Internship Description
Chiara Eisner and Weihua Li, ‘19JRN, spent their summer with The Marshall Project, a Pulitzer-prize-winning, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the United States’ criminal justice system. As their Investigative Fellow, Chiara reported on issues of local and national interest, around themes of criminal injustice. Weihua was their Data Journalism Fellow and used her graphics, analytical and computational skills to assist reporters on their investigation about criminal justice issues in the United States. She also pitched and produced smaller data-driven stories.
Throughout this summer, I worked on several quick turnout stories as well as long term projects at The Marshall Projects. With my programming, design and journalism skills, I helped reporters to scrape government websites, created data visualizations that strengthens the reporting, and analyzed datasets to provide insight of the U.S. criminal justice system.
The first story I worked on was about how Trump administration’s immigration policies have worsened case backlog in immigration courts. Using the data that our reporters obtained, I built a data visualization that illustrates how the number of pending has skyrocketed since the Trump administration.
Through my studies at Columbia, I learned many skills that equipped me to contribute to digital storytelling and data investigation at The Marshall Project. One project I worked on include an investigative piece on “gate money” -- money that prisons give to people upon release. Our reporter reached out to correction departments in all 50 states and survey their gate money policies. Using their findings, I used JavaScript and js.d3 to build an interactive component to the article where readers can explore the drastic difference in gate money policies. I could not have successfully pitch the idea, let alone execute it, had I not gains a solid news judgement and technical skills from Columbia.
When I received my diploma from the Graduate School of Journalism, I thought I was done with being a student. That’s not true -- during my fellowship at The Marshall Project, I was learning Every. Single. Day.
I wouldn’t describe this as a challenge. My colleagues and editors were extremely generous with their time and guidance. Together, they taught me things like making responsive designs that are fit for mobile and building news gathering tools that can automatically collect information -- skillsI wish I had picked up in school.
My experience as a Tamer fellow taught me that learning doesn’t stop the moment we step out of Columbia. Instead, skills I learned in school are a great foundation that prepares me to continue growing as a data reporter.
