Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter . It can feel more difficult than ever for journalists to find data: FOIA requests go unanswered, government dashboards are taken down, and public databases get quietly archived. In some cases, no datasets exist at all. Increasingly, reporters are left to collect and create their own data.  Systematically collecting data from across the web, a process known as scraping, is a common solution. Writing a scraper or two for a story is (usually) a fairly straightforward task for a data journalist who knows a bit of code. But writing dozens or even hundreds of scrapers to scrape data from multiple websites in myriad formats can be prohibitively time-consuming. At the Tow Center, we have been able to use AI to generate a first-draft fleet of Python scrapers in just minutes. Now we’re sharing that code for you to use, too.  Scraper Factory is an AI-powered code generator for creating scrapers.…