Data journalism conference considers sharing resources, knowledge
Gathering at Stanford included journalists, technologists and academics
At Stanford University last week, Big Local News hosted the second annual Story Discovery at Scale conference. The two-day event brought together about 60 journalists, technologists and academics united by a desire to help newsrooms of all sizes produce more data-driven journalism.
Stanford is the home of Big Local News, which helps journalists access public records—and even includes a free platform for journalists to archive data. Nearly every narrative can be aided by data that conveys context, provides evidence and helps a reader place themselves in the story. However, without specialized skills and ample resources, working with data can lead journalists to use words that are unprintable in a family newsletter such as this one. 😀
Increasing access to data-driven journalism involves doing more: providing more training and support, developing more tools and algorithms, and making more datasets available. It also involves doing less: less duplication of efforts, less bespoke work on deadline, and less guessing about what communities want to know.
A lot needs to come together for a newsroom to actually leverage data on a regular basis, whether it is in small daily stories such as business openings or larger investigative and accountability work. To that end, the Stanford event’s presentations and conversations explored solutions that included:
Understanding needs of audiences often unserved by journalism, through listening and research techniques, and serving those needs with novel approaches.
Highlighting emerging, repeatable solutions to working with common, local datasets such as police stops, public meeting agendas, property tax records and restaurant inspections.
Exploring not-terrible uses of artificial intelligence to assist in repeatable tasks and provide reporters with real-time assistance.
Lowering barriers to incorporating data, especially in small and independent newsrooms, with things like Slack-based “tipbots” that alert journalists about newsworthy leads.
Defining new approaches to collaboration involving journalists, students, librarians and experts.
Sharing ideas and solutions for revenue generation.
Stitching all these possibilities together into something simple and coherent for journalists involves taking a “federated” approach to sharing resources and knowledge. Organizations such as Big Local News and MuckRock are pioneers on this front, building partnerships with publishers, data providers and universities, and developing systems that handle common (and often unglamorous) tasks, such as a single login to multiple tools.
Federating helps make the user experience more consistent for journalists, more like “one-stop shopping” than the current juggling act required when using multiple tools and services. It also helps make life more sustainable for data providers who have expertise in certain topic areas, because their work is more likely to be used and less expensive to operate.
To paraphrase an old programming adage, if done correctly, this approach to data-driven journalism should help newsrooms of all sizes keep simple things simple, and make complex things possible.
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Other news around the horn…
Investments
💰 MacKenzie Scott funds Word In Black, News is Out. Christmas came early last month for 361 nonprofits that received $640 million from Yield Giving (either getting $1 million or $2 million each). Yield is the organization that’s giving away MacKenzie Scott’s billions. In the local news sphere, the Local Media Foundation (the giving arm of the Local Media Association) was one of the recipients of Scott’s largesse, with funds going to two important collaborations, Word In Black (Black publishers) and News is Out (queer news publishers). Word In Black will use the funds to expand resources for investigative journalism, produce events and enhance infrastructure. News is Out will launch a three-month strategic planning process and determine top priorities for the funding. “To have a national funder with the reputation of MacKenzie Scott recognize the importance journalism plays in these communities is refreshing and validating. These publishers have been historically underfunded in every way,” said Nancy Lane, co-CEO of Local Media Foundation and Local Media Association.
🔔 Lenfest offers grants to expand Every Voice, Every Vote. The Lenfest Institute helped produce the ambitious election project Every Voice, Every Vote (EVEV) during last year’s Philadelphia city elections. EVEV included a broad coalition of 130 news outlets, community nonprofits and even social media creators. Post-election, the coalition wants to continue its work covering issues that matter to Philadelphians, including public health, public safety, affordable housing and homelessness. A group of funders, including Lenfest and Knight, are offering $2.875 million in grants to help cover these vital issues, with solutions journalism, accountability reporting and even data projects. Alongside the grants, the collaboration will run a public awareness campaign and conduct polls. “We are extremely excited to launch the next—and most critical—phase of the Every Voice, Every Vote initiative to ensure that residents from every neighborhood…continue to have access to the information they need,” said Shawn Mooring, head of Philadelphia programs for Lenfest.
Awards
🏆 Texas Tribune, ProPublica, Frontline win National Magazine Award. For years, the definition of a magazine was a glossy print publication that you flipped through at the doctor’s office. But that’s changed rapidly, as Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Frontline won a National Magazine Award for their multimedia coverage of the. school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The Tribune-ProPublica report, “Someone Tell Me What to Do,” used hours of interviews and body camera footage from police to come to a startling conclusion: Children followed active-shooter training perfectly, while police did not. The investigative partners produced a documentary along with Frontline called “Inside the Uvalde Response.” The award was the first magazine award for the Tribune, one of the top statewide nonprofits in the country. “While it is gratifying to win an award, this was one of the most emotionally difficult stories any of us had ever covered,” said Sewell Chan, editor in chief of the Tribune. “We are grateful to the survivors and relatives of victims in Uvalde, who entrusted us with their stories. We hope that our work might better inform and prepare law enforcement agencies.”
Impact
💵 How INN is helping newsrooms with fundraising. Donations are the lifeblood of nonprofit newsrooms, and often their leaders come from editorial backgrounds without experience in fundraising. Luckily the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has a lot of resources for newsroom leaders to get up to speed and develop fundraising strategies and find major donors in their communities. How can they do that? INN director of network philanthropy Stephanie Schenkel explains five ways INN can help. That includes one-on-one coaching, support for the annual NewsMatch campaign, discounted tools for “wealth screening” (to find those major donors) and peer learning opportunities. Plus, INN is developing a new training on fundraising fundamentals. “Taking advantage of INN’s resources can help news organizations focus on producing strong journalism while receiving the support needed to stay afloat financially and serve their communities for the long term,” Schenkel concluded.
🚗 Motor City collaboration helps decipher budget meetings. In a big city like Detroit, the budget alone requires 46 public meetings in a month. So how can anyone keep up? Thankfully, Detroit is also home to some strong nonprofit news organizations that teamed up to cover all those meetings, logging hundreds of hours of painstaking audio recordings and notes. BridgeDetroit, Outlier Media and Detroit Documenters covered budget hearings for everything from the Board of Ethics to the Police Department to the Public Lighting Department (yep, $20 million proposed). Each hearing summary includes a list of what’s being proposed, what’s changed and important things to note, along with a link to the audio. “If I can say this, they’re like Pokemon cards showing the stats and special abilities of each city department,” BridgeDetroit’s Malachi Barrett told WDET. This is no doubt a policy wonk’s dream and a civically engaged community’s ideal for government transparency. Hopefully more communities will follow Detroit’s example.
Research
📱Hispanic Americans prefer news on digital devices. A recent Pew Research Center study found that Hispanics in the U.S. are following the same trends as other demographics, except they have an even stronger predilection for digital news. The study found Hispanics prefer getting digital news in a larger percentage (65 percent) than their white (55 percent) and Black (50 percent) peers. They’re also more likely to get news from social media because Hispanics are younger than other groups in America, Pew found. While many news outlets cater to Spanish-speaking audiences, Pew found that 54 percent of Hispanic adults get news mostly in English, and just 21 percent mostly in Spanish. In fact, they tend to prefer to get news in English too, with 51 percent giving a preference for news in English vs. 24 percent in Spanish. Pew notes that there’s a split between U.S.-born Hispanics and immigrants: U.S.-born Hispanics overwhelmingly get news in English while 41 percent of immigrants get news mostly in Spanish, 26 percent primarily in English and 31 percent do both equally.
Jobs
Sahan Journal, Executive Director
Learn more here.
Reynolds Journalism Institute, Innovation Team members
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Richmondside, Editor in Chief
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Fellowships
Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism
The Carter Center
$10,000
Apply by April 12
New America
$10,000 to tell a “comprehensive American story”
Apply by May 3
Local Investigations Fellowship
New York Times
One year; fellows stay in their newsrooms
Apply by September 2
Training
Branded Content Project & VuePoint Advertising
Free and online
April 24 at 1 pm ET
Upcoming Events 📅
Open Source AI Hackathon from Hacks/Hackers
New York
April 5–7
International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ)
Austin
April 12–13
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Las Vegas
April 13–17
Collaborative Journalism Summit
Detroit
May 9–10
San Diego
June 11–12
Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)
Milwaukee
June 12–14
National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ)
Hollywood, CA
July 9–13
Oklahoma City
July 25–27
National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ)
Chicago
July 31–August 4
LION’s Independent News Sustainability Summit
Chicago
September 5–7
The Association for LGTBQ+ Journalists
Los Angeles
September 5–8
Online News Association (ONA24)
Atlanta
September 18–21
Quote of the Week
“Some local newsrooms are at the front of AI innovation because there are fewer dependencies in their workflow streams. The operations with the most innovative experiments are ones like the Baltimore Times, the two- to three-person newsrooms that feel lucky to have help. Chatbots and image creators are also on sale right now as [tech] companies vie to be the top AI developer, so prices to use these tools are low and sometimes free to use.”
—Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, in a Q&A with the Local Media Association
News @ Knight Credits
Written by Marc Lavallee, with Mark Glaser
Edited by Jim Brady, Jessica Clark and Kara Pickman