The Data-Driven Reporting Project

AmyJo Brown is an independent editor who helps local news organizations tell stories that carry weight, focusing not just on the external work – the stories that publish – but also on how our industry does it work. A veteran journalist with a background in local government and investigative reporting, her focus on improving processes and changing systems has carried through her work consulting with news leaders on editorial strategies, building data tools, working with young journalists and leading collaborative journalism projects.

David McKie is deputy managing editor for Canada’s National Observer. Before joining the Observer, the Ottawa-based, award-winning journalist and author spent 26 years as an investigative producer and reporter at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. David specializes in data and teaches at the schools of journalism at Carleton University, the University of King’s College, Ryerson University and the University of British Columbia. He has co-authored three journalism textbooks and two user guides on freedom-of-information laws and privacy, respectively.

Derek Willis is a lecturer in data and computational journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Previously he worked as a news applications developer at ProPublica, The New York Times and the Washington Post. He has been a reporter at several other news organizations and am the co-founder of OpenElections, a project that collects and converts official precinct election results.

Eva Constantaras is a data journalist specialized in building data journalism teams in the Global South. These teams have reported from across Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa on topics ranging from broken foreign aid and food insecurity to extractive industries and public health. As a Google Data Journalism Scholar and a Fulbright Fellow, she developed a course for investigative and data journalism in high-risk environments. She is currently Data Editor at Lighthouse Reports and Data Journalism Advisor at Internews.

Jeremy Singer-Vine is a data editor, reporter, and computer programmer based in New York City. From 2014 until early 2022, he served as the founding data editor for BuzzFeed News. Previously, he reported for the Wall Street Journal and, before that, for Slate Magazine. Since 2015, he has published Data Is Plural, a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.

Michael Grant is a visual journalist who specializes in editorial experience design. In 2021, he founded Get Current Studio — a design, web development and storytelling agency that is reimagining the print and online brands of ethnic publishers and how they serve their audiences. Grant is an alum of the JSK Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University where he researched challenges facing HBCU media studies programs as well as Black-owned news organizations, and the Google News Lab Teaching Fellowship where he trained newsrooms and universities around the country. He also leads the ONA HBCU Digital Media Fellowship, a program that introduces a select group of HBCU student journalists to new approaches to digital storytelling during the annual ONA conference.

Sisi Wei is Co-Executive Director of OpenNews, where she envisions and executes transformative initiatives to help create a journalism industry that is more inclusive and equitable, especially for journalists of color and local journalists. Previously, she was the Assistant Managing Editor at ProPublica, during which she edited and managed news apps, graphics, visual investigations and large, interdisciplinary projects. Sisi won the Gwen Ifill Award in 2021, and has won numerous Malofiej, SND Digital and ONA awards, the Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism, and the 2016 Data Journalism Award for Best Individual Portfolio.

Valérie Ouellet is an award-winning investigative reporter based in Toronto. She uses her data analysis and coding skills to find and report on exclusive stories for the Canada’s national public broadcaster, CBC News. She has won an Amnesty International Media Award for documenting COVID cases in Canadian jails (2021) and the RTDNA Dan McArthur Award for shedding light on Ontario’s broken school violence reporting system (2020). She was a two-time contributor to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on worldwide projects The Paradise Papers (2017) and The Implant Files (2018).