 So, before we get started, I'd like to introduce CeCe Wei, who is the Director of Programs at Open News where she envisions and executes transformative initiatives for journalism, especially for journalists of color and local journalists. Previously, she was assistant managing editor at ProPublica, where she oversaw and edited news apps, graphics, visual reporting, and investigations. Thank you for joining us, CeCe. I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you for that great introduction. I'm really excited to be here. I also have this crazy tech setup that we just made up just now, so if I'm ever looking down, it's because I'm trying to read your chats. But welcome, everybody. My talk today is, as it says, it's going to be about how data has transformed journalism both on the inside and on the outside. And if you want to follow along with the presentation, I'm going to paste this into the chat as well so that you can flip through the slides with me. The other thing is that all the screenshots that I'm going to be using later on, they're all clickable. So if you are going through the keynote and you're like, oh, I really want to know more about that project, just go to the slides and click on the URL and it'll take you right there. So let's get started. So as you all know by now, I'm CC. I thought I would actually start with a unrelated share just because we're in this kind of crazy time in that one of the things I've been doing a lot lately is spending a lot of time doing art sort of as my therapy as a way of getting through this and so I wanted to put it here. And I also wanted to say that this is my first CSV comp I've been wanting to come for many years I was really excited, but I would actually be able to come this year. And I'm even more thrilled that the organizers were able to put this online and to bring us all together. And I actually wanted to ask all of you, if you would show the organizers some love by putting some emojis in the chat right now, because they've done such an awesome job transporting this physical conference into a digital one and supporting the speakers many of whom, like myself have never presented in this literal environment before. So, thank you to the organizers. And thank you for folks for putting things in the chat. You know the other thing is I wanted to sort of thank all of you for being here because it is a hard time to focus right now and that's a lot of the work that Open News has been doing which I'll talk a little bit about later but just helping people get through this time and I know, attending a talk. When there isn't a craziness happening in the world right now is very different than attending a talk at a time in which many people are stuck at home are worried about loved ones so thank you for being here. I've really enjoyed the morning session so far and I kind of feel like I've like discovered some more of my people just hearing like Angela talking about building data communities which is really close to my heart. And then the multiple talks on open data, how to grow how to support each other through an inclusive research and coding culture. That stuff is really exciting to me right now. And that's also because most of my life in my career in journalism. This is sort of my path. I think this is the right direction. So I was a journalist first I came out of college wanting to do journalism, but I didn't have any idea of actually how transformative it would be for me, because I ended up also falling in love with coding and with data. And I wanted to merge all of those things together to tell stories in a different way. And then over the last couple of years I spent some time as an editor. So that internalism means that you are both literally helping people write better words and tell their stories and make them sort of the best help them do the best work they could possibly do. On the other hand also trying to be a good manager and trying to figure out what does that mean how can I be there for people. And then a common thread throughout all of my work is sort of a real close to my heart part of it is about diversity and equity and inclusion everywhere to work, and how important that is to me, and especially now during coven 19. And so we'll be talking about that a lot later on, and how that is interwoven with hiring. And this is also also ultimately a talk about something I wanted to look more deeply into for a long time. I've been there in the journalism and data journalism communities feeling this change, feeling that with these skills and an increased number of people working in journalism with these skills that there isn't change. And so now I'm hoping to both with this talk and with a good amount of work in the next couple of weeks and months to really dig into it. All right, so two places I wanted to highlight really quick so you understand my background, ProPublica for those of you who don't know it is an investigative nonprofit newsroom. I started there, eight years ago it was about 30 people. When I left this January, I think it was almost if not already 200 people total. So it's been an insane ride. Really amazing for me. And it has really sort of been a place that has given me almost three different types of jobs and the ability to learn both how to do the data journalism work. And then how to both communicate collaborate and make it sort of a seamless part of the entire body of work that is journalism. And then this February I started open news, which for those of you who don't know is a community driven community support organization that tries to marry journalists and technologists who are doing this work together. And so this is some language that we've been working on recently, just about like what what is at the heart of open news right now. And I think this really puts it pretty well, which is that we're here currently to support a movement in journalism. And people are doing this, we want to be there for them and we want to help catalyze their work. And it's all centered around newsrooms being equitable inclusive and collaborative, which is really key and then also the communities that are involved that journalism is trying to serve that they can. Once again, really trust journalism to have their backs and to represent them. So that's sort of the core values we've been talking a lot about values today of what open news is really here for. And I see a lot of love in the chat for these organizations. Thank you. And so this is our community here, journalist slash technologists. And even at the beginning of the talk I was talking about how data has changed everything right data I use it almost as a shorthand because when I talk about how it's changed journalism. In this journalism slash technology community it means so many different interconnected things. So as an example, I started my career as a graphics editor at the Washington Post, the skills that I use there were front end development, design, and my journalism skills. And so I made graphics. I did data visualization whether it was on the Olympics or the election. But then I also wanted to do some data analysis right data collection, and I wanted to do some back end database program I kind of had an interest in almost everything. Full stack and so when I went to ProPublica, I was called a news apps developer right and all these titles. When you're really in the community, you know what they all mean but on a generic level. It's just this journalism slash technology type of job. And as a news apps developer I did everything from beginning to end. And that included right collecting the data cleaning the data, trying to find some insight that I would then go do some journalism on by interviewing people. And then, if it turns out it's like a wealth of data that people would love to sip through then you build the back end database then you design the front end UX for all the people who are going to sip through it that don't know anything about the data already. And that was like a ton of stuff. And so we also frequently work and collaborate with other people in the newsroom, so that you are not the only one doing literally everything though I did that a couple times and I loved it. But I'm also very happy that I'm not doing everything anymore. So, that's sort of an example there's a lot of different titles, but we're just looking at people who are working in journalism, they've got data design coding skills. And they're trying to do the journalism that way. Okay, so then this is something that we say a lot at open news that journalists and technologists are uniquely positioned to change journalism. It's a field right that is already great at digging for stories and at writing really compelling narratives to tell those stories. So then the question is what happens and now we have over 10 years to look at what happens when you build into journalism, the skills and the tools that are available from the data community, the tech community and the open source community. So here's, I'm going to show you three changes. So here's change. Number one, better journalism. And this is probably the most well trodden space in terms of how does data and technology improve journalism itself. I could spend our entire hour together in this section I'm only going to give you one walkthrough of an example. But if you want to know more about this I can share loads of resources that you can read about almost any specific project or group of projects so please let me know if that's interesting. And the one thing that I'll share for folks obviously many of you who are not following along and what journalism communities are doing is that something that's always wrong true in the data journalism community this is more than 10 years ago right is that if you can marry your data skills. And then oftentimes your technology skills in order to use your data skills with your journalism. There are many cases in which you will no longer need to take all your experts at their word, because they should be able to show you, and have you be able to reproduce the data itself and show you essentially the proof in the pudding. And that's what it really enables journalists to do to take these critical views of what's going on and demand to see the proof, as opposed to have to deal with just a statement which we do in many areas of journalism still. Okay, so here's my better journalism example. This is a piece that I edited last year by three very talented journalists and was a larger collaboration with ProPublica's local reporting network. And basically ProPublica has this program where they want to help local journalists do hard hitting investigative work, but they don't want to parachute in so what they do is they pay for the salary of a staff person who's already at the organization. So that the local newsroom can backfill and have someone do sort of the demands of the day to day job so that somebody on their staff can actually focus on doing an investigation and an investigative series for a whole year. This is one piece in a much larger package in which ProPublica partnered with the advocate and the Times Picayune in New Orleans to look at this part of Louisiana that is so notorious for being polluted that people just call it cancer alley. And once I sort of knew that for the story I started seeing it everywhere like in novels that I was reading, even in fiction. I don't even remember what it was but it was like two days after I was editing the story I was reading this book and they were like oh yeah I'm in a truck driving through cancer alley and I was like wow okay this is really And so then the problem right as journalists that we're looking at is why are more chemical plants still being approved to be built in this area. Questions that we want to know answers to are what's going on how much pollutants are in the air. What is the difference these new plants are going to make how do they get approved. Okay. In addition to some great on the ground reporting to journalists Laila Young's and Al Shaw. Both were on the news apps team at ProPublica. And they were looking at an EPA data model that estimates the concentration of chemical pollutants in the air that are specifically coming from these chemical plants in the area. So in the map that you see right now the red gradation is the level of air toxicity specifically from cancer causing chemicals that are being admitted. The really tiny gray dots those are just the plants that are already built. There's over 200 of them. The purple dots are the new plants that are already approved and will be built and the orange ones are the ones that are still pending approval. At the time that we did this piece and we had a source tell us that there are no permits that are pending approval that have that to their recollection have ever been rejected so we can pretty much assume that they're going to get built. Okay, so I'm going to share with you sort of two things that are part of this massive project that we learned. One example is in this specific area of the cancer alley section. I'm going to explain what the colors mean because you don't have the benefit of going through the whole walkthrough of the presentation. The blue gradient on land that shows how predominantly black the residents are in a given district right so you can see in the lower left, that area is predominantly black and then there's this little slice over on the right, this little shape. That is not only not predominantly black it is also predominantly white. Okay, so I wonder if I can actually move my mouse can you. Yeah, you can see my mouse so this area right here. What you already know when you get to this part of the story is that a new plant is moving in, and that plant is going to double the toxic air emissions in this entire area. And what we found looking at this right is that every single one of these shapes all represent plants that have been approved and will be moving it right and they're all going to be admitting chemicals, but you don't see any right here. So, we looked into it. And what we basically found out is that there's actually these two plant complexes that originally wanted to move in one inside of the predominantly white district and one across the river from it, and the district council, those were the only two plants that they barred from actually building. And you kind of see the quote that we got from a council member on the slide. But that was sort of something that really, I don't want to say shocked us, but we didn't know that it would be this crystal clear of a difference. Given how many on the previous slide you can see different plants are moving in all over and around the river. So that's one example. The second example though and this is another aspect of being able to bring your data skills in right is that as Laila and out dig further. They actually realized that the local regulatory agency has a really interesting way of regulating their chemical emissions. They only regulate whether the level of each individual pollutant separate from the other ones. And that those levels do not violate state law individually. So they don't look at the cumulative risk of multiple cancer causing chemicals being emitted from the same place. And so enter G, you can see on the map where that is supposed to be built. And these are their projections for the levels of air toxicity, given each of their cancer causing chemicals so this is just looking at one at the same time, which is what the regulated the regulators would be looking at when they're trying to decide is is an acceptable level. But then we were also able to on top of that show you okay but there's also a second chemical that is also cancer causing. This is what the cumulative air toxicity looks like. And finally, obviously, this is not the first and only plant that exists in this area. This is what actual actual cumulative air toxicity looks like if you consider emissions from every other plant that's already there, and whether or not those chemicals are going to travel to this area. And so we also found that when toxicity reaches these levels. It's done so in other states as well like it did in Illinois, and the Illinois EPA actually shut the plants down. But in this case in Louisiana, it's totally legal, totally okay. So just to share something so it's not all depressing news. After the investigation and there's still more follow up now Louisiana to decide that they wanted to commission a detailed study on cancer rates in the area. There's also, I feel like I've gone over maybe 25% of the journalism in this project so if you want to know more about it. I highly encourage you to check it out. Okay, so that's what I mean by better journalism right there's so many different aspects of what's going on there. There's the visualization. There's the understanding of how to be critical about data processes and then third the use of data itself. So that's change number one better journalism. So this is collaboration on an entirely new level. And especially as we talk about the open source community and the tech community, even earlier, the our community and how everyone is really collaborative in terms of helping each other. This is something that has grown, I think, exponentially in journalism. So here's a really easy example. So this is the website source. It's one that we publish at open news. The whole point of source is essentially to share knowledge and we publish articles that help journalists help each other. This was something that was published, I think last week, May 8 was last week, I think. Basically, as local journalists are doing their own stories, or national journalists are doing their own stories, they collect all this data, they analyze it. And they can only do so many stories out of that data set when journalists all over the country would be able to use this slice of it or this slice of it to specifically tackle a story about their community. So we invite them and we pay them to write a story that walks you through exactly how to do it, and then tells you how to customize it for your area, how to analyze the data and then what questions to ask. And to show you a fun example as well. In this one, there's literally the R code that you can copy and commented through how it all works. And then we also do this. The same thing, article has Google Sheets instructions so that if you don't know how to use R, you can still figure it out with us. And so this is something that is a quote, I don't know who to attribute it to, but I know is said in the community, a lot, which is, you know, journalism is a competitive place, right. They're trying to break news first they're trying to get their news organization or themselves recognition as the experts on something. But when there's so many stories to cover what we can obviously do is collaborate on the tech, compete on the stories, help each other do our journalism better and just compete when it comes to figuring out what's actually going on in our communities and making sure that we are reporting on it respectfully accurately. So source is definitely not the only place doing this. These are four of the eight story recipes that we have published recently just on coven, but other organizations, for example, where I used to work pro publicly they call them reporting recipes. Every time we came out with a huge news app even we would walk reporters through how to use it. How do you use it to report on your local area. And so it's something that more and more journalists are doing. And especially when you have data as that kernel as your kickoff point because I can't write a story about every row of data. It's just not humanly possible. But journals across the country could write a lot more stories collectively. I wanted to highlight a couple of other projects as well that really show collaboration on a different level, not just teaching each other how to write stories but actually coming together to do big projects. So this is the coven tracking project. It was, I even hesitate to say incubated I feel like it was kicked off at the Atlantic, and then more and more journalists started to volunteer their time to put this together so that there was at least one complete data source available. And these people do it on a volunteer basis. They work at all different parts of journalism and they provide this to other people for free data journalists or anyone else who wants this information. Another instance, big local news is a organization run out of Stanford University, and they are also all about sharing data so that journalists can use it. They also made this fantastic case mapper so that local journalists if you don't have those front end skills or if you want to do it yourself, you can embed this for your local area and just put it on your site, which embedding graphics and making graphics so they're embeddable for local journalists is not a new concept it's something that's been going on for many years now. And this is sort of the latest iteration of it. And then also this newsroom guide to coven 19 and I wanted to share this because this is also collaborative people working at different places. It's focus right is not solely on data, but also as you can see things like let's take care of ourselves. And how do we take care of one another, which I really appreciate. And then finally so this is collaboration at a massive scale, everything before is much smaller in comparison, which is I wanted to highlight two rather famous examples of major journalism collaborations. This one is the Panama Papers. So for folks who aren't familiar with this. It started at ICI J, which stands for the International Consortium of investigative journalists. They worked with over 100 media partners, they sifted through over 11 million leaked files. And it was all about exposing offshore holdings of world political leaders of details of hidden financial dealings of drug traffickers billionaire celebrities. It was probably I think the biggest leak of inside information in history. And in order to parse this they couldn't do it by themselves. And so I wanted to show this quote from their site, which is just that they indexed organized and analyzed 2.6 terabytes of data that made up a leak, and that leak is like not just data right it's like PDFs and memos and emails as well. And then they used collaborative platforms to communicate and then share those documents with journalists working in 25 languages and nearly 80 countries. And that I think is just has been really incredible it has spurred a lot of investigations, a lot of impact and then ultimately resulting in this effort getting a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, which was really incredible. And then the other example like of you as well is something that Scott Klein my previous boss at Republica thought of and then orchestrated a project called election land. And what's interesting about election land is that it's about covering the election on the day of, not in terms of results but making sure that people who run into problems on voting day. Journalists can report on it fast enough to make a difference so that maybe you'll still be able to vote. So when it comes to things like voter intimidation, cybersecurity issues voter suppression, all of that right across the US on election day. Can we get tips to journalists in those places fast enough so they can report on it publish and then impact change before polls close. And so, I think election land I don't remember how many times it's been done at least twice if not three times happening again in 2020, but in 2018 there were more than 120 local and national newsrooms that participated in the country getting real time tips. And in total there was more than 230 stories published so this is sort of what it means now. When it comes to massive like anywhere from micro to major invest collaborative journalism efforts in in the industry and a lot of it most of it uses data in order to power that. That's change number two, massive collaboration. And then finally, change number three is this is what I mean by inside and out. So, making the journalism industry a better place to work. This is something that I'm going to break into three parts for you. First one is unions. So, you know, unions have been around for an incredibly long time data journalism cannot take any credit for their existence in any way. We have learned an incredible amount from them. But what's been really fun to see on my end is that a lot of the newest union based pay and equity studies have been led by and the data analysis has been done by people who are data reporters on the editorial side of the newsroom. Right. So this was in 2018 a pay study by the Union of the Los Angeles Times. I have their findings on there you can check this stuff out. But this was led by Anthony Pesk, who is a data journalist and a reporter on the data desk. And there's a more recent example as well. I think this was just last year, the Washington Post Union also did a study of pay. Also finding that women of color in the newsroom are making less money. And this was led by Stephen Rich, who's an investigative data journalist at the Washington Post. And in the full spirit of everything we've been talking about today, in addition to doing the study, he then open sourced the techniques and the code to do it. And not only is there a I Python notebook version, there's also a our version that you can walk through if you want to do the same thing. So that's really cool. But I also don't want to just highlight large places. There's also examples like this, where Katie Gillespie, an education and data reporter at the Colombian which is in Vancouver, Washington also sort of was part of the organizing effort for their local newsroom, right. And so I think we're really only seeing the merge of these two communities come together and really build on each other. And the last thing I'll say about this too is that there are a lot of other data journalists, especially as I was reporting out this part of the presentation, who have led pay studies, either at the organization or at their union, and the findings to all of us but they were brought to management, right. And so they're also, as always, more quiet moments of change that are happening. And obviously this is all on top of work that unions have been doing for a long time. The major change that I'm seeing now is that instead of needing to pay a consulting group to look at the data that the employer gives you, you now have in-house talent and in-house skills inside of your bargaining unit that know how to do this and that really know the people involved and know the organization thoroughly because they work there. And that's kind of incredible. Okay, so then the second part of making newsrooms better is their hiring policies and diversity reports. So I just want to say before I show you what I'm going to highlight, it's not comprehensive of a timeline, but what I would like to highlight is newer journalism companies, and by newer I mean probably created in the last decade or so, whose data and staff are really integral to creating diversity reports that are available and geared towards the public, which is the people who read the journalism as opposed to geared towards like your board or stakeholders or something like that. And after doing as much research as I could, I felt like there were only around 10 total news organizations that even have something like that that's publishable, right, meeting that criteria. Meaning that it's not buried like in a PDF report that you kind of have on the side on your site, but that you really treat like another piece of journalism on your website so that the public can find it and actually read it. And so here is the beginning, I think of it all, which is in 2014. A lot of you will probably also remember that it follows the same trend as when technology companies were reporting their diversity reports for the first time. And BuzzFeed was the first journalism organization to do it. And it makes a lot of sense because BuzzFeed's origin story really was about being a tech company that does journalism, right. And after talking to some folks. I also found out for sure that it was their data science team that was looking at and analyzing the data to make the report possible but that was sort of already embedded in their company culture and still is right that they use data to make a lot of their decisions and it's really important to them. I was at ProPublica at the time. So the next year, following their example, ProPublica published their first one. And now in 2020, the fifth one has come out, right, they're done annually. And in this case, Lana Groger and I were both news apps developers. And part of the kickoff for this was that we were like, hey, you know, we should do this. We're currently not tracking as a company in any way, the demographics of the staff and we should give people an opt-in way to self identify and then report on it for the public, especially when our journalism is so centered around fighting injustices, right. And we want to know what the makeup of the staff is like. And so we were able to sort of create that data set and then analyze it and then visualize it and put it up in a report. More places have followed suit, the Marshall Project, their diversity report also was prompted and started with a group of people, including a data journalist on their staff, as well as the city, which is a, compared to all the other organizations, the newest, which launched to be a organization that really serves and covers the people of New York City. And this diversity report was also led by a data journalist there. And so the one last thing I'll say is that I'm certain there are backstories that I don't know about because I couldn't interview every organization that had come out with a diversity report before this talk. But they were definitely, I feel like there's definitely something that I saw and I want to keep researching about how these having these inherent data skills in house, right, are enabling organizations to look at themselves, much more critically and from maybe a safer place, because their staff is trying to work with the company to try and be transparent with their readers. Okay. And then here's, here's like a sad, a sadder point, right, which is that the work of collecting diversity and demographic data and journalism is not new. There is this diversity census called ASNE, or ASNE is the organization, but they've been doing this diversity census for over 40 years, and news organizations just report to them and then they put out an aggregated sort of report every year and participation rates have been so slow in recent years that ASNE decided that it wasn't worth doing the diversity census anymore, which is really sad for me. And there's a long list of major news organizations that all of you will have heard of that don't participate. No one requires that they do. And even when listed publicly, it doesn't sort of have any effect. And so you're sort of seeing these two, two different things happening simultaneously, which is data journalism bringing in more public facing diversity reports while journalism as a whole is sort of regressing when it comes to how willing they are even to report their own numbers. So very interesting. And then finally, so I love this example though, I wanted to merge the two right unions and diversity reports marrying them together. One last example, which is that at the intercept. They are a, they are also an investigative nonprofit. You can learn more about them as well. They're also a relatively new organization. But what's really interesting about the intercept is that they, as a union decided that diversity was the most important thing to them. And so in their actual union contract, there are diversity agreements, which I think is different right then a diversity committee or some people on staff getting certain things published right this is a sort of second level agreement. And they had a first of its kind diversity provision that requires that when people who are interviewing when people interview for the bargaining unit jobs, that at least two people of color have to be interviewed at that stage right so those kind of rules aren't new but the fact that it's part of a union agreement has never happened before at least to the knowledge my knowledge in journalism. And the contract itself right has that I kind of jumped again a little bit. But then the contract also created their diversity committee, and it includes the fact that managers have to come and they have to discuss issues that affect their affect traditionally underrepresented people in journalism. And that also sort of includes creating this demographic survey it also includes discussions for how to allocate resources to address this kind of thing. So I think that was really cool just sort of bringing all that kind of stuff together. So these changes, as we've talked about right. Going back to my original statement about journalists and technologists being uniquely positioned to change journalism for all these reasons, both when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to the makeup and the process and the culture of what it's like inside of these rooms. And so I think my conclusion so far is that they're doing it one step at a time, they're creating change bringing change. And, you know, we've gone through these various ways that attempts are being made, even at a time in journalism that is really difficult right now, just like in many different industries with people going through pay cuts people going to close this work, and the work of the unions that I showed you before are still moving forward to try to do the best that they can to help keep their newsroom sort of a fair and equitable place. And so, see, yeah, so the one thing I want to say here is that if you're in journalism, and you're listening to this talk and you want to make these types of changes in your organization. So if you're interested in talking about it, I would love to talk to you. But similarly, and I think this is more the case for the people at CSV com is that if you're in another industry, and you want to sort of take some of these things that journalism is doing and apply it yourself. I know that in different industries there are definitely different types of challenges for which things are harder and which things are easier but I would love to learn more about what you're doing what you want to do. And if you want to help sort of bounce ideas, I think that would be fantastic. So, these are all the different ways to contact me. And I think I spoke significantly faster than I planned so we have time to do questions live, I think. Thank you CC. How do you want to handle questions. Do you, are you able to access the ask a question. Yeah, or do you want me to read through them. I'm happy to see if I can just. I think there's three in there right now. So I think I can just read them and then go through them. Does that sound good. It's great to me. Okay, cool. Okay, so the first one question from. Oh, okay I see they move when you all vote on them. So let me. I feel like I maybe will be able to contract this. So okay first question is story recipes sound really amazing. I'm curious what kind of usage you're seeing on them do people let you know when they use it, or do you have another way to know that it's enabled someone to report and analyze the data. So this is a really great question because open news had published story recipes in the past but not as frequently as we're doing now and so we're actually in the middle of trying to figure this out. And we currently don't ask for anything, because are the like center value that we're trying to hold here is that you don't need to pay anything whether that's in registration or personal data or anything in order to access this stuff. And so we don't, we don't have a guaranteed way of knowing. There's no like code that you have to embed if you publish with it. So we are thinking about ways that we can ask the community to tell us because we have heard anecdotally that people use it report on something and then they publish like sometimes people will proactively tell us that other times they'll say they looked into it but it didn't work out. But the third case which is really interesting is that some people look at it and they use it, not to report on the story recipe but just to learn the techniques that the authors went through and getting to that story. And so that's also really cool. I also know that the way that we had done it at ProPublica is that we just sort of it's a similar thing there's a little blurb that says, if you use this we'd love to know we'd love to promote it send it to us and so sometimes when people would do that we would accumulate all the links and then we would have a little section on the site for that project that says local stories that were written, and then we would show all of them, which is like a good way of motivating people to share the links back but we're still trying to figure out how to really thoroughly look at this out of the news. Okay, next question. Okay, so this is a question from Jennifer. I know data sources, I think I see local stories in the data. What can I do, I'm not a writer how to connect with a journalist or interest in generating a new local journalist. I think Jennifer I see you in the chat I'm going to ask you a quick question to clarify which is I think what you're asking is. I know how to use the data and I'm interested in contributing to this work, but I'm not a writer right now how do I either collaborate with a local journalist or do my own work is that what you're asking. I know in the chat, perhaps, while I'm waiting for that I can go ahead and just answer that version of the question because I think that's right. I think that if you're really data savvy. You can definitely sort of look at what local newsrooms exist in your space. So, what does that means geographically, or if there's an area of expertise that you have. There's no biography, but a newsroom is sort of based there. I think that you could totally look at if they're doing any data stories are ready. Usually people will have something like the word data in their title or their biography. One thing is you should also feel free if you want to just chat me in the CSV comp slack with sort of like your location or if you want to brainstorm a little bit. There are a lot of places where data journalists hang out. And so, there's sort of easy ways to get in contact with folks if you want to work together on something. And then, okay, next question. Okay, I'll do these in the vote order as well as they shift. But, okay, one of the criticisms for requiring representation among job candidates is that it can be inherently othering, especially when the people slash committee doing hiring isn't trained to confront their biases, and There are also requirements for inclusivity training and practices to accompany interviewing for contacts and academia we often hear about requirements for your M's in the interview pool who end up not being seriously considered. Okay, so this is a question from how it's 100% on point so if all you do is follow that rule and nothing else. It could be a total disaster, like for all of the reasons that are stated in the question. All I can tell you is what my sort of recommendations are things that I've seen work gradually. One is that to communicate to people that with this rule. The spirit of it is that a inherent understanding that it isn't that people of color who are qualified to this job don't exist, which is sort of like one layer of very Like mostly when people are at the very beginning stages of understanding how this works and confronting their biases that's like the first layer right people think well like I would hire people of color but they're just not qualified. And to establish that's just not true. The key is that you are not finding them right. And so the question is like, why are you not finding them or why are they not interested in working here. The power of having at least one or two or however many more. You want to say of finalists who are POC is is that if you cannot find two of them who would do a great job at this, then you are not done with your applicant pool stage of your job hiring process like you just haven't done a good job as an organization and I think that step to step three definitely includes things like how do you then conduct the interviews better, including how do you make sure that people are asking all sort of hitting all the same points on their questions. How do you make sure that people aren't just like trying to connect purely on stories. And then there's some stories about where you've worked before, because then institutional biases can just sort of like, keep rolling into each other. And then there's also, you know, like the question mentioned inclusivity training, though I've personally never been able to study those up close in terms of being a part of one and then seeing how it affects the staff. But I think it's an area that I'm definitely really interested in. Okay, next question is, oh and any questions and I don't read out loud I will answer them in the chat so please don't worry about that. What is your perspective on using data to form narratives more responsibly in journalism, especially when there's potential for transforming industries slash social issues. Yeah, so this is from Selena. I think that you have to be to be really good at your job and what I mean by that is that as journalists right. If you want to do your job well, you have to have I mean, some words to borrow from my predecessors who have already given talks this morning, you have to have empathy for your community. You have to do your job and understand the types of things that they are going through, you have to report out, what does it mean to be respectful when it's not your own monoculture that you're in right and that we're in a blend of different cultures. And journalism, and we've seen it before. An example I can give to is that one of the local reporting network partners from over the last year and also this year who ended up winning a Pulitzer this year which is really great they're based in Alaska. And one of the things that some of the engagement reporters at ProPublica did when they were trying to fully understand the community they were covering which was on a really hard topic. Which is about sort of the like sexual harassment and rape of women in remote locations that have no, no police protection, or even physical access to a rape kit, right, and one of the things that the community was telling our engagement over and over again is that however long ago journalism comes in, writes a story about this, and then the entire community is branded by this one thing. And that's all they're ever known for. And journalism has a responsibility for that to understand the implications of their actions on multiple levels and to tell stories in a way, because it's possible to do so to tell stories in a way that don't sort of scar a community forever, right. So I think that 10 minutes left. I think that data is sort of like one component to making sure that you understand what's going on, but then you absolutely have to talk to the people involved, especially if it's not a community that you're already part of to fully understand what's going on. And that sort of you know the flip side of really good traditional journalism helps you accomplish that. Let's see. Oh, this one's fun. I would love to know how any tips on how to interview your data to find unique stories. The interview in quotes, I don't know why you put it in quotes but it's really appropriate because one of the first people who I learned data journalism from Derek Willis who works at data, and I ended up editing for a couple years had always talked about when we work with data as journalists we're doing is interviewing them, pretend like they're human being and ask them what you want to know. So if you have a data set that is about schools or test scores or votes for representatives like if you had a human being with all that knowledge in your head what would you ask them. And I think that's a really fun way of thinking about it because then you'll quickly realize like oh maybe my data can't answer this question. And if that's the case you'll know that you need to combine data sets or maybe what I find often is when I do that I realize something is missing and then I go back to the entity that gave me the data and I'm like why is this not here are you holding it for me or what's going on because it would make sense without this information. But if you want to know more. I can, I can try to maybe pop in some resources because there's a lot written, I think both by Derek and by other folks who teach data journalism. How journalists can think about data as a source in that way. So I'll drop something in the flag. And then, okay, we have two left so I think I can get to all of them as a designer and technologist how do I level up my journalism and get involved in news apps development from john. So, this is a great question. Design and technology skills are really great to have as a backbone. I find that some of the super broad stroke point of view whenever I taught folks who come from that background who want to come into journalism, which is what open news facilitated for a long time before I worked there is that the scariest thing for people who don't come from a journalism background is calling strangers to ask them whatever questions you want to ask. And that makes a lot of sense like in normal day to day life. Most professions do not require that skill. And it's a very social based skill. And I think the thing that I would say is I would start out with a topic that you're really passionate about that's that's not super high stakes. So to give you an example. Remember that show we all used to really like called Game of Thrones until the last season happened well so the Washington Post had this great piece that they did on it. That was just literally tracking every death per episode that had happened across every single season right so that some data and design and if you're really into the topic, you will be really into this right and then, depending on what you ask, try to figure out like what do I want to know more about what do I want to confirm, and get some practice sort of just attempting to ask for other people's time to tell you some information. And practice wise that's what I would start with. If you really want to get into the profession you can totally like. If you want to check out my car which I can put in the chat here. That's where a lot of data journalists hang out it's a conference but it's also a listserv that anyone can join for free. Understanding that it's a bunch of journalists if you say something they're like it's going to be on the record. But it's a great place especially for new people to get started including students and people are really happy to help there. Yeah. Let's see here we go. Next question. Let's see any any newsrooms in Europe that are known to utilize data in a powerful way. So. Oh yeah and then folks yes so Guardian and BBC absolutely fantastic. Depending on what country you're in you might have more familiarity, but the other thing that I would say is the organization that won the Pulitzer for the Panama Papers. ICIJ they're based internationally in Europe. And that was probably one of the most powerful uses of data I've seen. The first thing is in Germany. I think at Derspiegel and he Julian used to work at the Berlin or Morgan post as well he is absolute powerhouse in this kind of work. There is a ton of different organizations also in Norway and Sweden. And I would say if you're really, if you want to kind of like a shortcut to figure out places that are doing really good work in Europe, I actually go to the Society of news design. And that is a professional organization and journalism that is specifically for journalists who are also designers, and they have a competition every year for the best of digital. And they show you the organizations that win medals and I often use that as a as like a shortcut to look at places that are doing amazing work across the globe, not just in Europe and both the print and the digital competitions are absolutely amazing. And then the visualization categories which often leads you to the same people who are doing the biz or the same team essentially that's doing the visualization, as well as the data analysis so that's, that's where I would go to check out very specific projects. And I think I covered all of them, but let me just make sure. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I think that's all the questions. Popping back in. Yeah, I think you handled all the questions and I wanted before we close on time to say thank you again for your year, really encouraging and informative. I feel very energized and have a notebook full of things to follow up on. That's awesome.