Britney Nguyen

Public perceptions of crime don't always match reality, a problem fueled by dodgy campaign rhetoric and (drum roll, please) ... old and incomplete crime data. Unlike readily available data on inflation and unemployment trends, national crime data lag by many months. The consequences? Here's what our Crime Trends Working Group says in its new report outlining a roadmap for progress: “Even small discrepancies can have big consequences in the policy and political environment. The potential fallout can be huge — in terms of crime tactics and strategies, whether the police chief stays on the job or gets fired, even whether the mayor or prosecutor is re-elected or driven from office. At stake are billions in government spending on public safety and criminal justice, the viability of businesses and urban centers, and the extent to which Americans are safe, and feel safe, in their homes and communities.” Tom Jackman of The Washington Post wrote a thoughtful summary of the problem and our group's recommendations this week. https://lnkd.in/gj4yXqje And please see the post below before turning on the TV tonight:

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As I approach my third month at The Baltimore Banner, I have been thinking a lot about defining success. A mentor offered the following thoughts: For reporters, it is much easier to define success. Editors often need help seeing that their goals should be quite different than their reporters'. They need to see each of their reporters as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. So editors need to meet each reporter at a different place and help them improve, and hopefully, thrive. Sometimes that means focusing on reporting or writing skills, sometimes it is helping a reporter figure out how to cover a beat, or how to distinguish their work from the competition. Editors of course are key to guiding coverage, whether it's breaking news or a more conceptual beat, when the goal has to be finding the front edge of the topic (for an education reporter, that might be new trends in teaching and for the city hall reporter it might be who are the emerging power brokers.) When it comes to editing copy, editors have to avoid rewriting stories, which can completely demoralize reporters, but they also can't send along stories that are confusing or take too long to get to the point. It takes awhile for editors to figure out that sweet spot between improving copy but not just rewriting it the way they would have written it. The hardest part of editing is probably dealing with difficult reporters and there is no easy answer for that. The only part of running a newsroom that I could advise on is running the coverage and for me, that was always driven by focusing on the big news of the day. You have to make sure that editors have put enough staffers on the big stories and are looking across the news cycle, e.g. what will we have to publish first thing tomorrow, and make sure some people are trained on the bigger, deeper questions that take a few days to report. If you are clear on your top priorities each day and the newsroom aligns behind those, then the smaller stories will take care of themselves. You will be judged by how the Banner did on the big things, not the small things.

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Congestion pricing was supposed to start today in New York City. It didn't after Gov. Kathy Hochul earlier this month announced an indefinite pause. My latest article in The Wall Street Journal traces the rise and pause of congestion pricing — a tale that involves 17 years and around $700 million. The abrupt reversal, which some attribute to Hochul’s reluctance to impose a new fee in an election year, leaves metro New York grappling with a historic missed opportunity and fiscal mess. There is no relief in sight for the city’s traffic congestion, which is the worst in the world, according to data published last week. The epic collapse in New York shows how a fear of dramatic change can give the status quo stubborn power over those trying to solve some of America’s most intractable challenges. That leaves policymakers nibbling at the edges of deeply rooted problems, even after investing huge sums of money and political capital. Blown up in a New York minute were plans for around $15 billion of planned improvements to the city’s ailing mass-transit system, the largest transportation network in North America. The reversal cast aside around $700 million in meticulous prep work, including a $555-million contract to install tolling cameras—which are already up and ready to go—and $33 million for a customer-service center with 100 employees who have already been brought on, officials said. Planners invested thousands of hours, including going to London and Stockholm to research their congestion-pricing programs, according to people familiar with the travel. What was supposed to be a transformative moment when New York led the way and boldly tackled traffic congestion, air pollution and transit funding, has instead turned into a surprising loss for a broad coalition that includes major employers, real-estate developers and subway riders. Surprised by the reversal were Hochul’s own lieutenants, including Janno Lieber, a fierce champion of congestion pricing and the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The MTA—which carries around 5.5 million passengers each day in the New York metro area—now faces a $16.5 billion-financial hole from the loss of money from congestion pricing and federal matching funds. Just days after Hochul’s announcement, a beleaguered Lieber joined a conference call with advocates in which he said he was equally shocked and remained committed to the program, three people familiar with the exchange said. “This is devastating,” he said, according to a person on the call. Here's the latest from me and Joseph De Avila —>

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Liars beware, I am now Intermediate at Digital Investigation Techniques according to AFP and Google News Initiative. This course focused on tracking election disinformation and verifying climate claims. It was interesting to see how the course's tools could be used to examine past/current elections.

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Recent article by Shota Kincha is a great description of the troubling trend of abusive private lawsuits (SLAPPs) in Georgia. These lawsuits aim to silence critical voices, crack down on journalist investigations and restrict free speech. I’m thankful for the opportunity to contribute to this article to highlight the importance of defending press freedoms, especially amidst democratic backslide and risinf Russian influence in Georgia. For a deeper look into this issue and its implications, check out the full article: #PressFreedom #HumanRights #Georgia

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It's #WorldPressFreedomDay, a time to reflect that journalism plays a central role in sustaining democracy. This excerpt from a message by Courtney Radsch, PhD, director of Center for Journalism and Liberty, reminds me that press freedom does not exist in a void: at the end of the day, journalists provide a public service in a market economy, and the policies that govern such market have always mattered for journalists to make a living and do their jobs free from fear of retaliation - be it coming from govts or the private sector. "News organizations and journalists around the world face not only a myriad of obstacles from authoritarian and autocratic regimes that seek to silence them, but also an information environment that is heavily controlled and concentrated in a handful of digital platforms. Competition policy plays a fundamental role in structuring media markets and business models that ensure the future of a strong and independent free press where journalists can make a living and work safely and without fear of reprisal, from government or corporations." #pressfreedom #digitaljournalism #informationintegrity I invite you to read the full message here:

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SEEKING YOUR NEXT BOOK CLUB OR READING GROUP TITLE? Is your group interested in discussing and analyzing historical themes and events as part of a broader exploration of literature and non-fiction? If so, this book To Tell the Truth: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent by Lewis M. Simons is likely your next read that fosters good discussion. https://lnkd.in/eNWhUbbn

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Four veteran senators are calling on Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and his AI working group to develop a framework for addressing extreme risks posed by artificial intelligence, “including biological, chemical, cyber, and nuclear threats,” while offering several options for oversight of AI frontier models. “Congress should consider a permanent framework to mitigate extreme risks. This framework should also serve as the basis for international coordination to mitigate extreme risks posed by AI. This letter is an attempt to start a dialogue about the need for such a framework, which would be in addition to, not at the exclusion of, proposals focused on other risks presented by developments in AI,” according to the April 16 letter from Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Angus King (I-ME). READ MORE: #artificialintelligence

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Dan Levine, a veteran investigative reporter for Reuters, earns the trust of sensitive sources by making sure they really understand how the editorial process works and know what they should expect to happen if they agree to participate. "Current and former government workers, corporate employees and victims of violence often take significant legal or physical risks to reveal harm or wrongdoing," Dan writes. "To earn sources’ trust, minimize their exposure and protect their safety, I always try to be as transparent as possible. This goes beyond conversations about on-the-record versus background. It involves a discussion about how the entire editorial process works. The back and forth not only benefits the source; it helps us maintain our own independence and credibility, and serves readers." You can learn more about how Dan approaches his relationships with sensitive sources in his guest column for the Ethics & Journalism Initiative (https://lnkd.in/dCMQ2NVB).

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New analysis from my colleagues at FiveThirtyEight. How do House members actually vote compared to their official caucus affiliations, and how are these new "clusters" defined? This was a fun one to visualize. https://lnkd.in/dZGibrhD

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🇺🇦 Post-war Ukraine will have to overcome the challenge of revitalizing its economy, boosting incomes, and competing globally. 💡 In his most recent insight, GMF's Bruce Stokes argues that "smart specialization" is the key to to tackle these hurdles. This report is part of a series of papers from GMF experts ahead of #URC2024. 🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/3TS5DkQ

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I'm publishing two extracts from a draft forthcoming book chapter on investigative journalism and AI. The first part, mapping the various branches of #AI and how they've been used in investigations, is now live...

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So I went to vote today in our primary election, and something happened. I tell you at the start that this is kind of an involved, in-the-weeds story, but I hope you’ll read it anyway. Because I think it illustrates how 99.9% of the time when something goes wrong with voting, it’s because good people with good intentions make a mistake. It’s NOT because of vote fraud. New Jersey had its primary today for Senate, House and other offices. No great controversies, but I wanted to do my civic duty, particularly because my wife was on the ballot: She’s running for a seat on our county’s Democratic committee (two candidates for two seats, so she was effectively unopposed).. So we walked into our polling place, and the poll workers there said they’d had some trouble with the voting machine, but we still checked in and started to fill out our ballots. It’s the kind of machine where you take a paper ballot, mark who you’re voting for and feed it into the machine. That’s when I saw it. “Hey, Christa,” I said to my wife, “why is your name not on here?” Because it wasn’t, and it should have been. Her name had been on the sample ballot we received in the mail ahead of the election - but the actual ballot I was about to cast had two different names listed as candidates for Democratic committee members, not her name. We pointed that out to the poll workers, and it quickly became clear what had happened: These were the wrong ballots. They were for a DIFFERENT polling place and district nearby, with different people running for that district’s slots on the county committee. A poll worker had picked up, and had been using, a stack of ballots for the wrong district. That was why the machine was on the fritz - it was being asked to accept ballots that didn’t fit the proper specifications for that polling place. My wife hopped on the phone to the Board of Elections and county committee members to alert them to the situation - some votes might have to be invalidated - while the poll workers tried to sort through what was going on and what they should do. Within maybe 15 minutes, the problem was resolved. The correct ballots were located, I cast my vote (including for my wife), the machine accepted my ballot. and I went home satisfied. I saw all of this happen with my own eyes - the discovery of the problem, the attempts to alert people to it, the resolution. No one tried to hide anything. No one got angry. Everyone did their best to figure out what was going on and how to remedy it. No fraud or other underhandedness. It was a relatively low-stakes primary election, true, so there was less reason for fraud to begin with - but if you dig below the surface of virtually any voting problem, what you’ll find is human error and Murphy’s law, not fraud. So if and when certain people start yammering about how the 2020 election was “stolen,” or how the 2024 election is going to be “rigged” - try to remember this, and use your common sense. Feel free to share.

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Time for part 2️⃣ of my book chapter on investigative journalism and AI: this looks at the challenges — from accuracy and bias to resources and explainability. There's some practical stuff here on competing ideas of fairness, overfittings vs underfitting and feature engineering. #ddj #AI

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FCC's net neutrality vote today could affect your internet speed. We explain https://lnkd.in/dNwCUSpv via USA TODAY

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