Hi! We've renamed ScraperWiki.
The product is now QuickCode and the company is The Sensible Code Company.

Data Journalism

Stories are now found in data

There is so much information in the world today, it is hard to keep up with Governments, businesses or even criminals, without using data to help find stories.

ScraperWiki has helped journalists become data journalists ever since we were founded in 2009, organizing Hacks & Hackers days to get together reporters and geeks all over the UK and US.

We recommend the Data Journalism Handbook, which is free on the web, to get going. It has sections about ScraperWiki.

ScraperWiki helps journalists:

  • Write and host your own web scrapers
  • Convert Government data from PDFs into spreadsheets
  • Learn about data science, coding and visualization

Contact us





Try PDFTables.com

“ScraperWiki is like crack for data journalists. With just some coding skills, they can get data in 100th the time it would take them to get it
manually. There’s no complicated setup or difficult installs. With the new apps there isn’t even a need to code!”

Nicola Hughes
The Times & The Sunday Times


Case Study: London Underground

There is a wealth of data concerning the London Underground, and working with customers we often find ourselves in the capital. So some exploration of this data seemed in order. We brought together and cleaned various pieces of data including station locations, their year of opening, passenger numbers and so forth.

These data were then fed into Tableau, the business intelligence and analytics software, and built a visualisation which showed the data overlaid on the classic underground map. Tableau’s interactive web functionality allows us to share this visualisation for everyone to enjoy.

Shortly after making this visualisation a strike by London Underground workers was announced, so we quickly whipped up the “Should I walk it?” tool which allows users to estimate how long it would take them to walk between stations.

Tableau works well with ScraperWiki’s Platform, we added an OData connector so data can be pulled into the platform and then fed out live via the OData connector to Tableau.

This visualisation now appears in the Regional sample workbook distributed as part of Tableau 9.

Commuter ratios

Tableau Partner


Guardian front page

Data Science Platform: Journalist accounts

We offer special access to our Data Science Platform for journalists, which allows you to create 20 datasets for free.

If you’re a Journalist please email hello@scraperwiki.com with the subject “Journalist”. Tell us the user name you want to use (or existing one if you already have one).

We’re not asking people to confirm that they are affiliated to any official press organisations – this may change in future. We do however require that you actively do public interest journalism.

Remember: Please cite us in your story


We're hiring!