Since the mid-2000s, some US and British news organizations have hired programmers to design data-driven news projects within the newsroom. But how does the rise of these “programmer-journalists,” armed with their skills and technical artifacts, really affect the way journalism can contribute to the public good? Based on an empirical study in Chicago, we show in this article that although they ...

Natural language processing and visualization systems have been proposed to help journalists analyze large sets of documents, but very little has been said on what journalists do with documents in practice. We review a collection of 15 stories completed with the Overview document mining platform, characterizing the source material and reporting tasks. The median document set contained 4,000 doc...