Big Local News

Very glad to see student work from last spring published by the AP today: school surveillance and va**ng: https://apnews.com/article/va**ng-surveillance-technology-schools-982128348c683b9d54c7a307c5b1fdc6?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter

Schools are using surveillance tech to catch students va**ng, snaring some with harsh punishments Schools around the country are installing sensors and cameras to crack down on student va**ng and handing out harsh punishments for many who are caught.

Launching the Sigma Awards 2024 for data journalism It's the end of the year, and you know what that means. Before you start thinking about Christmas carols, snow trips, and December office dinners, let us share some cheerful news. The Sigma Awards for data journalism are back again. We're delighted to start the hunt for 2023's best data

Happy New Year to our students and the entire Bill Lane Center community!

If you are still looking for a winter quarter class, please consider the popular, five-unit American West class held Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. in Hewlett 201. The first class on Monday will be introductions by all four faculty. Come check it out!

More on the course:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate course taught by a distinguished group of four scholars from different departments and two different schools (see faculty below).

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

Faculty:
Bruce Cain, Political Science
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
David Freyberg, Civil and Environmental Engineering
David M. Kennedy, History

We need to make local news big! The Computer History Museum has published my article on building an infrastructure for local journalism, along with other pieces delving into technology and journalism by JSK's Dawn Garcia, Google News' Richard Gingras, Hacks/Hackers' Sil Hamilton, The Globe and Mail's David Walmsley, Outlier Media's Candice Fortman, The Pivot Fund's Tracie Powell, and more! It was a pleasure to both attend the workshop and engage with so many. Read it here: https://futureofnews.computerhistory.org/making-local-news-big/
A little more background on this body of work: Over the past two decades, digital technologies have profoundly disrupted the news industry. Now, emerging technologies have the potential to transform the news business once again. The Computer History Museum’s two-year exploration of Technology and the Future of News offers insights into the potential - and avoidable pitfalls, of news journalism in the years ahead.
During this first year, CHM’s Tech and the Future of News initiative convened a diverse group of thought leaders to discuss how changing technology has impacted the news and how we can use it to restore trust, preserve a free press, and help citizens get the information they need. Publishers, editors, journalists, academics, and entrepreneurs contributed insights and insider stories about tech and the news that were balanced by a survey of nearly 1,600 people from across the US.

CHM Tech and the Future of News — Making Local News Bog

It’s too hard for local journalists to access public records about policing, public health, education, government and other vital topics.

From its base at Stanford University, Big Local News tries to solve the problem by gathering data, building tools and collaborating with reporters.

The biglocalnews.org site also offers a free archiving service for journalists to store, share and publish data. Selected projects are preserved by the Stanford Digital Repository. An Industrial Affiliates program provides expanded opportunities to engage with the program and support its mission. And we have recently launched agendawatch.org, which allows users to set up email alerts for local government agenda items of interest -- lowering the cost of covering government for local newsrooms.

If you want to help support local journalism, consider giving to Big Local News on . Today, Stanford University is matching gifts up to $5,000, making your contribution count for more!

You can give online at givingtuesday.stanford.edu. To direct your gift to Big Local News, when you make your gift please select "School of Humanities and Sciences" from the drop-down menu and then select Other and write in Dept. of Communication, Big Local News project.

We are building a support infrastructure for local news. Please help!

--Cheryl Phillips, founder, Big Local News

Local news is big An occasional missive in support of local news and democracy.

Local News is Big | Cheryl Phillips | Substack Read the local news that matters and discuss how local journalism can create impact. Click to read Local News is Big, by Cheryl Phillips, a Substack publication. Launched 3 years ago.

https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2023/06/23/welcome-to-agenda-watch.html

Welcome to Agenda Watch, a platform to help journalists keep watch on local government Trying to keep tabs on contractors scooping up bids in the region? School boards discussing CRT? The latest big box store angling to build in your town? Agenda Watch has you covered.

https://www.facebook.com/sigmaawards/posts/pfbid0T6Yy7ktySKHxPtX2kij9vR95uAok5fXutDAoeTjGH8izp5pVpTQZzahSen8Foppel

Sigma Awards - YouTube The Sigma Awards is a competition to celebrate the best data journalism from around the world.

A big day for Big Local News:
Big Local News to collaborate with New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship
March 9, 2023 • By Big Local News

Big Local News is excited to announce it is collaborating with the New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship to provide data journalism and analysis support and training for the inaugural class of fellows.

The program, led by Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of The New York Times, provides local journalists the opportunity to produce “signature investigative work focused on their state or region that will be published by The Times and made available for free for co-publication by local newsrooms,” according to a news release by The Times today that announced the first cohort of fellows.

“There was so much talent out there and so many good ideas. These were hard choices. But this is a remarkable group of reporters,” said Mr. Baquet in the release. “And their work will have an impact on their communities.”

Big Local News data journalists will support the work of the fellows by helping them obtain and analyze data for their projects and provide ongoing training in investigative data techniques throughout the process.

The BLN team combines many different skills that have helped move forward numerous accountability stories. We specialize in large-scale data collection using public records requests and web scraping, building workflows for processing data, analyzing datasets and collaborating with journalists and researchers. The Big Local team also offers a quarterly virtual office hours program program, where any local reporter and editor can connect via Zoom with the Big Local News journalists for advice, hands-on training and more.

“Being able to help with the important local journalism that will come out of The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship is exciting and core to our mission,” said Cheryl Phillips, founder and director of Big Local News.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2014, Phillips spent 12 years working as a data journalist at The Seattle Times and has worked in local newsrooms around the U.S. “Local impact is best achieved through local accountability journalism, this is exactly the kind of work we hope to help foster.”

Big Local News got its start through a Stanford JSK Journalism Impact Fellowship and support from the The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford and Columbia Universities as well as the Google News Initiative.

About Big Local News
From its base at Stanford University, Big Local News gathers data, builds tools and collaborates with reporters to produce journalism that makes an impact. Its website at biglocalnews.org offers a free archiving service for journalists to store and share data. Learn more by visiting our about page.
https://biglocalnews.org

Big Local News Data, tools and collaborations that empower journalists to better cover their community. A project at Stanford University.

Introducing the US Place Sampler by Big Local News and The Markup!

Introducing the United States Place Sampler (USPS) – The Markup Easily sample random U.S. street addresses using this new tool from Big Local News and The Markup

Where did the kids of the pandemic's public-school exodus go?

New data on enrollment by sector (private, homeschool, public) & population from a collaboration with Big Local News, the Associated Press and Education Professor Tom Dee provides some evidence.

The data and story recipes are available at biglocalnews.org and also are archived with the Stanford Digital Repository for access by the public. That's right, local journalists can use this data for stories in their own communities. Supporting local news is what we do.

https://apnews.com/article/covid-school-enrollment-missing-kids-homeschool-b6c9017f603c00466b9e9908c5f2183a

Thousands of kids are missing from school. Where did they go? Over a million kids left public schools during COVID. Hundreds of thousands of them didn’t start private school or homeschool. They’re missing.

Big news on increasing access to vital data for local journalism.

Instantly explore Big Local News projects with Datasette Today the Big Local News site linked up with Datasette, a free and open-source tool for exploring data.

When I came to Stanford in 2014, I came with an idea to support newsrooms as they performed their daily public service. I wanted to ensure that journalists could more easily access data that would help them tell stories of all kinds, from daily education news, to solutions journalism, to investigative and accountabilities stories that can shift policy. I'm happy to say that since then, we've build a data-sharing platform, a way to archive and preserve data for the long term and news detection data streams, such as our layoff watch and our soon to be released Agenda Watch site. All of this has happened because of generous gifts and grants. But we need your help. Every donation you make will support local journalism in all the ways described above. Please consider making a gift to Big Local News to help support local journalism that matters.

Read more about how here: https://lnkd.in/gq3MAXsw

Some of what we have been working on:

Exploring the benefits of federated databases for policing records This article explains the steps for newsrooms to facilitate data-driven accountability journalism through cross-domain collaboration.

How you can support Big Local News It’s too hard for local journalists to access public records about policing, public health, government and other vital topics. Big Local News – a small lab within the Stanford journalism program – tries to solve the problem by gathering data, building tools and collaborating with reporters.

https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2022/11/29/giving-tuesday.html
This Giving Tuesday, please support local journalism. Give to your local nonprofit site, or give to a journalism training organization. And please consider supporting Big Local News - we provide data, tools, tutorials, news tips, mentorship and more. The goal is to support community accountability journalism. We are located at Stanford but run on gifts and grants. Every bit helps.

How you can support Big Local News It’s too hard for local journalists to access public records about policing, public health, government and other vital topics. Big Local News – a small lab within the Stanford journalism program – tries to solve the problem by gathering data, building tools and collaborating with reporters.

Hello friends, you may know that I founded Big Local News, a data-sharing platform and collaborative effort for journalists. The pilot project for this effort was the Stanford Open Policing Project, where we collected and have released 250 police stop data from 33 states and 57 cities. We also trained local journalists in how to analyze this data for stories. We are currently working in cooperation with data scientists and others to collect and standardize police misconduct records.

Since we launched the Big Local News data-sharing platform the first week of March in 2020, we have seen its user base consistently grow, with nearly 2,500 users now. We’ve launched multiple projects to support local journalism. We built a Covid Casemapper, which makes it possible for newsrooms to embed a local Covid Case map with up-to-date information on cases, vaccinations and deaths. We collaborated on an effort to collect, standardize and release school enrollment loss during the pandemic and published an academic paper at the same time as news stories in the New York Times and in local newsrooms, such as EdSource in California, and the Baltimore Sun. We’ve built out story recipes where we help journalists understand how to analyze data for important local stories. Most recently, we launched the Census Mapper, which allows embedding of a map of local Census population shifts.

Next up, we are beginning to develop an ambitious project called Agenda Watch. We are scraping thousands of local government agendas and minutes and are building out a web site that will enable journalists and everyday citizens to set email alerts by topic, or to mine patterns in actions by local city councils, county commissions and more.

The mission of Big Local News is to help fill in the gaps of local news by providing data, tools and training. This effort is funded through grants and donations. If helping local news is something you are interested in, you can support our work by making an online donation. In the form, select School of Humanities and Social Science and specify Dept. of Communication, Big Local News project. Today, Giving Tuesday, that donation will be matched up to $2,500, thanks to a Stanford donor. Thanks much for reading this far and feel free to reach out directly for more details on our work to [email protected].
https://give.stanford.edu/

-- Cheryl Phillips, Director of Big Local News

Make a Gift to Stanford When you give to Stanford, you drive positive change in the world.

Our Census Mapper project has census data: national to county level. You can filter by race + embed the map of your local area for any census-related projects. The tool was created by Big Local News and Pitch Interactive, data collected and processed by the Associated Press. https://censusmapper.biglocalnews.org/ #/

Census Mapper 2020 Pitch Interactive and Big Local News as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative) have partnered to share an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national level, states, counties, places and census tracts. The Census data are pulled from the data collected an...

Still not sure about how to make a visual for your story? Our new tool can help! Big Local News and Pitch Interactive bring you the Census Mapper, an interactive tool with national, state, and county census data - also customizable by race & embeddable. https://censusmapper.biglocalnews.org/ #/

Census Mapper 2020 Pitch Interactive and Big Local News as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative) have partnered to share an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national level, states, counties, places and census tracts. The Census data are pulled from the data collected an...

If you liked the COVID-19 Case Mapper, you’re going to love this! Big Local News and Pitch Interactive, Inc have teamed up once again. This time we bring you the Census Mapper project: an embeddable map with national, state, and county level data - click below for more. https://censusmapper.biglocalnews.org/ #/

Census Mapper 2020 Pitch Interactive and Big Local News as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative) have partnered to share an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national level, states, counties, places and census tracts. The Census data are pulled from the data collected an...

The Census Mapper tool, produced by Big Local News and Pitch Interactive, Inc. , in collaboration with the Associated Press and with support from Google News Initiative & John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships is an interactive, embeddable map that helps readers visualize census data. Click below for more: https://censusmapper.biglocalnews.org/ #/

Census Mapper 2020 Pitch Interactive and Big Local News as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative) have partnered to share an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national level, states, counties, places and census tracts. The Census data are pulled from the data collected an...

Need help visualizing census data for your readers? Check out the Census Mapper Project, an embeddable map with census data at the national, state, county level. Created with support from the Google News Initiative and John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships. https://censusmapper.biglocalnews.org/ #/

Census Mapper 2020 Pitch Interactive and Big Local News as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative) have partnered to share an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national level, states, counties, places and census tracts. The Census data are pulled from the data collected an...