Our readers want more
Angelenos want information on crime, coronavirus, air quality, housing
Last month at Crosstown, we asked our readers what they wanted to know about their Los Angeles neighborhoods.
The results were revealing and encouraging for our small team of journalists, designers and engineers.
Livability — from the air we breathe to the cost of housing — was the top concern.
In our work, we use publicly available data to tell stories about our communities in Los Angeles: Anti-Black discrimination is up, air is cleaner, COVID-19 numbers are spiking in some neighborhoods and falling in others. We then make that data publicly accessible so Angelenos can study their own neighborhoods.
Here’s what our audience told us:
Readers confirmed we are delivering them information they want to know about, specifically data on crime, coronavirus and traffic. We are eager to give them more information about housing, air quality and education.
Our readers’ greatest concern is housing costs.
We will use this feedback as a guide for making tools for our audience
We are working on a tool that readers can use to see current and predicted air quality in their neighborhood. Working with scientists from USC’s Spatial Sciences Institute and the Keck School of Medicine of USC, we are designing a dashboard that tracks air pollution by neighborhood. We plan to launch this in the fall.
We will continue building and improving our big neighborhood newsletter project, launching in November and funded by the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. We want to deliver weekly information to Angelenos that they actually want. Reader feedback and future user testing will ensure we’re putting what users tell us into our visual and written pieces.
We will be exploring new datasets. One of our great successes this year was creating a neighborhood-level COVID-19 infection rate map. We intend to explore more datasets on housing, public health and education so we can make publicly available data publicly accessible.
Have more ideas you want us to pursue? We’re always here to listen: askus@xtown.la.
