Let’s Talk About Open Journalism
Open practices can empower readers — and fellow journalists
My name is Sisi Wei and I work as a journalist, designer and developer at ProPublica. We’re roughly a 50-person newsroom in New York City that focuses on investigative journalism. I work on a team making interactive graphics and databases that help the public understand how data affects them and their communities.
For example, earlier this year ProPublica reported that hundreds of surgeons in the United States have complication rates double or triple the national average, and built Surgeon Scorecard, an interactive database that publicly reports the complication rates of more than 16,000 surgeons.
More recently, we looked into how some of the most well-known colleges in the U.S. are leaving their low-income students with high amounts of debt, and built Debt by Degrees, a trilingual news app that allows anyone to look up details on specific schools. You can even compare schools head-to-head.
During MozFest’s Saturday evening Conversations session, I’ll be discussing my work at ProPublica, and what journalism overall has been doing to work in the open.
We’ll be talking about open sourcing code, publishing methodologies, and how the data journalism community is growing and learning in the open via conferences, email lists and websites like Source (which is run by the amazing Knight-Mozilla OpenNews program).
On top of all that, I also want to talk about how being “in the open” can extend to journalism in another way: through sharing our data and expertise around a story, so we can extend our impact and help local journalists use our data to cover stories in their own cities and states.
Please feel free to post questions and comments as MozFest progresses and if you want to continue the conversation past Saturday night.
Additionally, if you’re interested in learning more about journalism or games, I’m coordinating the Games & Understanding pathway on the journalism floor this year. Make sure to come check us out.
