R has found its way into a good number of news groups who do data journalism. Andrew Flowers for FiveThirtyEight talks about how they use the statistical computing language throughout their workflow.
R is used in every step of the data journalism process: for cleaning and processing data, for exploratory graphing and statistical analysis, for models deploying in real time as and to create publishable data visualizations. We write R code to underpin several of our popular interactives, as well, like the Facebook Primary and our historical Elo ratings of NBA and NFL teams. Heck, we’ve even styled a custom ggplot2 theme. We even use R code on long-term investigative projects.
