2. How to use this guide

This guide will walk you through the process of creating a simple data-driven news app to track real estate development in your area. It is designed to be used by journalists at small, local news outlets who want to serve and engage readers around development in their community. It assumes you have the capacity to research, manage and vet a data journalism project, as well as some development experience (or the willingness to learn and/or hire for it on a project basis).

The template site that hosts this guide will serve as the public-facing tracker once you set it up and customize it for your outlet. It includes:

• A homepage, with a short description of the development tracker.
• A map page, where you can search for and browse real estate development projects on a map.
• A projects page, where you can see a list of all projects or search for particular projects by keyword.
• A tip submission page, with a form your readers can use to share information or questions about local real estate developments in their neighborhoods.
• An about page, where you will share more background about the project.
• A contact page, where you can tell users how to get in touch with you.
• Multiple real estate projects pages, each one with details about a single development, including status, use type and photos.
  • The template site includes about 10 sample project pages. Your site will include as many pages as your data allows.

When you think of data journalism you may picture obtaining and analyzing existing datasets more than creating your own – or creating a dataset to find answers that serve a particular article or reporting series. Our primary intended use for the development tracker is not to fuel news articles; instead, it is meant to be a long-lasting tool that serves readers alongside more traditional journalism.

However, the tracker can still benefit real estate reporting, for example, if you receive reader tips that alert you to projects that have not yet been reported on. And once you have your database, you can analyze it like you would any other, identifying themes that warrant further reporting, like development activity concentrated in a particular area of the city; a developer who has multiple stalled projects or high levels of subsidies; or an increase in residential projects, rehabs or other types of buildings. You may pick up on trends in the development community or in your local government’s treatment of projects.

“News apps encourage readers to interact with data in a context that is meaningful to them: looking up crime trends in their area, checking the safety records of their local doctor, or searching political contributions to their candidate of choice. More than just high-tech infographics, the best news apps are durable products. They live outside the news cycle, often by helping readers solve real-world problems, or answering questions in such a useful or novel way that they become enduring resources.”

From “The Data Journalism Handbook 1,” edited by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers and Liliana Bounegru

“Graphics tend to tell a single story while news applications tell many — specifically, news applications let readers see how they're personally affected.

“Graphics tend to run in the browser while news applications tend to require multiple trips to some backend or a runtime on a server.”

From “ProPublica Data Style Guide,” by Scott Klein

This development tracker does not actually fit the second half of this definition: It is set up to not require a backend or server. If your dataset gets too large, you wouldn't want to rely on pre-generation of pages, and instead use a backend that would fetch data on demand from a database and only build a page when the end user requests that page.

You don’t have to know too much about this distinction at the moment, but in general, the dataset's size should influence your site architecture.

Data is collected in an Airtable base, which is used as the content management system for the tracker.

The tracker site is built with Next.js, a development framework that uses React, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Airtable’s API key is used to connect your Airtable base to the site, and each row of data about a single real estate development project becomes a page on the tracker site. The site uses several additional tools, like Mapbox, and is hosted on Netlify. We'll walk you through our narrow uses of these programs and tools later in this guide.

The template site and Airtable base are pre-configured to limit the amount of coding you’ll need to do to launch your own tracker, but you will need to do some. All of those steps are included in this guide.

This guide starts with some initial considerations: what you will need to complete this project and initial questions you should ask as you’re planning to bring a development tracker to your newsroom.

Then, it discusses what kinds of data you’ll need to gather and how you can go about collecting it.

Next, it walks you through using Airtable, creating your copy of the Airtable template and how you will enter your data there.

Then, you will set up your tracker site and customize necessary components. After that, you will be shown how to publish the tracker to your own website.

The following sections cover managing your tracker and harnessing public engagement and support. Finally, there are some tips for launching your tracker to your audience and how to get in touch with us if you have questions or suggestions.

The guide is based on our experience with the Detroit Development Tracker; the template site and data structure are based on its format.

The site includes reader engagement functions, so you can include callouts and users can submit tips. We have found that the submission function and readers’ willingness to use it are vital to the tracker’s success. If reader engagement is not something your newsroom prioritizes, it may be difficult to maintain your tracker.

And if your community’s real estate development landscape and available data – or your readers’ needs around development information – look very different than ours, you may have difficulty implementing the tracker template. The tracker is open-source, meaning you could customize it as much as you want, but most changes you would want to make to the data structure would require changing your Airtable base and therefore custom coding. Changes to the public-facing site will also require custom coding; you can easily adjust text and we walk you through some customizations, but adding new functions or pages will require individual work.

A final caveat: The limitations we’ve found using Airtable have prompted us to explore other systems to store data for the Detroit Development Tracker in the future, aka we may stop using the structure we’re showing you how to implement in this guide. Still, these options will include more custom work on the developer side, and we still think the setup in this guide will work well, particularly for newsrooms that don’t have the developer capacity to build their own backend.