What a data journalism tool should actually do
Most “data journalism tools” are really chart makers. You arrive with a finished table, you leave with a picture of it. That’s the last ten percent of the job. The ninety percent that comes before (cleaning the export, joining two sources, noticing that one region doubled while the rest stayed flat) still happens in a spreadsheet, alone, late.
Datastripes covers the whole path. Import, clean, explore, chart, write, publish. Same window, same file. When you change a filter while exploring, the published story can change with it, or stay frozen exactly as you reported it. Your call.
Built for reporting, not for quarterly business reviews
Business intelligence software is made for people who look at the same dashboard every Monday. Journalists look at a dataset once, hard, and then need to explain it to a million strangers. So the defaults are different here: readable labels instead of codes, a narrative order instead of a grid, a source table under every chart so readers can check your sums.
Transparency is part of the craft. Every story you publish can ship with the underlying rows, downloadable, so the fact-checkers, the skeptics and the rival newsroom can all see what you saw.
For the freelancer, the local paper and the investigations desk
If you’re a freelancer, it’s the graphics desk you don’t have. If you work at a local paper, it’s how you turn the council budget PDF into something people actually read. If you’re on an investigations team, it’s the fastest way to go from a leaked spreadsheet to a first look at what’s in it, without the file ever leaving your browser.
Your data stays yours
Sensitive datasets are processed in your browser. Nothing is used to train anything. When you’re working on a story that hasn’t run yet, that matters more than any feature on this page.
