Starting this week, I’m joining the team at Documenting COVID-19 on a part-time basis. Documenting COVID-19, for those unfamiliar, is an open-records project that makes pandemic data and records from all levels of the U.S. government available to journalists and researchers.
Project researchers also help journalists craft stories around these government records, contributing to investigative articles on topics ranging from death certificates to contact tracing challenges.
Documenting COVID-19 is run out of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a research institute run by Columbia and Stanford Universities; it’s been funded by the public records site MuckRock and other supporters.
The project is currently expanding to collect even more COVID-related documents and data, and I’m excited to be part of that expansion! I look forward to unearthing stories, collaborating with local newsrooms, developing my investigative skills, and generally working to hold U.S. institutions accountable for their pandemic failures.
And, for any local reporters reading this, if you have a story idea or project where you could use some assistance from Documenting COVID-19, let me know! (Email me, hit me up on Twitter, etc.)