Introducing Datasette for Newsrooms

April 24, 2025, 8:37 p.m. Simon Willison, Alex Garcia

We’re excited to introduce Datasette for Newsrooms, a new product suite from Datasette Cloud built specifically for investigative journalists and data teams. It's an all-in-one data store, search engine, and collaboration platform designed to make working with data in a newsroom easier, faster, and more transparent.

Built for how newsrooms work

News organizations today deal with troves of documents, spreadsheets, databases, and leaks. But too often, that data is siloed, hard to search, or dependent on a handful of experts to operate. Datasette for Newsrooms changes that.

With Datasette Cloud you can:

  • Upload and organize your data: CSVs, SQL dumps, document troves, and more.
  • Process unstructured data with AI, transforming messy data sources into searchable, filterable tables.
  • Search and filter quickly with powerful full-text search, filters and facets.
  • Visualize your data with built-in charts and maps, or export it to your favorite tools.
  • Run SQL directly in your browser, and share your queries with your team.
  • Collaborate with your team using comments and mentions.
  • Publish your findings—entire tables or specific query results—transparently to your audience.

Empower your data nerds

Does your newsroom have one over-worked data expert who everyone else depends on for pulling numbers, cleaning spreadsheets, and answering every question involving data?

Datasette lets those data experts build a self-service portal for the rest of the team.

Screenshot of a database interface showing firearm background checks data. The page displays "home / nics-firearm-background-checks / background_checks" at the top with user "alex-staff" logged in. The table shows ">10,000 rows" of background check statistics by state for February 2025, with columns for permit, permit_recheck, handgun, long_gun, other, multiple, admin, and prepawn counts. States shown include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Delaware with their corresponding numerical values.

Reporters can search and filter data, run saved queries and visualize and export the results, independently or in collaboration with each other and the resident data nerds.

Our goal is to making newsroom data workflows more collaborative and less reliant on gatekeepers.

And when it’s time to go to press, you can publish the data behind the story for your readers, helping build trust and transparency in your reporting.

We'll help you get started

Sign up for our trial and we'll give you hands-on help getting started. We'll work with you to import your data and onboard your team. You can pay us in feedback!

We’re offering one year of free access for nonprofit newsrooms, and a two month trial for everyone else.

Reach us at hello@datasette.cloud and we'll get you set up.