Journocoders June 2023

Investigating big tech by finding their undocumented APIs

Show and tell

Please add links to anything related to data or journalism here! Great data stories you’ve seen, new tools, jobs you’re hiring for, announcements – anything others might be interested in 👇


Tutorial

Some useful notes for the later steps:

Step 6: at the end, you'll have some Python code that the tutorials says 'you can run'. But how? The easiest way is to use Google Colab which lets you interactively run Python code online. Click 'new notebook' then paste the code in. The code you have makes the API request, but doesn't actually do anything with it. To actually see the response, add this line at the end:

response.json()

Press the little play button on the left to run the code. You should see something that looks similar to what you saw in the inspector.

Step 7: You will need to add the same line to see the response in step 6.

Step 8: In this step the code gets refactored to make it repeatable and reusable, but it's a bit of a jump if you've never done anything with code before. If that's you, do still try to read the code -- you should be able to get a rough idea of what does what, and how it's similar to the code you had in the last step. Try changing some of the code (eg. the keywords) and rerunning it to check your understanding.

Next time

The next meetup will be on Wednesday 12th July. Location TBD.

What should we cover? Anything we should or shouldn’t be doing? We want your ideas!

Interested in what we’ve covered before? We have a list!