Big Local News part of JSK Impact Partnerships

The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University launched a major new initiative, the JSK Impact Partnerships, which will leverage JSK’s connections, its vast alumni network, and access to one of the world’s top universities to accelerate progress in the journalism industry to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public.

The JSK Impact Partnerships will be based on JSK’s four call-to-action themes: challenging misinformation and disinformation; holding the powerful accountable; fighting bias, intolerance and injustice; and strengthening local news.

Big Local News will be among the partners:

• Big Local News, JSK Local Impact Partner: Big Local News, led by Cheryl Phillips, the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Journalism at Stanford, collects, cleans and shares data so that journalists and researchers can discover and write stories about policies that affect local communities and how institutions are operating. With support from JSK, Eric Sagara, a senior data reporter with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, will work with Big Local News as a visiting senior data journalist for the 2018-2019 academic year. In this role, Sagara will take the lead in standardizing and analyzing data from localities across the country for Big Local News. He will help guide the process of training newsrooms to use the data and to use “story recipes” to create compelling narratives for their local communities. A public-facing website will provide an easy interface for journalists to select and download data as well as upload and share data they may collect. The site will feature tutorials from journalists who have successfully used the data. Sagara will also conduct workshops for local journalists in the coming year to help them make the best use of data in their reporting. “This support helps fill a critical gap for Big Local News,” Phillips said. “It also deepens our relationship with JSK at a time when collaboration is vital to the future of journalism.”

More about the JSK Impact Partnerships.