The Public Ledger

The Public Ledger is both a tool and a strategy I’ve designed to support small newsrooms and their ability to produce original and compelling reporting on their local governments.

It is a digital library — a “morgue 2.0” — that stores curated public data critical to good local government beat work: Campaign contributions & spending, election results, local board and committee assignments, and city and county government contracts and budgets.

It then organizes it more usefully — following the money and the connections to map the local power structure & store contextual knowledge that reporters can access to quickly and deeply background the people they encounter on their beats.

The Public Ledger also organizes that same information into a catalog of reporting tools designed to conduct the first interview of the data. These reporting guides — shared wisdom, applied to relevant data — help reporters ask deeper follow-up questions on deadline and see enterprise and investigative story leads they would be unlikely to surface on their own.

This work is currently in development across two pilot projects in Pennsylvania: One in Allegheny County and the other in Lancaster County.