The Markup is a nonprofit newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good. Our journalism is actionable and drives real-world impact.
In 2024, The Markup became a part of CalMatters, a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization that explains California policies and politics and makes its government more transparent and accountable. This trailblazing combination of a national and a state newsroom creates an incredible opportunity to ground our work, have continuous impact, and allow our journalism to build real, long standing relationships with communities.
Our approach is scientific: We build datasets from scratch, bulletproof our reporting, and show our work. We call this The Markup Method.
As a nonprofit newsroom, our journalism exists to serve the public. And that’s why we have embraced a Show Your Work philosophy. Whenever possible, we will publish the underlying datasets and code that we use in our investigations, as well as a detailed methodology describing the data, its provenance and the statistical techniques used in our analysis. We invite academics, journalists, policymakers, consumer activists, and community organizers to engage with our findings—after all, this is for you.
We also want our stories to reach you where you are. That means we will publish our stories on our own site and also through distribution partnerships with other media. And because we know many different types of audiences—including those we don’t know about!—will be interested in our work, we encourage you to freely republish our work under the terms of our Creative Commons license.
We also make a privacy promise to our readers. We will not expose you to third-party tracking. We will collect as little personal information about you as possible. And we will never monetize this data. This makes our work more complicated and more expensive, which is tough for a nonprofit—but your privacy is worth it.
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