Date: September 27th Time: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Pacific Time

With the election drawing near, open office hours for with the Big Local News team will be there to assist reporters with data-related tasks. Whether you’re new to data journalism or an advanced data reporter, our Zoom meeting is the perfect opportunity to get guidance on public record requests, data discovery, data processing, cleaning and analysis.

Big Local News also collects, cleans and standardizes datasets and makes them available to reporters and researchers. We’ve gathered election-related data, including voting machine data, a survey of first-time voters and can reporters request data from their state or local authorities. Have non-election related data questions? Just let us know and we will walk you through the data and potential stories during our virtual open office hours.

Feel free to drop by to learn more about Big Local News or discuss potential collaborations. You can submit your questions in advance through our survey.

About Big Local News:

At Big Local News, we bring together diverse skills to support accountability in local journalism. Our team specializes in data collection through public records requests and web scraping, data cleaning and analysis and story recipes or guides to find your story in the data. The goal is to bolster local news efforts. We partner with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship, offering mentorship and support to fellows working on data-driven investigations. Some of our latest projects include uncovering bribery scandals in Hawaii and how the system still broken, investigating the abuses in a Mississippi Sheriff’s Department, and reporting on Baltimore’s overdose crisis. As part of the California Reporting Project, we highlighted issues like the Bakersfield Police Department’s record of 31 bone fractures over four years and their struggles with mental health crisis management. In 2023, we partnered with The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education to analyze private and homeschool enrollment trends, explaining the drop in K-12 public school enrollment. Previously, 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. These datasets and story guides are available for reporters interested in local school enrollment trends. For more information, email us at [email protected].