Join the Cyber Policy Center on October 7th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for Making Local News Big, a seminar with Cheryl Phillips.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Fall Seminar Series continues through December; see our Fall Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

This talk will present a case for building an infrastructure in support of local journalism and, in the process, supporting the information needs of communities, which fosters awareness and democratic functions. Local newsrooms often lack the technical infrastructure to manage and interpret data, as well as then tell vital stories from patterns in data. Our team at Big Local News develops open-source pipelines to automate the collection and cleaning of multiple streams of data. This session will walk through the importance of building an infrastructure for local journalism that lowers the friction points for newsrooms, making it easier to tell critical stories for local communities.
 

About the Speaker:

Phillips is the founder/co-director of Stanford University’s Big Local News, a data-sharing platform and computational collaborative in support of local journalism. She also is co-founder of the Stanford Open Policing Project, an effort to collect police interaction data and evaluate racial disparities. She helps lead the Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network, a national collaboration to collect, process and analyze police use of force and misconduct records. She teaches data and investigative journalism and has worked in numerous newsrooms, including The Seattle Times, USA TODAY, The Detroit News and newsrooms in Texas and Montana. During her time in Seattle, she twice covered breaking news that that received a Pulitzer Prize and twice worked on investigations that were Pulitzer finalists. Big Local News staff have contributed to two projects that were Pulitzer finalists in 2024. Most recently, Phillips and Big Local News contributed to an investigation into overdose deaths in partnership with The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times Investigative Reporting Fellowship that received a George Polk Award for local reporting and a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.