NEWS COUNTS

A National Journalism Network to Cover the 2020 Census

Mark Hansen, Columbia Journalism School, [email protected]

Mike Ananny, USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, [email protected]

Ben Livingston, Columbia Data Science Institute

Angela Woodall, Columbia Communication and Media Studies

NewsCounts hits the rails! Our "whistle stop tour" from Detroit to Oakland begins January 6. Check out our itinerary and contact us if you are along the route and want to participate.

We urgently need a robust national conversation about the serious and imminent challenges facing the 2020 Census, underscoring the important role it plays in the political, economic and civic life of the nation. To avoid a failed count, we need strong, fact-based reporting to fuel this conversation, and to perhaps point to potential solutions and opportunities. But these are complicated issues, requiring knowledge from local communities as well as subject area experts. We propose a national network of journalists, news organizations, professional bodies, technology companies, schools and universities that can create a national dialog about the census, and help ensure a successful count.

On April first, in years that end in zero, this country participates in a unique national moment. We exercise our constitutional right to be counted in the Decennial Census, a count that influences the structure of our political system through apportionment and the political districting, and dictates how $675 billion in federal funds per year are allocated to local cities and towns. It is a high-quality, independent source of information about life in the United States, a 10-year check on our progress as a nation. From urban planning and economic development to journalism and social science research, the census is a “basemap” of public life.

A failure to count properly and comprehensively, using scientifically sound, culturally engaging, and publicly defensible methods would harm how cities govern, businesses invest, researchers learn, and communities grow. To avoid this failure and ensure that the census continues as the cornerstone of public data collection in the United States, we propose creating a national network of:

• Publishers and journalists, through an existing relationship with the Columbia Journalism Review and guidance from ProPublica; creating partnerships with high-profile publications with wide circulations and international reputations; engaging publishing networks like Hearst and the Philadelphia Media Network; and, finally, reaching out to individual journalists with strong census reporting records
• News collectives, by establishing relationships with the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Online News Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Poynter Institute, the First Draft Network, and Newsgeist
• Statisticians, computer scientists, and data scientists, building on our ties with professional groups like the American Statistical Association; initiating collaborations with local college and university departments; and reaching out to not-for-profit groups like DataKind, Code for America and data visualization experts like Flowingdata
• Social scientists and demographers, through establishing collaborations with the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and the network of Population Centers funded by the NIH
• High school and college journalism programs, through relationships with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, an emerging relationship with Columbia’s Scholastic Press Association, and potential ties with the National Association of Media Literacy Educators, and the educational networks of KQED

These groups will form a new kind of community: a network of experts ready to act as sources and help reporters find fast, high-quality information; a toolkit of timelines and story prompts, to guide reporting before, during, and after the count; mentorship among census experts, quantitative and statistical scientists, senior reporters, and student journalists; and interdisciplinary researchers studying not only technical details of the census, but also its history and cultural meaning.