New staff

Big Local News, a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, is adding staff and expert advisers, the latest step in our growth as we work to lower the cost of accountability journalism for local newsrooms.

Paige Moody and Jake Kara are joining Big Local News to work on our engineering efforts, including news detection alerts and the build-out of Agenda Watch, a platform to help journalists shine a light on local government.

Emily Guadagno, with deep experience in program and product development, has joined Big Local News as the director of product and our go-to person for our Data+ membership program. Rosie Cima has joined the team as a senior data journalist, to collect, clean, and analyze data in collaboration with affiliate newsrooms, and also work with students on related projects.

Meanwhile, data journalism and newsroom leader Shawn McIntosh, recently retired as the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will be volunteering as a senior adviser of strategy for Big Local News going forward.

Stay tuned for the announcement of our new managing director soon.

The addition of these journalists marks another step in our growth as Big Local partners with local newsrooms to help strengthen data journalism skills and support accountability journalism.

In April, Big Local News was awarded a $3.9 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to accelerate collaborative infrastructure supporting local news organizations across the United States.

“We are excited to be a part of building an infrastructure in support of local journalism, thanks to support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,” said Big Local News Founder Cheryl Phillips, who also teaches data and investigative journalism at Stanford. “Our goal is to lower the cost of accountability journalism, making it possible for local news outlets to report out stories they would otherwise not have the resources to tackle.”

Big Local News collects local data to discover the regional or national patterns that will yield stories with impact. We go after data sets that are hard to obtain because they’re kept in disparate, scattered locations by multiple jurisdictions. We work with newsrooms to process, analyze and archive the data they collect and we provide mentoring and training with partner newsrooms. This year, an investigation from The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship about the city’s fentanyl crisis won a local reporting Pulitzer Prize. The project was produced in collaboration with Big Local News and nine other local newsrooms and involved reporting out how one cohort of older black men has died of overdose at higher rates for years in multiple communities around the country.

Paige Moody comes to Big Local News from The Washington Post, where she led the Reporting Tools engineering team, working closely with journalists to design and build applications that expand reporting capabilities, including the Post’s first AI-assisted reporting tool. As a founding member and technical advisor for the Newsroom AI Lab at Hacks/Hackers, she collaborates with partner newsrooms to experiment, build, and thoughtfully integrate AI into reporting and editorial workflows. Earlier in her career, Moody worked as a data engineer at Mapbox, developing large-scale data pipelines for geospatial visualization and analysis.

Jake Kara is a software engineer and data journalist who has worked in news and digital humanities for more than a decade.

Prior to joining Big Local News, he was a senior software engineer on The Washington Post’s Reporting Tools team, working on projects such as the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning police shootings database; an AI platform for video forensics, and the Post’s system for monitoring trends in social media discourse.

Kara began his journalism career at Hersam Acorn Newspapers and worked at The Connecticut Mirror as a data editor. He also worked as a developer at Yale University, in the Digital Humanities Lab and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He is currently a founding member and technical advisor at the Hacks/Hackers Newsroom AI/Lab.

Rosie Cima is a senior data journalist with Big Local News at Stanford University. Before joining Big Local, she was the data editor for the Scripps News investigative team, where she won a 2024 national Emmy Award for editing a series about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. She previously worked as a data journalist at the Center for Public Integrity and as a writer at Priceonomics.

Shawn McIntosh recently retired as managing editor for investigations and data journalism at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, capping 22 years in senior newsroom leadership there.

Her career includes roles as editor in chief of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and investigative work at USA TODAY and The Dallas Morning News.

As a longtime board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, she helped build NICAR, IRE’s data journalism program, which has trained thousands of journalists to find and tell accountability stories that otherwise would go untold.

Shawn will help Big Local News on strategic thinking and focus on how Agenda Watch can help local newsrooms.

With the addition of these exceptional journalists, we will enhance our support to local news organizations as they produce data-driven accountability journalism.