How our collaborative news team responded to COVID-19 in LA
When COVID-19 started spreading in the US, California and Los Angeles, there was a flurry of excellent reporting. But, one area wasn’t getting much coverage: how the pandemic and subsequent shutdown were impacting individual neighborhoods.
Here at Crosstown, a small, data-driven news organization based at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism, we were able to respond quickly.
We dove into the data we normally use to report on daily quality-of-life issues such as crime and traffic, and instead used it as a way to chart how life was changing rapidly in Los Angeles.
We wrote about how domestic violence incidents have been increasing in our city since the shutdown began, we interviewed a public health expert on how LA’s air quality is now pristine, thanks to a massive reduction in traffic, we noticed that LAPD reports containing “suspect wore a mask” have shot up.
And, we produced a map that updates daily with the infection rates of COVID-19 cases in every neighborhood in LA County. (xtown.la/coronavirus).
We’re not a breaking news organization nor a legacy media outlet, but a small team of part-time reporters, software engineers and designers. We showed our readers — and ourselves — that we were able to use publicly available data to report on how COVID-19 was changing our city just as we felt and saw the changes around us.
What makes Crosstown different from other news organizations is that we draw on different types of skills. The coverage we produced since the beginning of COVID-19 relied equally on each one of our three teams: reporters, software engineers and designers. We would not have been able to dig into the data or build our infection rate map without our software engineering team (the largest of our three teams). We would not have been able to present our work to the public in an engaging and intuitive way without our designers. And without our reporters, we would never have rooted around to understand data on domestic violence or disputes about the rent or which neighborhoods have been experiencing upticks in infection rates.
Though we’re still on lockdown and, thus, still working remotely, we are more confident than ever that our collaborative approach can bring our audience data and stories that matter.
This is the second post in our journey toward creating 110 newsletters for the City of Los Angeles. Other topics will include details of how we’re trying to partially automate a weekly newsletter and the slippery business of wrangling a roadmap.
