Welcome to Fact Tank, a new, real-time platform from the Pew Research Center, dedicated to finding news in the numbers.

Fact Tank will build on the Pew Research Center’s unique brand of data journalism. For years, our teams of writers and social scientists have combined rigorous research with high-quality storytelling to provide important information on issues and trends shaping the nation and the world.

Fact Tank will allow us to provide that sort of information at a faster pace, in an attempt to provide you with the information you need when you need it. We’ll fill the gap between major surveys and reports with shorter pieces using our data to give context to the news of the day. And we’ll scour other data sources, bringing you important insights on politics, religion, technology, media, economics and social trends.

As always, we aim to be rigorously nonpartisan in our approach. Unlike other think tanks, Pew Research doesn’t take stands on issues and we won’t be making policy recommendations or staking out issue positions on Fact Tank. Our goal is to provide factual information that can be trusted by those on both sides of today’s partisan and policy divides, and to provide a foundation for informed debate.

We also invite your feedback. Feel free to comment on our posts. We’ll review your comments for appropriateness, and post them as quickly as possible. You can also follow and respond to our work on Twitter, by following @FactTank.  You can also email us at facttank@pewresearch.org.

We hope you’ll find Fact Tank a valuable addition to your daily information diet.

Alan Murray  is a former president of the Pew Research Center.