Slides from the News Inequality Project presentation at the Knight Prototype Fund Demo Day on April 12, 2018 in Austin, Texas

1. 1
Hamdan Azhar
Knight Foundation Demo Day (April 12, 2018)

2. 2

3. 3

4. Source: Analysis of newspaper headlines from the Gothamist (2015-2017)

5. Source: Analysis of newspaper headlines from the Gothamist (2015-2017)

6. If we build a tool that measures “blind spots” in local news
coverage (places where coverage is disproportionately low),
then media organizations will use results to adjust their
news coverage and reduce inequality. Results may also be
used by civic organizations to develop citizen journalism
initiatives and/or by nonprofits or journalism schools to
increase focus on less-covered places.
6
Our hypothesis

7. 7
What did we build?

10. 10
What did we learn?
Tradeoffs between working independently, quickly, and■
scraping up a storm VS. partnering with a newsroom and
working slowly (and sacrificing independence)
Editors are often more interested in using these findings to get■
more subscriptions rather than being shamed for what they’re
not covering
Journalism■ students this as a tool for new story ideation!

11. 11
What are our next steps?
Partner with 2■ -3 newsrooms to produce custom dashboards for
editors and reporters
Extend our database to more cities and produce case studies■
(Could a newsroom’s focused effort to cover a previously
neglected area generate more subscriptions?)
Use■ machine learning to conduct semantic analysis of topics
and articles in our database (Do reporter’s use different
language to describe different neighborhoods?)
More■ robustly document our code!

12. 12
Thank you!
Check out■ our NYC dashboard at
bit.ly/nycdashboard
Follow along at■ newsinequality.org and on Twitter
@newsinequality
Christian MilNeil Leslie Shapiro Carson Sprock Hamdan Azhar