Matt Kiefer
Matt Kiefer is a 2020 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, where he designed and prototyped tools to monitor civil and human rights. He is also a project lead for the journalism collaborative, Covid Public Info, and the creator of FOIAmail, an open source framework for automating public records requests.
Matt’s work on Source
Projects
Articles by Matt
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Don’t panic. Collaborate.
Covid-19 threatens local journalism, just when we need it most. Here’s how the Covid Public Info project is responding.
Posted onThe Covid Public Info project launched this spring, and has alreadycollected input from thousands of individual community members, filed hundreds of public records requests, and compared notes with dozens of journalists. Here are some highlights of what we’ve learned so far, and ways for you to get involved.
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How 10 Newsrooms Built a Chicago Voter Guide, Together
The highly collaborative process behind our in-depth, interactive voter guide to Chicago’s historic 2019 election
Posted onAt the end of 2018, as Chicago faced a historic election with a wide-open mayoral race and all 50 city council seats on the ballot, a group of independent newsrooms decided to try something unprecedented with their election coverage: collaborate.
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How The Chicago Reporter Made ‘Settling for Misconduct’
For hundreds of police lawsuits, we needed good data management, strong collaborations, and a bigger chart.
Posted onIn researching Settling for Misconduct, we had to account for details from hundreds of county and federal court filings, identify thousands of officers named in civil complaints and tally hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary awards. We also needed thorough reporting to connect issues of police misconduct to fiscal accountability. And oh yeah – we had to have a slick web app to present the data to the public.
Our search for the best tabular-data extraction tool in 2024, and what we found