Hello my dear frosches! 🐸

The Easter is behind us and there is again more things to do at The Pond!

Read more about it below.

Happening at The Pond

Next month we will again offer two training sessions:

🎬 Finding stories in data: Jonathan’s revenge. This session is back and now it’s data trainer Ada Homolova who will look for stories in a dataset she has never seen before. Live, beginner friendly, questions welcome. Thu 16 April at 14:00 CET.

🧠 Embeddings for research. You have thousands of documents: court rulings, parliamentary speeches, leaked emails, and no idea where to start. Text embeddings can help. Ada (again) and Johan Schuijt will show you how and when to use embeddings in your research. We'll also be doing this session at Dataharvest, so if you can't be there with us, don't miss this one at Mo 27 April at 15:30 CET.

☕ Community hangouts: this month there is only one on Monday 20th April at 15:30 CET! Do you need help or do you just want to hang out? Come for the coffee machine chats you're missing when working from home!

Made at The Pond

♻️ Pondcast #3: Calculate CO2 emissions with Thomas Goorden: The recording is up! Learn how basic chemistry can strengthen your climate reporting.

📏 Stop making unit mistakes! In our newest blog you will learn from Thomas on how attaching units to your calculations prevents costly mistakes. Featuring the Mars Climate Orbiter 🚀

📚 New: guides on datafrosch.fun! We now have a guides section with step-by-step references you can keep open while working. Currently: Finding stories in data, Tidy data, and Pivot tables. More coming!

Mentorships open!

🧪 Want to level up your data skills with 1:1 personal attention and hands-on guidance? The second cohort of this year starts on the 4th of May. Check out more details on the mentorship page!

What We're Reading

🏆 The 2026 Sigma Awards shortlist is out! Remarkable diversity in data journalism this year. Great inspiration for your next project.

🎥 Schibsted open-sourced Videofy, an AI tool that turns text articles into ready-to-publish news videos in minutes. Free for any newsroom to use.

🤖 How journalists can make AI work for them. Columbia Journalism Review with a practical framework for using AI without sacrificing quality or oversight.

🇨🇳 What is trending in China? This was my favorite project from the JournalismAI Skills Lab. Very practical data transformation and lovely tool design.

🦚 Pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations. Loved this Datawrapper's guide to choosing colors for charts. Color is a proper rabbit hole 🐰⚫

Do you enjoy this newsletter? Join The Pond on Discord and let me know!

With 💚 and 🐸,
Ada

The Pond is a community by and for nerds in the newsroom. Join us!