Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Navigate News With The Upshot

The New York Times has started their own data journalism site. Navigate News With The Upshot

One of our highest priorities will be unearthing data sets — and analyzing existing ones — in ways that illuminate and explain the news. Our first day of material, both political and economic, should give you a sense of what we hope to do with data. As with our written articles, we aspire to present our data in the clearest, most engaging way possible. A graphic can often accomplish that goal better than prose. Luckily, we work alongside The Times’s graphics department, some of the most talented data-visualization specialists in the country. It’s no accident that the same people who created the interactive dialect quiz, the deficit puzzle and the rent-vs-buy calculator will be working on The Upshot.

Perhaps most important, we want The Upshot to feel like a collaboration between journalists and readers. We will often publish the details behind our reporting — such as the data for our inequality project or the computer code for our Senate forecasting model — and we hope that readers will find angles we did not. We also want to get story assignments from you: Tell us what data you think deserves exploration. Tell us which parts of the news you do not understand as well as you’d like."

Their first big story, Who Will Win The Senate?. "According to our statistical election-forecasting machine, it’s a tossup. The Democrats have about a 51% chance of retaining a majority." Lots of very pretty graphs.

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