Sensors and Journalism — A Starting Point

We’re publishing this blog post as a year’s end marker for our sensor journalism research. At the very start of June, when we held our two-day workshop on sensors and journalism, many participants called for the Tow Center to develop…

The Rise of The Single Subject Platform

A Research Project by News Deeply &

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University

By Lara Setrakian and Kristin Nolan