The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization that“seeks to educate and enlarge the audience of people who care about criminal justice” as well as “create and sustain a national urgency about the US criminal justice system.” The organization does this through its award-winning journalism. In particular, the Marshall Project has won a number of awards for its innovative data and digital approach to reporting, which is the team I worked on this summer. I worked on a number of data-driven stories relating to criminal justice — and in particular, policing and prisons. I analyzed data for a story on police violence, collected data for the weekly COVID tracker, which tracks the number of COVID cases in prison, and created a graphic for a story on prison population drops. In addition, I sent dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for a police settlement story that the Marshall Project is currently working on, and analyzed initial data for it.

During my master's program, I learned how to work with data. This included practical skills, such as learning programming languages and skills like Python, HTML, and Javascript to be able to analyze data, clean data, and visualize data. In addition, I also learned broader reporting approaches, such as how to look at data as a story and flesh out findings, connections, and narratives. During my time at the Marshall Project, I directly applied the skills I learned during my program. I used Python to analyze multiple datasets, I used HTML and Javascript to create graphics, and I used the reporting approaches I learned during our discussions on the stories we were working on, as well as during my own work looking at the data I used in each of the projects. Utilizing the things I learned during the program allowed me to both expand my own knowledge, but also to increase my confidence when I saw I was able to use the skills successfully for real-world applications and for news stories published by a nationally-recognized outlet.

Before I began the fellowship, I was primarily worried about feeling my skills and expertise would not be adequate for the job required of me and about how I would be able to conduct a successful fellowship completely virtually. However, these did not end up being the challenges I actually faced. I was able to carry out the tasks required of me proficiently and without difficulty. In addition, The Marshall Project did a great job of creating a sense of newsroom virtually, and my editor was always willing to video call or provide guidance when asked. The largest challenge for me was learning to feel comfortable speaking up, pushing forward my ideas, and asking questions when needed. As a reporter — and especially as a young reporter — a large part of my job is being able to bring forward and present my own ideas, and then do the work of pushing them forward. That felt very intimidating to me, and I spent a large amount of the first part of the summer learning to feel comfortable having conversations about my story ideas.

I’ve learned so much about data, reporting, and criminal justice during my time at the Marshall Project. For practical purposes, I was introduced to several new data sources, academic resources, and experts in criminal justice, which will help me in future reporting. I’ve also had a chance to read a lot more of the work done at The Marshall Project, as well as general criminal justice reporting during my time here. This has shaped how I think of and approach my reporting. My editor and colleagues were very helpful in reading through my code and providing feedback on how to approach analysis, and how to structure my code, which will be useful in the future. I recently began a new job covering gun violence in Kansas City, and much of my work at The Kansas City Star intersects with criminal justice reporting. I really would like to use the data-driven approach I saw the data team use at The Marshall Project in my work here. It is my goal to be able to report a nuanced story on gun violence and policing that contain my own original data analysis and visuals as I saw being done at The Marshall Project during my time here.