Among this week’s Pulitzer Prize winners, the Local Reporting award, shared by the Baltimore Banner and the New York Times, showcased how data and collaboration fuel breakthrough journalism at scale. The broader collaboration behind this effort—documenting how the fentanyl crisis has disproportionately affected a generation of older Black men—included Stanford’s Big Local News and nine other news outlets across the country, from the Boston Globe to the San Francisco Standard. Each publication reported and ran stories that leveraged the same underlying data from the CDC, but with the proper context for each city.
The nature of this collaboration was one of the topics at last month’s Story Discovery at Scale convening at Stanford University, hosted by Big Local News. In its third year, the event brought together about 70 data journalists, product folks, academics and multi-hyphenates of local news. Over two days, they shared the latest best practices and worked on new ideas for tools, training and collaborative approaches to help newsrooms unlock stories, add context and increase output.