Our Data, Our Values
What we think about our data, its potential and its limitations
Our Data, Our Values.
Crosstown is an experiment in producing a new kind of local journalism powered by data that tells us something profound about our neighborhood, our city, our region. Because our type of journalism is new (though we are by no means the first), our practices, our standards and our values need to be laid out clearly.
We believe that delivering data about your neighborhood will help build community.
Data can be effective in telling stories about where we live and how our urban environment is changing. We want to connect people with information that is relevant to them. In a moment when the public’s trust of the news media is flagging, we believe that grounding our stories in data is a way to stitch together that relationship. Our first experiments in this field are with traffic, crime and air quality — three areas that contribute to the overall quality of life in Los Angeles.
Our premise is that telling stories through data arms us with facts that can be wielded against rumor, mistaken impressions and stereotypes. Data is powerful. It allows us to compare one neighborhood with another, between one month and the next. Sure, traffic is bad, but is it really worse than it was a year ago? Maybe two houses in your neighborhood were burglarized recently, but is there actually spike in robberies? The data can help us sort this out.
We are always questioning the data, and you should, too.
Data is only as good as its source. Sometimes journalists, governments and the public are tempted to overreach in their interpretation of the data. “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess,” remarked Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase. All data has its limitations. Our crime statistics, for example, come from official sources. But that doesn’t mean they are complete. We collect the crime statistics from multiple law enforcement agencies, some of whom have different reporting standards. We work to understand these differences, and our policy is to report on them and help you understand them, too. Our air quality data can deliver hour-by-hour readings of particle concentrations in more than 250 neighborhoods and cities across Los Angeles County. But what that might mean for public health is more nuanced. We want our work to encourage and enable you to explore the data yourself: to put our observations and numbers in context, to make comparisons, to look at how places and the stats that describe them are changing over time. But we also believe that all data should be approached with a critical eye.
It’s not just the numbers, but the story behind them.
The data is our source, but it’s the context that provides the meaning. Los Angeles has experienced a rise in crime lately. That’s cause for concern. But by some measures it’s also a safer city than it has been in decades. That should instill confidence. We like our stories to be short and to the point. We also want to provide the essential context so that our analyses of the numbers make sense.
This can be tricky. Take our crime map, for instance. It’s a visualization of the data by neighborhood. Many people associate certain areas, like South Los Angeles, with crime. The data may bear this out, but only to a point. Those neighborhoods might be much less crime-ridden than they were just a few years ago, though the crime rate might be higher than, say, the wealthy area of Brentwood. Displaying the data as is might give an accurate snapshot, but it won’t tell the full story. Worse still, it might confirm deep-seated stereotypes at a moment when the situation on the ground is changing. At Crosstown, we strive to be aware of how the way in which we convey the data can create impressions, rightly or wrongly.
Our goal, as data scientists and journalists, is to challenge stereotypes when they are based on incorrect or incomplete data, and spark conversation when the data presents us with a picture that we weren’t expecting.
To do our job well we need your help.
Los Angeles is vast and diverse. People on the East Side might experience the city differently than those who live in the Valley. We want to call on our readers to point out moments when our work is incomplete, inaccurate or even misleading. We hope to become better stewards of this data over time. But we depend on you, the people of Los Angeles, to act as a check on our presentations and interpretations.
We’re not perfect, but we’re trying.
We will make mistakes. We already have. When we notice them, we’ll cop to them. (If we have to change and article, you’ll see an asterisk at the bottom explaining what we did.) If you catch an error, let us know. We want to make Los Angeles an even better place to live. We’re in this together.
— The Crosstown team
