We teamed up to build a dashboard that shows two kinds of data: how widespread COVID–19 is in a community, alongside health indicators that show how some people are more at risk. We’ve open-sourced the project so you can use it too.

How do we measure how well our coverage reflects the communities we are entrusted with reporting on? How do we check our work for social and cultural tone deafness, for blind spots and holes, especially when it comes to marginalized or vulnerable communities?

How and why national news orgs should find local reporters to cover stories in their own communities.

Why newsrooms should go responsive, even for complex projects.

Data can be impersonal, especially large datasets with thousands or even millions of records. The fact that most data of this magnitude is calculated by machines is, however, a sharp contrast to the ultimate goal of examining it in the first place—to find human trends and patterns behind the numbers.

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.