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Michael Reilly Joining The Markup as Managing Editor
We’re excited to announce that Michael Reilly, a science and technology journalist for nearly two decades, will be joining The Markup as its managing editor. In this role Reilly will help refine and execute our journalistic vision, lead and manage the newsroom and its processes, and help shape our ambitious and impact-driven journalism.
Who’s Afraid of Disparate Impact?
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, I’m Aaron Sankin, and I’m a reporter here at The Markup. Over the past year, I’ve focused...
It Takes a Small Miracle to Learn Basic Facts About Government Algorithms
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, folks, my name is Todd Feathers, and I’m an enterprise reporter here at The Markup. Last...
Beyond “Grey’s Anatomy”: What We Learned About UNOS
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. It’s Sisi again. The first time I heard of UNOS, it was on the steamy medical drama “Grey’s...
Civilian Harm in Ukraine, Municipal Incorporations, and Political Podcasts
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated March 22, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Civilian harm in Ukraine. Researchers at Bellingcat and contributors to its Global Authentication Project have assembled a map and dataset of more than 1,000 incidents “that have resulted in potential civilian impact or harm since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.” They include incidents “where rockets or missiles struck civilian areas, where attacks have resulted in the destruction of civilian infrastructure,” and/or where visual evidence depicts civilian injuries or “immobile civilian bodies.” The information, collected from public sources and vetted by Bellingcat, includes each incident’s date, location, description, sources, type of area affected, and type of weapon system (if known). [h/t Philip Bump]
HHS Plans Breakup of Organ Transplant Monopoly
The federal government announced a plan Wednesday that would wrest control of the country’s transplant system from its longtime nonprofit contractor, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that contracts...
How a Group of Health Executives Transformed the Liver Transplant System
Marilyn Walto’s family didn’t expect her to make it through the year. A chronic disease was attacking her bile ducts and destroying her liver. Without a transplant, she would die. In an administrative room in a Boston hospital, her surgeon and transplant coordinator explained that donated livers were in short supply, especially in Massachusetts, where waiting lists were particularly long.
How We Investigated UNOS’s Liver Allocation Policy
In February 2020, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), which is the United States’ sole national network for organizing organ transplants, made a change in its policy on how livers are allocated to patients in need of transplants. The policy change made it so that, in effect, a...
Poorer States Suffer Under New Organ Donation Rules, As Livers Go to Waste
New rules requiring donated livers to be offered for transplant hundreds of miles away have benefited patients in New York, California, and more than a dozen other states at the expense of patients in mostly poorer states with higher death rates from liver disease, a data analysis by The Markup and The Washington Post has found.
Special Database 18
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hello, readers!. My name is Jon Keegan, and I’m an investigative data reporter here at The Markup. Recently...
The Markup Wins Sigma Award for Series on Internet Disparities
The Markup’s investigation, “Still Loading,” has won a 2023 Sigma Award, which recognizes stellar data journalism from around the world. This series is the culmination of an eight-month effort that began when Markup reporters Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin set out to see what speeds and prices internet service providers were offering to households across the country. In the process, their work transformed into something even more urgent: an exposé revealing how a quartet of telecom giants had neglected to upgrade their networks with high-speed infrastructure in socioeconomically disadvantaged and less-White neighborhoods.
From Bank Financials to the Market for X-Men
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated March 15, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Bank financials, 1976–present. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s National Information Center “provides comprehensive financial and structure information on banks and other institutions for which the Federal Reserve has a supervisory, regulatory, or research interest.” Its datasets include quarterly financial statements for bank holding companies, going back to 2016, plus detailed attributes of all active banks, 150,000-plus banks closed since the mid-1930s (including Silicon Valley Bank), and 160,000-plus bank branches. The agency also provides bank financials in the form of “call reports” going back to 2001. Earlier call reports, going back to 1976, are available from the Chicago Fed. Related: The FDIC’s list of failed banks since October 2000. [h/t Sergio Correia]
A Racially Biased Scoring System Helps Pick Who Receives Housing in L.A.
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, everyone,. A few years ago, Markup reporter Colin Lecher was reading Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks and...
The Markup Wins Four SABEW Awards for Business Journalism
Multiple investigations from The Markup have been recognized in a range of categories by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s 2022 Best in Business Awards. Dara Kerr’s stories documenting attacks on gig workers and ride-hail drivers won in the Features and Travel/Transportation categories. In addition to a...
Aspire to Work for The Markup? Here’s Our Advice for Candidates
We’re hiring editors at The Markup (the deadline is Monday, March 13!), so when Mandy Hofmockel, who runs the newsletter “Journalism Jobs and a Photo of my Dog” invited me to do a short Q&A for her readers, I gladly said yes. She asked me about advice I want to share with candidates and what it’s like to work here, and the more I answered, the more I wanted all our candidates to have access to those answers.
From Government Contracting to TV Shows Cut Short
Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated March 8, 2023, has been republished with permission of the author. Government contracting data, cataloged. The nonprofit Open Contracting Partnership has launched a registry of government procurement datasets that use its Open Contracting Data Standard (featured in DIP 2020.02.26). The registry contains 100-plus entries so far, across 50-plus countries—from Argentina’s national roads authority and the city of Buenos Aires to Zambia’s Public Procurement Authority. You can filter the listings by dataset recency, update frequency, and the data types included (parties, awards, documents, amendments, et cetera). [h/t Georg Neumann]
Help Make Everyone Cool It with the Data Collection (Starting with Kroger)
Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. Browse the archive here. Hi, everyone,. I’m Ryan Tate, an editor here at The Markup. It’s Saturday morning, and I’d like to...
Journalists, You Should Be Looking for Undocumented APIs. Here’s How to Start
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm, write about the processes we develop, and share our work. We’re constantly working on improving digital security, respecting reader privacy, creating ethical and responsible user experiences, and making sure our site and tools are accessible.
Introducing the United States Place Sampler (USPS)
In October 2022, The Markup published an investigation into internet disparities in 38 major cities across the United States. Afterward, many readers, including fellow journalists, reached out to ask how they could replicate the investigation for other cities. We wanted to help make that possible, but we knew that the early challenge we had with sourcing, cleaning, and wrangling street addresses would pose an issue. So, we got to work on finding a way to help people get easy access to randomized address data—or as we like to say, receipts from streets.
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