For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to Alberto Cairo, head of visualization at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Cairo shared several user-friendly tools and core principles to help investigative reporters shape their data visually to create new insights for audiences.
If you read “The Case of Jane Ponytail,” published in The New York Times in 2018, you’re likely to remember it. The award-winning story recounted the life and death of Song Yang, a Chinese woman who came to the United States with dreams of becoming an American citizen, but who ended up dying after falling from a building during a raid on the illicit massage parlor where she was employed as a sex worker. Now you can read the story with annotations by Dan Barry, explaining how he crafted the heart-rending narrative.
Private records can be just as illuminating as public records. A team of ProPublica Illinois journalists used an unusual private record — a mother’s diary — as the primary material in an investigative narrative that exposed the human impact of a clinical drug trial of children with bipolar disorder.
