Journalism grad school at Stanford? These data journalist alums explain how it helped their careers.

Houston Chronicle journalists knew there was a problem: High-speed chases by local police were killing an alarming number of people.

Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence, the newspaper’s deputy data editor, Caroline Ghisolfi, collected law enforcement reports of the incidents, extracted data from PDF documents, and analyzed the numbers. This enabled Ghisolfi and reporter Andrea Ball to document the extent of the problem in an investigative series, which prompted the Houston Police Department to adopt new restrictions on high-speed pursuits. A year later, the Chronicle found that high-speed police chases had dropped by 35% as a result.

Ghisolfi built her data reporting foundation when she was a journalism master’s student at Stanford in 2020-21. “When I first arrived at Stanford, I had no idea what data journalism was, and I had never written a line of code,” Ghisolfi said. “It changed the trajectory of my career and my life, because I have such a love for this discipline — and I would have never even known what it was if I hadn’t entered the program with an open mind.”

The Stanford Journalism Program marries reporting fundamentals with multimedia storytelling and data skills to help a new generation of reporters and editors tell stories more powerfully. In the nine-month program, students take courses that include public affairs data journalism, digital media production, narrative writing, investigative watchdog reporting, news application development, and immersive (AR/VR) journalism. Students often do professional internships funded by the Rebele Journalism Internship Program.

Ghisolfi is among dozens of alums who are working as data journalists in newsrooms around the world, ranging from ProPublica and the BBC to The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.

“I can’t even keep track of where all the graduates have landed off the top of my head. They have gone out to smaller, nonprofit news outlets, such as the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, to regional metros to national and international news organizations like The New York Times and Reuters,” said Cheryl Phillips, Hearst Professional in Residence, who previously worked at The Seattle Times for a dozen years. “The really exciting thing is seeing the difference they are making in the newsrooms and communities where they work.”

Jennah Haque (MA 2022) is one of the alums who credits Stanford for teaching her foundational skills that she uses on the data visualization team at Bloomberg News. Haque has done everything from building graphics about the recent U.S. presidential election to visually showing war damage across the Gaza Strip. 

“Having the chance to learn the essential skills and basics of writing but also be able to upskill and have strong data literacy before you go into the workforce is invaluable,” Haque said. “I think newsrooms are going to start making [data skills] the standard.”

At Stanford, Haque used visual evidence from satellite imagery to tell a multimedia story about disparities in climate impacts across two neighboring Bay Area cities. The story was published on Palo Alto Online, as well as the Peninsula Press, the Journalism Program’s local news website which publishes student work from reporting classes.

“It started from looking at Google Earth, seeing a difference and knowing that other places had done data studies on temperatures in urban areas with concrete versus grass and tree shade — and what that does,” said Hearst Professional in Residence Geri Migielicz, a longtime photojournalist who teaches the program's multimedia courses. “That irrefutable evidence led [Haque] to talk to the city managers … she broke it down and got to the sources.”

In addition to core storytelling techniques in text, audio, photo and video, students gain a solid data journalism toolbox: how to track down relevant datasets, clean them, and find important stories within the numbers. Students are required to learn the Python programming language and can also pick up skills in Structured Query Language (SQL), the R programming language and spreadsheet analysis. Newsrooms looking to hire data journalists increasingly expect candidates to be proficient in programming languages.

“Coding is not that dissimilar from thinking about how to craft a news story: It has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it requires you to think about one big problem broken up into lots of smaller problems,” said Serdar Tumgoren, Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism who was previously a data journalist and lead news applications developer with The Associated Press.

Like many data journalists, Tumgoren was self-taught, working a full-time job and staying up late at night to hone data skills over many years. But he believes that approach can often be inconsistent and take years to fill in the gaps. The Stanford master’s program, which is limited to about 15 to 18 students each year, provides personalized attention from faculty as students acquire those skills.

“If you just give yourself that window, you can really fast-forward your career and your learning,” Tumgoren said. “I’m always amazed to see how things that took me several years to learn, students get to the beginner, if not intermediate, level of coding within nine months.”

Elena Shao (MA 2022), a reporter and graphics editor for The New York Times, emphasizes how useful it was to learn to program with Python with storytelling in mind, not just through a computer science approach. 

“I started to understand that the problems that I was trying to solve in journalism were not deeply complex logical problems, but were more creative problems,” Shao said. “How do you tell a story in a way that it deserves to be told? How do you find that right balance between something that is visually novel and something that is also very clear for readers to understand?”

After Stanford, Shao began her work at The New York Times on the climate desk. Now, she creates data visualizations and interactive graphics that respond to major news events across topics. Shao’s recent data-driven storytelling includes uncovering falsehoods in election season speeches and demonstrating how climate-change-driven wildfires have burned large swaths of land in the American West.

Phoebe Quinton (MA 2023) said she has used her skills in SQL, R, Python, Tabula and Tableau in her work as a politics data reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, including in coverage of the November 2024 elections in Georgia.

“In the data journalism classes, [faculty] went through how to clean data, how to make sure there aren’t extra white spaces or things that are going to throw off your end result numbers, because sometimes a small mistake can just really grow,” Quinton said. “It’s pretty much reliant on having data that you can trust, and being able to trust data really relies on that cleaning process and making sure that you know what information you’re looking at.”

As newsrooms grapple with how to responsibly develop guardrails for artificial intelligence, students from the Stanford program also enter the workforce with a solid ethical foundation about using new AI tools. Migielicz said she teaches a “consistent ethical set of values, no matter what medium you’re using.” In her multimedia courses, students learn to use image and video verification tools, especially useful as generative AI adds complexity to understanding what user-generated content is real and what is not.

“We’re not just teaching knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” Tumgoren added. “Hopefully it gives them a leg up on the competition.”

Ghisolfi, who did internships at the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and The Associated Press while at Stanford, said having the journalism faculty on her side far past graduation has been extremely helpful. 

“They’ve just been incredible mentors,” Ghisolfi said. “The whole group of professors are guiding me through my career.”