A Newsroom of Two workshop

Local newsrooms across the country are disappearing, but there's at least one potential watchdog left: you! Doing journalism yourself might sound intimidating, but once you know the process, it becomes totally approachable. In this workshop, we'll go through the basics to investigate your local government.

• Day/Time: Wednesday July 29, 6:30pm-7:30pm -- New York Time (EDT)
• Venue: Live online teleconference

Abstract

In this workshop, I (Brandon Roberts) will take you through what you need to know to investigate your local government agencies. I'll demystify the investigative process and cover the basic tools every journalist needs to know:

• generating leads
• records requests
• public data sources
• navigating your local government's bureaucracy

This is a live session with time to ask questions about how you can report on your community.

Pre-requisites

An interest in reporting on your local government agencies.

Bring an idea for something you'd like to investigate about your local government and we'll talk about how it might be accomplished in the Q&A portion of the workshop.

About the host

Hello, I'm Brandon Roberts, an independent computational journalist who has worked with ProPublica, the Associated Press and various investigative newsrooms in the US and internationally. I didn't start at large news organizations, though. I got my start running my own investigative newspaper and made a lot of avoidable mistakes in the process. I believe that learning how to produce rigorous journalism both improves communities and makes people more aware of bias and falsehoods in what they read. Plus, it's fun to investigate your local government.

Links

More links coming soon... About me