Introducing DataDesk: The local stories newsrooms never had time to find
Assuming your mission is to be an invaluable source of journalism – and information – to your local community, what is your strategy to achieve this? Where do you focus your resources and how do you prioritise?
Picture this. It's 9pm on a Tuesday, and a three-hour city council meeting just wrapped up. The county released a batch of building permits that morning. The local court published its weekly rulings at noon. The health department updated its restaurant inspection list. Nobody in the local newsroom read any of it. Not because it wasn't newsworthy — because there just wasn’t time.
That's the daily reality for many local newsrooms: small teams, endless local data, no realistic way to watch all of it. And even the stuff that reporters prioritize to look into is often difficult and time consuming to access.