Big Local News

12/03/2025

Need help with a data-driven story? Have a coding challenge? Big Local News can help. Please join us for our virtual office hours Friday! More details here:

Date: December 5 Time: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Pacific Time

05/05/2025

Today, Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times were awarded the local reporting Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis which found that the city had become the drug overdose capital of the country. The work was done in collaboration with The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship and Big Local News. This project enabled the simultaneous publication on the opioid overdose crisis in six other publications around the country. Another three news organizations published stories in January. The project brought to light for the first time how the opioid crisis has disproportionately affected one group of black men in their mid-50s to early 70s throughout their adult lives in dozens of cities around the U.S., using a one-of-a-kind dataset from the CDC that tracked every fatal overdose. That granular data was provided by the CDC with the understanding that it could be released with summary numbers only at the county level. Together, The Banner, Big Local News and The Times summarized the data findings for the newsrooms, held many regular virtual meetings with them, fact-checked the data analysis, built visualizations, and became the beneficiaries of some impressive local reporting from Boston and Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. This work spearheaded a national conversation about America’s opioid epidemic.
(https://www.nytimes.com/.../black-men-overdose-deaths.html)
The amazing, collaborative nature of this project can be seen in the credits paragraph published as part of the most recent national story: Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Phillips, Eric Sagara, Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo of Big Local News; Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson of The Chicago Sun-Times; Aubrey Whelan and Joe Yerardi of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Venuri Siriwardane and Jamie Wiggan of PublicSource; Abigail Higgins and Colleen Grablick of The 51st; Ryan Little of The Baltimore Banner; David Sjostedt, Noah Baustin and George Kelly of The San Francisco Standard; Steve Strunsky and Riley Yates of NJ.com/ The Star-Ledger; Darian Benson and Mary Claire Molloy of Mirror Indy; Edgar Mendez and Devin Blake of Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and Chris Serres and Yoohyun Jung of the Boston Globe.
For us, here at Big Local, this is the proof of the premise behind the founding of Big Local News. Sharing data, analysis, and accountability journalistic work will only amplify that work for the good. We talk a lot about lowering the cost of accountability reporting, through better use of data and algorithms. This project did just that.
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/.../baltimore-opioid.../

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04/03/2025

https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2025/04/03/bln-knight-foundation-award.html

STANFORD, Calif. – April 3, 2025 – Stanford University’s Big Local News has been awarded a $3.9 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to accelerate collaborative infrastructure supporting local news organizations across the United States. Big Local News will work with o...

12/20/2024

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-local-journalism-collaboration-tells-story-black-men-phillips-ryroc

The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner and seven other local news organizations, in partnership with Big Local News, published today about a pervasive and long-running crisis in fatal drug overdoses among Black men born from 1951 to 1970, what’s known as a cohort effect, and one that we have fou...

01/27/2024

Very glad to see student work from last spring published by the AP today: school surveillance and va**ng: https://apnews.com/article/va**ng-surveillance-technology-schools-982128348c683b9d54c7a307c5b1fdc6?utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter

Schools around the country are installing sensors and cameras to crack down on student va**ng and handing out harsh punishments for many who are caught.

01/05/2024

It's the end of the year, and you know what that means. Before you start thinking about Christmas carols, snow trips, and December office dinners, let us share some cheerful news. The Sigma Awards for data journalism are back again. We're delighted to start the hunt for 2023's best data

01/05/2024

Happy New Year to our students and the entire Bill Lane Center community!

If you are still looking for a winter quarter class, please consider the popular, five-unit American West class held Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30 a.m. to 10:50 a.m. in Hewlett 201. The first class on Monday will be introductions by all four faculty. Come check it out!

More on the course:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ARTHIST 152, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate course taught by a distinguished group of four scholars from different departments and two different schools (see faculty below).

The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.

Faculty:
Bruce Cain, Political Science
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, English
David Freyberg, Civil and Environmental Engineering
David M. Kennedy, History

12/13/2023

We need to make local news big! The Computer History Museum has published my article on building an infrastructure for local journalism, along with other pieces delving into technology and journalism by JSK's Dawn Garcia, Google News' Richard Gingras, Hacks/Hackers' Sil Hamilton, The Globe and Mail's David Walmsley, Outlier Media's Candice Fortman, The Pivot Fund's Tracie Powell, and more! It was a pleasure to both attend the workshop and engage with so many. Read it here: https://futureofnews.computerhistory.org/making-local-news-big/
A little more background on this body of work: Over the past two decades, digital technologies have profoundly disrupted the news industry. Now, emerging technologies have the potential to transform the news business once again. The Computer History Museum’s two-year exploration of Technology and the Future of News offers insights into the potential - and avoidable pitfalls, of news journalism in the years ahead.
During this first year, CHM’s Tech and the Future of News initiative convened a diverse group of thought leaders to discuss how changing technology has impacted the news and how we can use it to restore trust, preserve a free press, and help citizens get the information they need. Publishers, editors, journalists, academics, and entrepreneurs contributed insights and insider stories about tech and the news that were balanced by a survey of nearly 1,600 people from across the US.

11/28/2023

It’s too hard for local journalists to access public records about policing, public health, education, government and other vital topics.

From its base at Stanford University, Big Local News tries to solve the problem by gathering data, building tools and collaborating with reporters.

The biglocalnews.org site also offers a free archiving service for journalists to store, share and publish data. Selected projects are preserved by the Stanford Digital Repository. An Industrial Affiliates program provides expanded opportunities to engage with the program and support its mission. And we have recently launched agendawatch.org, which allows users to set up email alerts for local government agenda items of interest -- lowering the cost of covering government for local newsrooms.

If you want to help support local journalism, consider giving to Big Local News on . Today, Stanford University is matching gifts up to $5,000, making your contribution count for more!

You can give online at givingtuesday.stanford.edu. To direct your gift to Big Local News, when you make your gift please select "School of Humanities and Sciences" from the drop-down menu and then select Other and write in Dept. of Communication, Big Local News project.

We are building a support infrastructure for local news. Please help!

--Cheryl Phillips, founder, Big Local News

08/04/2023

An occasional missive in support of local news and democracy.

08/04/2023

Read the local news that matters and discuss how local journalism can create impact. Click to read Local News is Big, by Cheryl Phillips, a Substack publication. Launched 3 years ago.

08/04/2023

https://biglocalnews.org/content/news/2023/06/23/welcome-to-agenda-watch.html

Trying to keep tabs on contractors scooping up bids in the region? School boards discussing CRT? The latest big box store angling to build in your town? Agenda Watch has you covered.