Welcome to Wrong Number, a newsletter focused on the odd, quirky and extremely niche data that three journalists are hyperfixating on — the stuff we would never cover in our serious day jobs in the newsroom. In every post, we’ll walk through how and why we picked the topic and did the data analysis to explore it. Every topic will always be something we’re especially passionate about, and we hope you’re excited to learn about our often weird interests. If you’re already a fan of the same stuff we’re nerding out over, even better! For data-minded folks, we’re also committed to sharing as much of the code + data underlying the work as we can, so we hope you’ll check our work and ask your own questions.
A little bit more about us …
Caitlin Gilbert is a data reporter based in New York where she is usually thinking about musical theater, soccer, or some esoteric bit of pop culture trivia. She has an absurd amount of hobbies that occupy far too much of her brain and is far too online for her own good. Expect lots of data forays into video games, Broadway, theme parks, film/TV, board games, fashion and much more from her addled mind!
John D. Harden is a data journalist based in the Bay Area. He likes to cosplay as a homesteader often stressing over his garden beds and their pH levels. His hope is to show how data can be entertaining and help inform the relatable questions we all have but are never quite sure how to answer or share — whether they’re about nature, movies, music, your favorite hobbies or simply how we move though the world.
Christine Zhang is a data and graphics journalist in New York. Her day job focuses on analyzing election data; if you’re looking for that, you won’t find it here. Her aim with Wrong Number is to dive deeply (or even shallowly) into the datasets that lurk in the other recesses of her mind, about stuff like art history, comics, food, films, beer, Broadway and whatever else she unearths. And to practice writing in the first person!
What data are you curious about? Send us tips and questions at [email protected]!
Why “Wrong Number”?
Have you ever dialed a wrong number and ended up in a strange conversation? That’s us. You come for one thing and leave with an unexpected data story that introduces you to a topic you’ve never thought about or reveals a different side of a subject you’re already into.
To be clear, nobody’s making numbers up in this newsletter. What we also mean by “wrong” number is that the data we’re writing about is just a bit … weird.
If you called us at our day jobs, you would find us hard at work covering a myriad of topics tied to the news cycle. This newsletter is for everything else.
