The Lede Program

An intensive, remote-friendly summer program from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism designed to equip journalists and storytellers of all kinds with the skills needed to turn data into narrativebreak out of Excelperform in-depth investigationsharness APIswrite data-driven stories

The Lede Program

Columbia Journalism School's Lede Program is a 10-week intensive on coding, data analysis, and visual storytelling. For 2024, the course will be once again operate with in-person and remote options.

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 zero, with no prior experience in data or coding necessary – You'll learn it all along the way. If you can turn on your computer, you're ready to go!

Real-World Skills

Tired of programming tutorials that are all about complex ways of putting a dozen numbers in order? We teach the practical, real-world skills in data analysis and visualization and sidestep the theory.

Application Details

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Applications for 2025 will open in late 2024 or early 2025

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. Our topics change each year, but let's review a few of the possibilities:

Python

Programming language

SQL

Data

JSON

Data

APIs

Data

Svelte

Interactives

R

Analysis and visualization

pandas

Data analysis

Playwright

Web Scraping

QGIS

Mapping

DataWrapper

Charts and Graphs

BeautifulSoup

Web Scraping

spaCy

Text analysis

CSS

Styling the web

Jupyter 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 program-long deep dive, you'll return to the workplace with sharp new analytical, investigative, and storytelling skills.

Applications

The Lede Program is open to anyone and everyone, with no prior coding experience required.

Learn more here

Dates

Summer 2024 will be from Monday, June 3 to Friday, August 9.

Tuition

As a professional program at Columbia University, the Lede Program costs less than a formal degree. Scholarship aid is also available. For more information on tuition and 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 2025 application period will open in late 2024 or early 2025

Learn More