The Next Generation of Newsletters.

(Design by Ivy Tsang)

Crosstown recently embarked on a project to reinvigorate local news in Los Angeles. Our plan: create an individualized email newsletter for every neighborhood in the city (that’s a total of 110 neighborhoods, by the way.)

That’s right. Each week, we’ll make 110 different newsletters. One with news for South Park, another with news for Venice, Reseda, Boyle Heights and so forth. It’s a gargantuan task, and it’s not something we could take on without the help of world-class computer science talent and support from the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge.

Crosstown is a non-profit newsroom based at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism. If we can make it work in LA, we think it could work in cities around the world as well.

Why this project?

Local news is broken. It simply costs too much to report and produce news in the traditional way. With the shift to digital, the revenue which news outlets can collect from their content continues to drop. Local news, which by definition reaches a small audience, can’t survive in this environment. The demise has accelerated recently with the economic fallout from COVID-19. Los Angeles has lost four local papers in the last two months.

The irony is that not having local news costs a lot, too. When local newspapers shutter, the borrowing costs for the cities they served often go up. The reason: With no watchdog, opportunities for public corruption abound. And, of course, it’s more difficult for locals to get information that will help make their communities safer, healthier and more connected.

Our solution:

(Design by Kiera Smith)

We’re trying to find a more efficient way to carry on at least part of the role once played by your local newspaper. And we’re trying to deliver it in a way that makes sense for right now: in your inbox.

Our solution starts with data. We collect data on a range of topics — crime, traffic, air quality, complaints from residents, parking citations, weather, fires — and then slice that data up by neighborhood. In a city like Los Angeles, with four million people spread out across nearly 500 square miles, people need that localized data to understand how their community is faring. Crime may be up in one part of the city, but way down in another.

Because we collect data about the entire city, no one is left out. There are no news deserts. Every resident can see how their neighborhood is doing and how it compares to other areas.

Just as important, it’s more cost-effective, because from one giant dataset, we can tell more than 100 different stories.

The stories

(Design by JD LeRoy)

Many of the topics we cover with data are the mainstays of local news, like traffic, air quality and crime. But our data-based reporting is different. We can’t be “on the scene” the way local TV news might.

Yet there are advantages. The data gives us context we wouldn’t be able to get through traditional news-gathering. Instead of reporting on a single event — a fire, or a traffic accident — we report on trends. Are there more collisions in your neighborhood than there were last year? What’s the most dangerous intersection where you live?

This can serve as a reality check. On platforms like NextDoor, Neighbors or Citizen, you might learn about a single event, like a neighborhood burglary. That’s scary, and rightly so. But our data will tell you whether the number of burglaries are rising or falling in your neighborhood and allow you to gauge how your neighborhood compares with others.

We believe that data delivered with that kind of context can be a spark for engagement. We hope it will help residents understand how their neighborhood fits into a larger puzzle of LA.

How we do it

We’re trying to rebuild the news ecosystem from the ground up. This presents three different sets of challenges:

• Data. Our engineering team has built a system to allow us to collect, store and sort large amounts of data. They have created ways to break it down by neighborhood, ZIP code, even census tract. Now, they are working on ways to automatically feed relevant data into each of our 110 newsletters.
• Design. Data is a bunch of numbers. Meaning is communicated through design. Our design team is working on how to take all of this dense information and present it in a visually intuitive and elegant format.
• Journalism. In the end, this is about telling the stories of your community. Our reporters work closely with the designers and the engineers to figure out what kind of questions we can ask of the data and what it can tell us.

What we’re doing now

We’re building out the project. We’re trying to understand what we need to create internally and what we can source from elsewhere. Some of the issues we’re trying to solve: How do you build a subscription sign-up page with 110 different options? Where do you store the email addresses? How can we automatically create and import the right charts into each neighborhood newsletter. It’s exciting and at times a little scary.

Maybe you have questions for us? Suggestions? We would love to hear from you at askus@xtown.la