Want to start a small data journalism team in your newsroom?

I was one of Scott's early hires and he knows what he's talking about. ProPublica was conceived [1] as a place to do the old-school, indepth investigative journalism that newspapers did before newspaper revenue started tanking. I was hired as a web producer and ProPublica's work would still be going on today with a traditional web presence. But news application development was not necessarily baked into that mission. Now the developers work as journalistic peers with the investigative reporters, as well as developing tech, designing and deploying applications. That wouldn't be the case if Scott hadn't continued to emphasize that there's more to his group than just maintaining the website...such advocacy is needed even in a small, flat-hierarchy, forward-thinking organization.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/about/press-release1

I'd love to see a news source that solely backs up their sources with cited data, and shows full methodologies for gaining that data.

There would need to be a way of anonymising sources, not sure how you'd get around that problem.

Very possible I missed it, but a story using data science in my opinion should be open source and reproducible using something like a data science notebook script.

This article reads as data scientist should be editors, which in my opinion makes zero sense. Sure understanding story is important, but editing ledes is a waste of time.

Umm... is that some rootkit code being used as the hero image on this article?!?

Are they illegally hacking, or data mining? :P