At NICAR 2015 I saw Al Shaw’s talk about how he worked with LANDSAT satellite imagery to build “Losing Ground.” Al described how he and his colleagues at ProPublica built a suite of custom tools to work with LANDSAT data to tell the story of the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. I was impressed and inspired by their work, and by Al’s reminder that the decades of data and imagery produced by NASA’s satellites and probes were a public-domain treasure trove that surely held many opportunities for storytelling.

Vox’s recent interactive on teen health asks the user for their birth year and then, based on that, changes the text of the story. We thought it was a fascinatingly personal way to contextualize CDC health data, leveraging readers’ innate curiosity about how they stack up. We talked to developer Soo Oh about the process.

A couple events this week plus a ton of conferences looking for your talk proposals.

Over the course of the 2016 US election season, we’ll be highlighting plenty of hardworking projects designed to make elections coverage better for all—like elex and OpenElections—but also the offbeat, playful, and experimental approaches that newsrooms can work on when the basics are under control. Our first entry in the series comes from the Guardian US interactive team, who took a moment to break down their animated results maps that debuted in last week’s Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary.

Meetups, proposal deadlines, and the fourth in the Hacks/Hackers Connect series.

Mixed skill sets, varying audiences and a basic lack of agreement on the purpose of journalism stand in the way of multi-country, data-driven journalism. But Eva Constantaras says the potential is too great to give up on.

It’s a busy week of meetups, plus your last chance to pitch conversations and lightning talks for NICAR.

Here’s a roundup of our favorite projects and pieces from the past couple of weeks, all worthy of another look.

In gearing up for NICAR, there’s a bunch more ways to participate such as pitching proposals to lightning talks and the conversations track. Plus, events all over the world this month.

With about 20,000 unlabeled audio files to classify, as part of a big breaking story, we created a process to help us focus on the files we actually needed.

Over a month after Brazil declared a state of emergency in response to a Zika outbreak, clear information on the virus is hard to come by. On Monday, BuzzFeed’s Jeremy Singer-Vine started an open guide to Zika-related data, to collect what we do know and help other journalists do the same. It points to resources like global and country-specific data on the spread of the virus, its mosquitos, and microcephaly, from respected sources. We asked why he started it, how he curates it, and where he can use everyone’s help.

Two weeks of highlights and bookmarks: projects and code that showed us new angles, got newsroom coders talking, and pointed toward better ways of working.

Ireland welcomes a chapter of ONA, meetups in NYC and Zurich, plus a few deadlines this week.

Multiple events in San Francisco this week, plus so many great opportunities just waiting for your application.

All of us have encountered a particularly emotionally charged news article, with every word betraying the author’s bias. But a single reader would have to be a dedicated follower of a news organization to really understand how much opinion is habitually betrayed in its work. To find out how carefully major news organizations moderate their language in articles on controversial topics, we at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) used computational techniques to analyze millions of articles from 15 large news organizations in the U.S. Some agencies, we found, do not shy from emotion-laden and biased rhetoric—the Huffington Post and Washington Post, for example. But we also found that, on average, the use of highly emotional language is curbed, pointing to possible self-moderation.

Meetups this week in Miami, Austria, and Finland, plus lots of upcoming events and deadlines.

We made an interactive based on a government agency’s method of predicting a person’s race and ethnicity based solely on their name and address. The response from our readers was, fittingly, a little unpredictable.

As we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software. We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016.

Reflections on iCON, the Asian American Journalists Association’s event in Miami last month.

As we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software. We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016.