Date: November 8th

Time: 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Pacific Time

Election season doesn’t quite end with Election Day any more, so the Big Local News team is hosting open office hours 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 help reporters request data from their state or local authorities, much of which is available through the Knight Election Hub.

Feel free to drop by for help with your stories, or to ask about potential collaborations.

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].