Google and ProPublica help journalists cover local elections
The Election Databot is a portal with all the relevant data for each race through the Midterms.
ProPublica and Google's News Lab are teaming up to help journalists, especially at the local level, report on all things related to elections. The Election Databot, which launched during the 2016 general election, will now offer up data on every race from the Alabama senate race through to the 2018 midterms. The portal for each event will broadcast a firehose of relevant news stories, search trends for the candidates and even broadcast FEC spending data.
The idea is that by providing local journalists with key, verified data at their fingertips, they will be able to better cover each election. For instance, the portal will have access to deleted tweets -- archived by Politwoops -- and material from each candidate's social media profile more widely. In an era where trust in the media is falling, and the media is becoming more partisan with each passing day, such solid data may be a small, but useful, step in restoring everyone's faith in the system.
