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Don't underestimate local data journalism, says Brant Houston

by: Amy Gahran |

Brant Houston has seen a lot of change in journalism - and this has drawn him through investigative reporting and data journalism back to community-level coverage. A local lifelong learning program has proven to be an interesting complement to this effort.

Currently, Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois College of Media. For more than a decade before that, he served as executive director for Investigative Reporters and Editors. I caught up with him at the 2016 National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting conference in Denver.

In 2010, with support from the Community Foundation of East Central Illinois and the Knight Foundation, Houston launched CU-CitizenAccess - a community online news and information project devoted to investigative and enterprise coverage of social, justice and economic issues in east central Illinois.

This site offers enables community members to share news and information, raise and discuss important local issues, and suggest solutions. It's also a platform for exploring innovative journalism techniques and practices - including local data journalism. Much of the content comes from UI journalism students, but some comes from community members.

Houston has been following local independent news startups closely, and observed that the changing landscape of support for these projects, especially nonprofits, is leading to new kinds of partnerships and alliances.

"Nonprofit news operations are starting to diversify. We're in a world with a lot of algorithms that can help us take in data - and that's how journalism has to change." he said. "Anything that can help us understand a community better, to make sense of incredible streams of social media, is useful."

He notes that the foundational journalistic practice of interviewing has taken on new meaning through data journalism. "You can interview data," he said. "When you have a data set, you can ask it questions. This usually involves filtering, sorting, or grouping and counting. What's the largest, the smallest, the median, the most recent? When you get an answer, that's the beginning of your exploration. What if you ask your question this way instead, or drill down further?"

Interviewing data has led CU CitizenAccess to local coverage such as Inspections find peril in central Illinois nursing homes. This series includes a searchable online database of Illinois Department of Public Health nursing home survey reports obtained by CU-CitizenAccess.org in December 2014.

When Houston began teaching at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a community adult education program supported by the University of Illinois and the Bernard Osher Foundation, he discovered a new resource for pursuing local data journalism: retirees.

Houston teaches a class at OLLI on changing demographics in central Illinois. Most of his students were retired professors, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. Class discussions brought new insights to local data, which in turn yielded local data journalism such as From 1990 to 2010: Twenty years of extreme poverty in Champaign-Urbana.

"Lifelong learning can be a powerful venue for community engagement, and a unique window into your community" observed Houston. "You can spend just 90 minutes a week, teaching what you already know, for four to eight weeks, and you'll get incredible tips. It helps my students a lot, and it helps me understand community better. I tell them about the data I find, and they tell me when that data makes sense or doesn't, or when it's curious."

The possibilities for leveraging lifelong learning in local coverage may be quite rich. According to a new Pew Research Center report, three fourths of American adults consider themselves lifelong learners with many of them pursuing education based on personal interests through local education programs.

Local data journalism is one way to get long-term mileage from limited resources, while rolling with the available time, attention and expertise of engaged community members. "You can produce the stories as you can find and interrogate the data. Visualize it, map it, and just leave it up. When there's a news peg, people will come back to it," Houston said.

In some cases, local data can prove even more compelling than narrative journalism. "We posted stories and data about local restaurant inspections, and we were surprised to see that people didn't spend much time with story, but lots of time with the data," said Houston. "That led to a little reporter depression, but that's how it goes."

Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran is a journalist, editor, trainer, entrepreneur, strategist, and media consultant based in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to writing
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