Susan Carroll Fellowship
By Natalie Lung Two factors measure the impact of journalism: the output (how much work has been done), and its significance. But Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute (API), thinks newsrooms don’t actually measure much of either. At a 2017 CAR Conference panel, Rosenstiel spoke alongside Lindsay Green-Barber, former director of strategic…
Read MoreBy Dariya Tsyrenzhapova The definition of bots is murky, but expectations for the use of artificial intelligence tools in news organizations is on the rise. Bots, like automated personal assistants, can collect information, execute actions, generate content and even emulate humans, said Tiff Fehr, an interactives editor at The New York Times. Fehr moderated a 2017…
Read MoreBy Haotian Mai A panel of environmental reporters gathered at the 2017 CAR Conference to discuss stories based on public and private data sources. Dinah Pulver of the Dayton Beach News-Journal helps build and maintain the paper’s database of shark bites. In addition to their own database, Pulver also finds water.usgs.gov useful for a variety sources of…
Read MoreBy Abigail West The left brain is commonly understood as the logical side, and the right brain as the creative, intuitive side. This is not accurate. The correct way to look at the brain is that the left side is the verbal side. It is conceptual and anticipatory. The left brain will apply already known…
Read MoreBy Uliana Pavlova We live in the age of cybersecurity, when it is more important than ever to protect our information and sources digitally. Olivia Martin from the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Mike Tigas of ProPublica offered useful tips and tools on digital security for journalists at the CAR Conference. Why does security…
Read MoreBy Shane Sanderson When the Palm Beach Post obtained a spreadsheet made by a clerical worker at the local medical examiner’s office, reporters had to verify it. The office worker had noticed an escalation in the number of overdose deaths and she began a project recording the details. The resulting spreadsheet had something like 100…
Read MoreBy Anadil Iftekhar Data is boring. Numbers are confusing. Limit them, hide them, focus more on people. Haven’t you been hearing this a lot lately? “We are here to say you shouldn’t do that,” said Will Craft. Craft and his colleague, Madeleine Baran, work at American Public Media. In a 2017 CAR Conference panel, they…
Read MoreAt our annual CAR conference in Jacksonville, IRE and NICAR announced initial steps to help save federal data that could disappear. Our hope is to help organize the efforts currently underway by journalists and concerned citizens. IRE and NICAR will host a central directory on our website to show submitted details on rescued data and…
Read MoreBy Natalie Lung Algorithms play an increasingly prominent role in journalism, but we’ve been slow to scrutinize those algorithms like we would any other source. ProPublica senior reporter Julia Angwin, Stanford computer science Ph.D. candidate Sam Corbett-Davies, and Philip Merrill College of Journalism assistant professor Nick Diakopoulos shared their experience in evaluating algorithmic fairness at…
Read MoreBy Daniel Levitt Sports data often gets overlooked as a source of investigative stories. But Steve Doig of Arizona State University and Paula Lavigne of ESPN showed journalists that we can – and should – hold sports organizations accountable. Both Doig and Lavigne entered the sports journalism world from other beats. Doig covered science, education…
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