Today, Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times were awarded the local reporting Pulitzer prize for an investigation into Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis which found that the city had become the drug overdose capital of the country. The work was done in collaboration with The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship and Big Local News.

BLN Staford Photo by Geri Migielicz at Stanford University.

This project enabled the simultaneous publication on the opioid overdose crisis in six other publications around the country. Another three news organizations published stories in January. The project brought to light for the first time how the opioid crisis has disproportionately affected one group of black men in their mid-50s to early 70s throughout their adult lives in dozens of cities around the U.S., using a one-of-a-kind dataset from the CDC that tracked every fatal overdose. That granular data was provided by the CDC with the understanding that it could be released with summary numbers only at the county level. Together, The Banner, Big Local News and The Times summarized the data findings for the newsrooms, held many regular virtual meetings with them, fact-checked the data analysis, built visualizations, and became the beneficiaries of some impressive local reporting from Boston and Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. This work spearheaded a national conversation about America’s opioid epidemic.

The amazing, collaborative nature of this project can be seen in the credits paragraph published as part of the most recent national story: Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Phillips, Eric Sagara, Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo of Big Local News; Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson of The Chicago Sun-Times; Aubrey Whelan and Joe Yerardi of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Venuri Siriwardane and Jamie Wiggan of PublicSource; Abigail Higgins and Colleen Grablick of The 51st; Ryan Little of The Baltimore Banner; David Sjostedt, Noah Baustin and George Kelly of The San Francisco Standard; Steve Strunsky and Riley Yates of NJ.com/The Star-Ledger; Darian Benson and Mary Claire Molloy of Mirror Indy; Edgar Mendez and Devin Blake of Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and Chris Serres and Yoohyun Jung of the Boston Globe.

For us, here at Big Local, this is the proof of the premise behind the founding of Big Local News. Sharing data, analysis, and accountability journalistic work will only amplify that work for the good. We talk a lot about lowering the cost of accountability reporting, through better use of data and algorithms. This project did just that.

About Big Local News

Learn more at biglocalnews.org and visit our About page.

Big Local News, situated in the journalism program in the Department of Communication at Stanford, allows journalists – whether freelancers, reporters from one company or collaborators across multiple news organizations – to share data and work together as they report out stories. Our work is designed to be journalist-driven and transformative, to help find solutions for local newsrooms’ ability to produce accountability journalism and create impact. The Stanford Journalism program’s mission is to serve the public’s need for facts in a just, self-governed society. We develop tools to make it easier to discover important stories and lower the cost of accountability journalism through better use of data and algorithms. We aim to be pioneers in the field of computational journalism, partnering with media and technology companies and with faculty and students from the social sciences and engineering.