About DUG

Data don't think; people do. Good data journalism helps people think more clearly about the world, and this guide exists to help newsrooms produce more of it.

What DUG is

For newsrooms that want to report on and communicate data, and to make use of its growing availability and the computing power now within reach, data science can feel inaccessible and expensive. It doesn't have to be.

We're journalists interested in making data journalism more accessible to newsrooms. There are plenty of guides on how to become a data journalist. This is not one of them. Injecting data into a newsroom's pipelines is harder than it should be, and this guide targets that organizational infrastructure: how to build, position, fund, and sustain a data team.

The Data Unit Guide offers start-up resources for small-to-medium and non-profit newsrooms building out their data journalism capacity. Its ideal reader is someone at one of those organizations tasked with doing exactly that. The guide is free to use, and we've integrated as many free and open-source tools as we can throughout.

Who made it

DUG began as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship at the Missouri School of Journalism, and it's a project of Caldern. First published in 2021, it was updated in 2023 and rebuilt again in 2026. Its primary authors were Clayton Aldern and Tatyana Monnay. We're grateful to RJI and the Tableau Foundation for supporting the original guide, to our industry survey respondents, and to the team at Grist, a nonprofit magazine covering climate, justice, and solutions, where some of this guide was first put into practice.

Have a correction, a tool we should add, or a section we've missed? We'd like to hear it. Write to us using the form below, or email info@caldern.xyz.