Save the date: June 2nd, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. (Pacific Time). The Big Local News team will host its second virtual open office hours to help reporters working with data.

Whether you want to brainstorm about data for your story, need help processing and cleaning it or are stuck on your analysis, just drop by our Zoom Meeting and we will be happy to help.

The goal of this initiative is to support journalists from all backgrounds, from those who have never worked with data to those experienced in handling it.

We are looking forward to meeting you Friday, June 2nd, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. (PT)!

About our team:

The BLN team brings multiple skills that will move forward accountability stories. We specialize in large-scale data collection using public records requests and web scraping, building workflows for processing data and analyzing data. We help bring journalists together and build collaborations in support of local journalism.

Big Local News partnered with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships and the Google News Initiative to fund and provide mentorship for data-driven journalism aimed at investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the most disadvantaged communities.

Our grantees published powerful and original projects from around the world as a result.

As a member of the California Reporting Project, our team helped to discover how the Bakersfield Police Department broke 31 people’s bones in four years, and how the same department fails to identify people in a mental health crisis.

In 2021, our team joined forces with the New York Times and Ed Source to collect public school enrollment data from around the country and analyze trends at 70,000 schools. This past year, we worked with The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education to gather and analyze private and homeschool enrollment data, which helped explain some of the dramatic drop in K-12 public school enrollment.

The enrollment datasets, along with useful tutorials, are available for every reporter who wants to explore the trends in their local school district, state or region.

Still have questions? Just email [email protected], or join our next virtual open office hours on June 2.

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.