Cheryl Phillips of The Seattle Times and Anthony DeBarros of Gannett Digital presented on how to fit your data to the appropriate presentation style. Just like when you’re shopping for clothes, you should ask a lot of questions before you buy (or in this case, before you spend resources designing anything).

What is the story in the data? What kind of data is it? Aggregated or individual records, for example. How much data do you have?  How much time do you have? Resources? How granular do you want to get? Is there a geographic component?

Don’t stress over ...

FOIA Machine is a new open-source web platform to manage your open records requests. It’s aimed to help you get what you want from your request, avoid being ignored and appeal when you are denied.

"It’s aimed to help you get what you want from your request, avoid being ignored and appeal when you are denied", says Djordje Padejski, investigative journalist and founding director of the FOIA Machine.

“What we’re hoping to solve is this problem,” Coulter Jones of California Watch said, showing the room a picture of binders full of FOIA requests at the NICAR Database ...

Don't let love get in the way of investigating. The old saying in journalism goes something like "if your mother says she loves you, check it out,” and if that's true for your mother then it's certainly true for your Valentine's Day date. So let's begin our walk through of how to make use of publicly available information to background your date.

First, checking property records, criminal records and civil filings is going to be much faster if you have access to Nexis. But if you don’t, you can still navigate your way to ...

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews yesterday announced its 2013 class of fellows, who will work as developers and technologists embedded in newsrooms around the world. Fellows spend a year writing code along with reporters, designers and newsroom developers to create new tools for journalism. Fellows for 2013 and their placements include:

• Brian Abelson, The New York Times
• Manuel Aristarán, La Nacion
• Annabel Church, Zeit Online
• Stijn Debrouwere, The Guardian
• Friedrich Lindenberg, Spiegel Online
• Sonya Song, Boston Globe
• Mike Tigas, ProPublica
• Noah Veltman, BBC

Learn more about the fellows from Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.