Ryan Pitts

Journalism leader Ryan Pitts is joining Big Local News, a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, as managing director, helping us support local newsrooms in creating data-driven accountability journalism.

“Ryan brings a collaborative spirit, data journalism expertise and management experience to Big Local News,” said Cheryl Phillips, founder and co-director of Big Local News. “We are thrilled he will be leading the daily operations of our organization as we support local newsrooms in publishing stories that matter to their communities.”

Ryan began his career in local newsrooms, working as a reporter, editor, and designer before learning to code as a hobby and finding a home in online journalism. He was the senior editor for digital media at The Spokesman-Review, a regional newspaper in Spokane, Wash., where he led an award-winning team responsible for data and multimedia projects, news applications, and product development. While there, he began contributing to many open-source tools for journalism, and later was part of the small team that built Census Reporter (https://censusreporter.org/), a project that makes census data easier for journalists to use.

Most recently, Ryan was co-director at OpenNews, a nonprofit organization that supports a network of journalists and developers doing transformative work at local, regional, and nonprofit newsrooms. He helped build SRCCON (https://srccon.org/) into a beloved community conference, organized programs where developers shared code and data projects for other newsrooms to replicate, and connected reporters with tools and partners to bring better journalism to the communities they serve.

Ryan was a 2025 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, researching practices in peer knowledge-sharing to strengthen the journalism industry. He is a board member and volunteer for Census Reporter, and a board member for the Murrow News Fellowship in Washington state and for RANGE, a small-but-growing community newsroom in Spokane.

About Big Local News

In April, Big Local News announced it was the recipient of 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.

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. Our aim is to lower the cost of accountability journalism through data-driven reporting and algorithms. 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.