By Carolyn Shapiro
Every time someone drives on a Los Angeles County freeway, electronic sensors record their car’s speed at various spots. The L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority collects all that data, every day, from every freeway in a region infamous for its troublesome traffic.
Computer scientists at the University of Southern California crunch the numbers for the city. Five years ago, Gabriel Kahn, a professor in USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, learned that public officials had never asked the USC team questions about the data. And, certainly, no news media were reporting stories with it.
That’s when Kahn got the idea for Crosstown, a website that aggregates the massive cache of public information government agencies collect — everything from law enforcement activity to parking tickets, construction permits to resident complaints — and makes it available for news outlets to tap into for stories. Kahn’s journalism school had received a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to work with USC’s Viterbi Department of Computer Science on innovative ideas like Crosstown.
The project provides insight into “all these things that have to do with core quality of life issues — from public safety to housing to traffic, road safety, things like that — things that local news is reporting anyway but doing so in a very traditional way,” Kahn said.
Coverage of a single traffic accident or a citywide statistic doesn’t reflect the different experiences of different neighborhoods, he explained. “If I can somehow use this data to create that conversation, bring some contour to that conversation, it can be informative,” Kahn said.
The USC computer scientists created their own cloud storage system for the millions of rows of data, so reporters can easily access it. Information is coded by location: where a crime took place, where a parking ticket was issued, where a resident identified a trash heap causing concern.
“That allows us to understand how these things are happening not just in the aggregate across a city of 500 square miles with 4 million people, but at the neighborhood level,” Kahn said. “So we can look at Los Angeles as a city, but also as a collection of 110 neighborhoods.”
Small, local publications typically lack the financial resources and audience size to gather a broad enough scope of information to bring that kind of perspective to their stories, Kahn said.
“We realized that we had a different way of producing local news,” he continued. “That had two powerful components to it: One was we were really able to ferret out individual stories of individual communities from an ocean of data. Two, we were able to do this at scale.”
Early in 2021, Annenberg, the USC journalism school, received another grant through the Local Media Association — with funds from Facebook parent company Meta — for a pilot program to expand the Crosstown model in other regions. The Crosstown team is now developing versions for TV station WRAL in Raleigh.; public radio station WBEZ in Chicago; and the publisher of the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com in New Orleans and the Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge.
“This pilot project is designed to help busy newsrooms access and analyze local datasets and use that data to identify and report on local issues in ways that make numbers meaningful to their audiences,” said Frank Mungeam, chief innovation officer at the Local Media Association, in a news release.
“Making data accessible and actionable to all in the newsroom is key to our broader mission of sustainable models for local news.”
Crosstown also employs two or three Annenberg student journalists who build stories from the data. The starting pay is $20 an hour. Crosstown has a part-time professional editor and several student software engineers, too, managed by a computer science faculty member, Luciano Nocera.
The students work outside class time and continue reporting through school breaks. Some Crosstown reporters have come from Kahn’s class on data-driven storytelling.
The reporters start with the data, then go into neighborhoods to talk to people affected by the numbers. Their stories have included deep dives into campaign finance filings and an analysis of the boom in permits for Los Angeles property owners to add residential or rental spaces known as accessory dwelling units. In 2021, a Crosstown reporter looked at the spike in deaths among homeless individuals and interviewed people living or working near those locations to craft detailed profiles of those who died — in some cases alerting family members who hadn’t known.
“It was very powerful,” Kahn said.
Crosstown’s website carries about three news stories at any given time. Crosstown also sends out an email newsletter every Wednesday to folks from all 110 Los Angeles neighborhoods, using its unique platform to swap out numbers and other information specific to each location.
Meanwhile, the data keeps flowing into Crosstown, bringing fresh ideas for journalists, Kahn said. “Then, it’s a different story over time.”
For more information:
Gabriel Kahn at USC, gabriel.kahn@usc.edu