Martin Stabe
LightNews LightNews
banner
martinstabe.ft.com
Martin Stabe
@martinstabe.ft.com
14K followers 1.8K following 69 posts
Data journalist at @data.ft.com. These days mainly thinking about elections data and how to use automation and AI in news. #ddj #dataviz
Posts Replies Media Videos
martinstabe.ft.com
Great piece of data journalism on the widespread anomalies in council tax banding, by @jonathanvincent.bsky.social and Sam Fleming and involving our great engineering teams on both the front- and back-end of the project. #ddj Plus a nod to some classic #dataviz design by @theboysmithy.ft.com:
A grid of small charts compares trends in house prices and council tax bills across UK local authorities since 1995. Each chart shows two indexed lines: one for average house prices (blue) and one for average council tax bills (grey), both normalised to 1 in 1995. The top section displays towns and cities in northern England — such as Barnsley, Bradford, Burnley, County Durham, Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Preston, Redcar and Cleveland, and Sunderland — where the two lines rise together over time, indicating that house prices and council tax bills have increased broadly in line. The lower section forms a cartogram map of London boroughs, where house prices have risen much faster than council tax bills. In boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Camden, Hackney, Islington, and Waltham Forest, the blue line representing house prices climbs steeply compared to the flatter grey council tax line. The layout mirrors the approximate geography of London, with boroughs like Enfield and Barnet at the top and Croydon, Bromley, and Sutton at the bottom. Source: Financial Times analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). London cartogram design based on a concept by Max Gadney and Mike Gallagher.
October 9, 2025 at 11:09 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
Arriving in Perugia in style. #ijf25
A Perugia MinIMetro pod arriving at the central station stop.
April 9, 2025 at 1:18 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
Further important 🐹📈 data journalism from @louisashworth.bsky.social and cartography from @theboysmithy.ft.com about the cost of small caged mammals (scm) in the UK: www.ft.com/content/f1cb...
A grid map showing the regional variation in the changing cost of small caged mammels in the uk.
March 13, 2025 at 9:46 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
Our stories often downplay the computational lift that goes into getting them. Suffice it to say "a Financial Times analysis of blockchain data" denotes some really impressive data journalism work from @olihawkins.com, @eadehemingway.bsky.social and @nikasgari.bsky.social.
A methodology note at the foot of the story linked to in the post, which reads: How the FT calculated the $TRUMP earnings The FT analysed data from the Solana blockchain, following the movement of Trump coin from its creation on January 17 to the end of its first few weeks of trading. The coin’s initial distribution was primarily managed by four accounts, which set up a “liquidity pool” on Meteora, a decentralised exchange, in order to sell most of that initial distribution. The FT downloaded the full transaction history of these accounts during this period, as well as the transactions within the liquidity pool. From this we have been able to reconstruct how the coin was traded and at what prices. The $350mn is a floor estimate. More money would have been made via sales on other platforms. It is not possible to calculate how much was made from transactions that took place off the blockchain.
March 7, 2025 at 9:27 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
The Palisades fire in LA overlaid on a map of central London. calmatters.org/environment/...
A map showing the area of the Palisades fire in Los Angeles overlaid on a map of central London.
January 15, 2025 at 10:28 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
I’ve re-read Jonathan Stray‘s 2019 paper on the difficult economics of AI in investigative journalism several times this year as we have run into several of the issues he identified. This is the one I keep coming back to:
jonathanstray.com/papers/Makin...
Except from a journal article that reads: "When Al is used in a commercial setting there is typically an ongoing business problem to be solved. Transactional data such as clicks and purchases arrives in continuous streams, and a model trained on this data can be used as long as the underlying stream is stable. By contrast, many data-driven investigative stories are never repeated. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's model for finding documents describing sexual abuse by doctors will never be useful again, because there is not another backlog of 100,000 reports to examine. In such cases the cost of building a custom Al solution cannot be amortized over multiple stories."
December 9, 2024 at 10:56 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
After reading this line I had to check the date to make sure this wasn’t a story from the archive, circa 2008. www.theguardian.com/media/2024/n...
Highlighted Text from a Guardian story quoting Express editor Gary Jones: “my vision for the Express is that every reporter and editor is able to upload content to the website, and there’s no segregation between ‘print’ and ‘digital’ …”
November 16, 2024 at 9:25 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
… und die vorläufige Ergebnisse für 2024 zeigen für diesen County erheblich kleinere Gesamtzahlen als die AP-Daten: enr.sos.mo.gov/CountyResult...
Screenshot of the unofficial results of the 2024 presidential election result in Jackson county, Missouri
November 13, 2024 at 6:20 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
Interessant. Die MIT-Zahlen stimmen mit dem offiziellen Wahlbericht von Jackson County as den Jahr 2020 überein … jcebmo.org/wp-content/u...
Official report of the 2020 presidential election in Jackson county, Missouri.
November 13, 2024 at 6:16 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
I'm immensely proud of all the amazing live-updating graphics the @data.ft.com team published over the last 48 hours (and continues to publish). But there's still a thrill to seeing them appear in print the next day:
Pages 4 and 23 of the UK print edition of the Financial Times of Thursday November 7 2024, showing a large number of graphics related to the US election.
November 7, 2024 at 4:52 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
📌 for tonight (from around 11pm GMT): ft.com/election
November 5, 2024 at 11:35 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
The completely rebuilt @data.ft.com US election results site is live. The six voters of of Dixville Notch in New Hampshire have of course already voted and reported their results: ig.ft.com/us-elections...
Screenshot showing the first reported results of the 2024 US presidential election reported on the the Financial Times' website.
November 5, 2024 at 11:15 AM
martinstabe.ft.com
📊 Endlich auch auf Deutsch verfügbar: das Poster „Visueller Wortschatz“ von @data.ft.com. Wir freuen uns über Anmerkungen und Ausbesserungen aus der deutschsprachigen #ddj und #dataviz
Community! github.com/Financial-Ti...
Screenshot of the new German version of the Financial Times’ "Visual Vocabulary", a poster designed to help journalists select the best data visualisation format for a given narrative intent.
March 12, 2024 at 5:18 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
I learned… just a bit of detail about the administrative geography of New England prepping maps for Super Tuesday, so it's great to see this all finally come together: www.ft.com/content/17e9...
Closeup of a choropleth map of northern New England, showing the margin of the winning candidate in the Republican Super Tuesday primaries in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts at the municipality level.
March 6, 2024 at 12:06 PM
martinstabe.ft.com
Learning much about the quirks of New Hampshire geography this week. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%...
Closeup of a map of New Hampshire showing the unincorporated territory Martin’s Location.
January 18, 2024 at 11:11 AM