A Quartz reporter who also writes his own code

Jon Keegan of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed Quartz reporter David Yanofsky, who codes to use data visualization and graphics to help tell stories.

Here is an excerpt:

What’s your favorite kind of challenge in a story?

I like finding sources of information that are seemingly under-utilized by people in journalism. With stream gauges, if there was a flood in some neighborhood, you might have a local reporter who went to the USGS, and found out the creek is three times its normal level. Or, you might find that information in a press release from local emergency management.

The intersection of physical science and journalism is appealing, where you talk to hydrologists, and meteorologists, and they are like, oh yeah we use that data all the time.

Another source that I really, really like is similar: international trade databases. I always come back to them because they are one of these things that no one reports through. One is from the US Census Bureau, one is from the International Trade Center, which is a UN/WTO joint agency. The data on trading commodities is so specific. The US data is like, “How many soccer balls arrived from China into the port of Houston in May.” It’s crazy specific, and often really useful.

Read more here.