Background reading on Lena Groeger¶

Lena Groeger, investigative journalist and news applications developer at ProPublica, will be speaking on Tuesday, Oct. 10 about her career path, her work, and her thoughts on data and investigative journalism.

Please spend some time this weekend to familiarize yourself with her work. Not for her sake, as she has plenty of important info and wisdom to share, but because there’s a lot of inspiration and insight to be found in her essays and visualizations.

Author page at ProPublica: https://www.propublica.org/people/lena-groeger
Personal portfolio: http://lenagroeger.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lenagroeger
Github: https://github.com/lenagroeger

Lena’s expertise and accomplishments are wide-ranging and impressive to the point of being intimidating. But she was a student and a novice just as most of us were/are. Her road toward investigative journalism and programming was not manifest destiny. Definitely take the opportunity to ask her career questions/advice. But I also highly recommend reading these interviews she’s given in the past about how she got into journalism:

Origins: Lena Groeger: Developer, designer, and journalist at ProPublica - Definitely read this, as it may answer some of your boilerplate questions, such as how Lena got into journalism, what she thought she’d be doing in journalism, and how she ended up where she is.
Lena joined ProPublica’s news app team in 2012, via one of the first/only fellowships specifically for news app dev developers. The Knight Foundation interviewed her about the new job, how she gets her ideas, and her thoughts about the future of data journalism.
CJR: ProPublica’s Lena Groeger on data visualization and writing about design
Visualising Data: Six Questions With Lena Groeger

Below are a few stories/essays/visualizations from Lena’s extensive portfolio. I’m not compelling you to write a homework essay to prove you did some reading, because I think you’ll find Lena’s articles to be obviously worth reading for your own inspiration and edification.

Plus – especially her visualizations and design essays – it’s just some of the most accessible and enjoyable reading you’ll find in data/investigative journalism.