The Lede Program

An intensive, remote-friendly summer program from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Department of Computer Science designed to equip journalists and storytellers of all kinds with the computational skills needed to turn data into narrativebreak out of Excelperform in-depth investigationsharness APIsexplain complex subjectswrite data-driven storiesprocess document dumpsfind insights and leadsperform in-depth investigations

The Lede Program

Columbia Journalism School’s Lede Program is a 10-week intensive on coding and data analysis. For 2021, the course will be operated as a fully remote program in light of the continued COVID-19 pandemic.

Not just for journalists

Pulling insights from data isn’t just for journalists — our tools and skills are equally valuable to social scientists, policymakers, and academics of all stripes.

No Prerequisites

We start from square one, with no prior experience in data or coding necessary. You’ll learn the ins and outs along the way.

Real-World Skills

We balance practical, real-world skills with the computer science theory you’ll want to take your coding further.

Lede 2021 will run remotely from June 7 to August 13

Program details

Applications for the reduced-rate 2021 program are now open

What will you learn?

“Data” isn’t just one simple thing. You’ll acquire a plethora of skills, tools and programming languages to make you a more effective storyteller. Let’s review a few of the possibilities:

Python

Programming language

SQL

Data

JSON

Data

APIs

Data

QGIS

Mapping

DataWrapper

Charts and Graphs

BeautifulSoup

Web Scraping

spaCy and NLTK

Text analysis

CSS

Styling the web

IPython Notebook

Accountable Coding

d3.js

Interactives

git

Version Control

…and that’s not all, either.

With coverage ranging from an hour of introduction to a semester-long deep dive, you’ll return to the workplace with sharp new analytical, investigative, and storytelling skills.

Applications

The Lede Program is open to applicants with a strong academic or professional record and demonstrated interest in data technologies. Learn more here

Dates

Lede 2021 will run remotely June 7 through August 13.

Tuition

As a professional program at Columbia University, the Lede Program costs less than a formal degree. Scholarship aid is also available, and for Summer 2021 we are offering a special 20% rate reduction. For more information on tuition and scholarship aid opportunities, see our Tuition and Fees page.

Questions?

If you’d like to know more, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at jrncomputation@columbia.edu
Email us now

Application Details

The Summer 2021 application period is now open, with an early admission deadline of March 31, 2021.

Learn more

Student Work

If you’re curious about the work we do, visit our Student Work page to see examples from assignments and projects, as well as published pieces by Lede Program graduates.