The Brown Institute is pleased to announce Magic Grant project ‘Documenting COVID-19‘ is the 2020 recipient of The First Amendment Coalition’s Free Speech & Open Government award. The project includes a team of journalists, data scientists, and a designer and has worked tirelessly to shed light on how state and local governments have responded to the
Highlights from Changing Course
Over the past 3 months, the Brown Institute hosted three lectures challenging us to think about data and computation in new ways. Each talk was by researchers outside of journalism, and there were terrific lessons from their approaches to data and computation for journalists interested in these areas. Below are recordings of the lectures by
Announcing ‘Volumetric Reporting’: talks and workshops on applications of volumetric capture in journalism
Advances in sensing hardware and computer vision algorithms have enabled common smartphone and tablet devices to be able to see and understand the world in more ways than ever before. Not only are these devices able to display 3D content, but they are quickly being equipped with technologies that allow for 3D capture. Applications have
The burden of malaria among pregnant women in Nigeria – an update on the reporting grants from Maternal Figures
Data shows that malaria accounts for 11% of maternal deaths in Nigeria. While it is not the lion’s share of the factors that contribute to maternal deaths, it is a significant one. In a story supported by the Maternal Figures Solutions Journalism Fellowship funded by The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Premium Times reporter Chiamaka
The Brown Institute, Lenfest Local Lab and Philadelphia Inquirer are partnering to build content audit tools
Our collaborative project won the Google GNI Innovation Challenge, securing $300,000 to build and test machine learning-based tools that help newsrooms analyze equity and representation in their work at scale. Editor’s note: This post was co-written and edited by Michael Krisch, Deputy Director of the Brown Institute; Sarah Schmalbach, Product Director of the Lenfest Local
Local Live(s) – Innovative Storytelling Connecting Journalists and Communities
Crystal Niebla, a reporter from the Long Beach Post, looked through the camera lens and into the homes of people she served. She was recounting a story she reported, about a violent mugging in the Washington neighborhood of Long Beach where she used to live. As the story progressed, Crystal peeled back the layers of
Sylvia featured in Variety magazine
“Instagram is full of wannabes, but there was only one Sylvia.” On November 24th, Damon Wise, Writer at Variety magazine interviewed our creative technologist Ziv Schneider about her project Sylvia, which premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab this month. In the interview, Ziv reflected on this five-month-long social experiment in making an aging
Announcing the Computation+Journalism Conference for 2021
C+J 2021 —A virtual gathering. From the outset, 2020 looked like it would be a year of data and computation in journalism. Think of the events that were planned — from the 2020 Presidential Election to the decennial census, to the Summer Olympics, to the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. Each of these stories had
Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
Our 2020-21 Magic Grant Wolf Pack has published its first piece — a deep dive into the invention of the term “superpredator”. The team “found nearly 300 uses of ‘superpredator’ in 40 leading newspapers and magazines from 1995 to 2000. Fewer than 40% of these articles criticized the term.” As Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hankock