ABSTRACT
In 2021, Big Local News, a project at Stanford University, began a project to download and organize agendas of public agencies in California and throughout the US and make them available to journalists and the public. The idea of automating the downloads and distribution of agendas was straightforward and much needed, especially by smaller traditional newsrooms that had lost staff and small startups. Eliminating repetitious tasks for journalists and creating interactive and visual stories that are packed with evidence-based content and useful data is one sure way to increase revenue through a broader audiences and methods that are cost-saving. Over the past three decades, journalists have become more comfortable with analyzing and visualizing datasets and posting the datasets themselves and their analysis and visualizations to the web and social media. Most of the data library is with ProPublica now, which it sells data for low prices to journalists and high prices to other professions.
