Zero shade for the New Yorkers dealing with this - it's awful - but it's wild to see the way East Coast media is suddenly doing wall-to-wall coverage of something that's been reality on the West Coast for a decade.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1666463804400574467

For folks whose air is now smoke - yes, it feels like the world is ending and smells like fire outside. It will warp your sense of day/night and affect your mood. Stay inside as much as you can, run filters if you have them, wear masks or wet bandanas over nose/mouth.

My story Monday touches on this while looking at 2021 grad rates, but in all the discussions of the very real & serious impacts the pandemic has had on educational equity, IMO way too many commentators gloss over the choices kids and families make. A brief local example 1/ After the disastrous educational impacts we saw last year when nearly all Oregon schools were online & the resulting political fallout, state & district leaders have made "keep schools open" their mantra. 2/

As always, would love to see a US breakdown on this for "the media/journalists" as an amorphous entity vs like, my local paper/news site, etc.

Bc this point: "Around the world, people fear the media is becoming more sensational for commercial gain" is...fair.

https://twitter.com/spj_tweets/status/1483895859603546114

There is an alarming distrust of press and basic tenants of journalism that is on the rise, increasingly detached from reality & it's scary and I hate it.

But depending on which segment of "media" you're talking about, there's a phrasing of this question where I'd prob say yes.

THE FAIR HAS A LLAMA OBSTACLE COURSE COMPETITION They're setting up

Just one anecdote for the discourse - in the past couple weeks, three separate journalists of color at different PNW publications have DMed me to say they got reprimanded at work for tweeting about how newsrooms have failed journalists of color in their experience. None of them named names or insulted anyone - they simply pointed out issues with coverage or practices at either their own publications or more broadly.

All three work at places that have publicly espoused their support for diversity etc in recent weeks.

*taps mic*

Here's a recap of last night's 3.5 hour school board meeting & the many issues raised about educational equity and class size as Oregon's second-largest district plans for $35 million in new state money

salemreporter.com/posts/1921/sal… We've been going hard on our coverage of this plan & the process, starting in September, and I want to take a minute to talk about why & give some context.

Oregon legislators, last spring, passed a $2 billion pre-k & K-12 ed spending package

salemreporter.com/posts/755/thou…

So @amandaripley has us practicing a thing called looping. When a source says something with heat/emotion:

Repeat it back as elegantly as you can: "It sounds like you're saying..."

When you get it, truly, they nearly always go "Exactly!"

If you get "Yeah." Or "not quite" 1/ 2/ then you need to ask again. "What did I miss?"

I think a lot of journos do this somewhat. But we take "Yeah." as us getting it right when often it's...not quite.

Local reporters - I'm gonna do a quick thread of how you can do a story like this without a data team or the mapping chops of some bigger news orgs.

This is likely not the Fastest or Best way, but it is a way that works.

https://twitter.com/rachelwalexande/status/1072911892715266049

You're working with American Community Survey data. The ACS uses 5-year estimates for areas with smaller populations, including Census tracts (roughly akin to neighborhoods)

The 2017 data came out last week. Overview: census.gov/programs-surve…
Census 101: censusreporter.org/glossary/