About It Figures NZ

It Figures NZ is automated data journalism for Aotearoa. Every day, our pipeline scans current New Zealand news, fetches the latest open data from government agencies, and uses AI to write stories that connect the numbers to what people are already talking about.

We exist because government data releases are a goldmine that nobody reads. Every month, agencies quietly publish datasets showing where money goes, what's getting more expensive, which crimes are rising, and how the economy is shifting. We surface those stories.

How it works

1. Read the news. We scan RSS feeds from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, and Reddit to identify what New Zealanders care about right now.

2. Fetch data. We pull the latest datasets from Stats NZ, Ministry of Justice, NZ Police, MBIE, and the Department of Internal Affairs.

3. Analyse. Our engine compares new data against historical baselines, looking for significant changes, trend reversals, and records — prioritising data that connects to trending news topics.

4. Write. When we find something newsworthy, Claude (Anthropic's AI) writes a story grounded in the data and framed around current events.

5. Publish. Stories appear here with full source attribution, key statistics, and a link to the raw data so you can check our work.

Caveats

These stories are generated by AI. While the system is designed to be accurate and grounded in real data, AI can make mistakes. Always verify specific figures by checking the linked source data before citing.

Data sources

All data comes from NZ government agencies publishing under open licences:

Stats NZ · NZ Police · Ministry of Justice · MBIE · DIA

Crown copyright. Reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.