Welcome to Knight Talks, the Uni of Florida College of Journalism and Communications produced by students for student I'm Sam Olinick, a graduate stud studying mass communications.

And our guest today is Ken Schwe a CJC graduate who worked for The Independent Florida Alligato the Los Angeles Times, The New Y and now he's editor of the news apps team at ProPublica.

Hey, Ken, thank you so much for today.

Hi, Sam.

Thanks for having me.

O So I want to get started by going back in time a little b when you graduated from the University of Florida with your bachelor's degree in j Did you always want to go into t No, I thought I was going to do computer science.

And then I got to the University of Florida and I got, you know, two printouts.

One, the computer science curric and one, the journalism curricul And the journalism curriculum looked like a lot mor And so I decided to study at the journalism school.

About halfway into studying here, of course McAdams came in to a c and said, you know, hey, print newspapers aren't doing so well If you have computer programing you'll be a very valuable sort o in the market.

And so I started dusting off my programing skills, and working on the sort of more side of things.

How did you work on the computer programing skills?

Was it, like, classes that you took?

Or on your own?

I took some time and I built a crime map of Gaine Crime maps were all the rage at the time in the data journali So I built a little thing that would scrape the Gainesvill Police Department website every of minutes and then build a crim of Gainesville.

This was like all on your own?

Y I was bored.

That's cool.

How did the time at the College of Journalism and Communications and the Independent for the Alli prepare you for your career?

Yeah, you know, I got a lot of great sort of bas reporting knowledge from the College of Journalism.

They didn't have a lot of advanc sort of data, you know, or like web programing classes, but they had a few and I took al And, you know, the last class, my capstone course was one where I basically just got to si in, you know, one of the rooms here for hours on end and build And that was super, super helpfu to kind of just get some real wo time to like just build stuff.

And at the Alligator, you know, you're running a daily with everybody else and you're sort of trying to fig the online presentation.

And so it was a really good practical experience into kind of how the news works.

So you kind of got the best of b doing your computer programing and journalism stuff?

Exactly.

Well, that's awe When you went to work for the Lo Times as a data graphics reporter, what kind of stories did you cov Yeah, I did a number of things.

I worked on the homicide report for a lot of the time that I was which was a project that was initially started, this kind of a blog that would t any murder within L.A. County.

There was no real good way of do And a reporter there had started working on thi And my team ended up taking it o and turning it into kind of an interactive data that I then worked on, off and o for the whole time that I worked And then I built a little bot at Times called QuakeBot that would automatically report there was an earthquake in the a which is really cool.

Did you get to pick these topics on your own?

Did you have freedom with that?

It was a mix.

You know, I started as an intern and you d get to pick a lot of things as a But, you know, as I started goin I started finding my spots and some things that I was inter Was crime one of those things?

Yeah, I think, you know, crime is interesting from a data persp for a number of reasons.

One is, like, there's a lot of data about crim And so you can help people sort of visualize like trends an like that.

On the flip side, the data is sometimes not good and the data of relying on the police to actu track and report crime correctly And so it's sort of a compromise set in and of itself.

And it's also only, of course, like where police have gone and actually like written stuff and not actually maybe where cri So I've always been sort of interested in probing th So how is data an important tool for journalists and storytellers Yeah, that's a good question.

You know, a lot of times when you're out in the field, you hear anecdotes about things that are happening.

And one thing that data can do a analysis can do is kind of tell whether that thing is actually h as much as people think it is or which is not to say it's not a p if it's not happening as much as people think it is.

Crime, I think, is actually one of those interesting example You know, I live in New York Cit There has been like, you know, the mayor of New York has said there's like a lot of c a huge increase in crime.

And while there has been like a pretty decent proportional incre in crime from the past few years it's still far below, you know, what it was even ten y And so when you kind of look at the like measure of crime is much lower than people sort of experience of it.

And once you know that, you can kind of investigate why people may be feeling that w The other thing about data that is really interesting, you know, besides sort of confir you know, disputing what people the ground is you can do data an and then take that analysis and where things are happening.

So we worked on a project at Pro where we analyzed data about tox that industrial plants are emitting all over the countr And we didn't just analyze that and put out those findings.

We then sent reporters to all of these hotspots to ask and a lot of the people who went down there, A, they hadn't been talked to by a reporter or anybody from the EPA or anybo you know, like that before.

And they were like, This makes so much sense.

My aunt, my mother, my cousin, we all have the same kind of can And we've all been wondering wha And you're telling me that there's this chemical in th that causes cancer in this area and like that upsets me.

That really, really sort of goes with what we sort of experiencing on the grou And you can sort of take this data and pinpoint plac and tell these stories.

So it kind of helps to connect t a little bit to what people are and almost kind of not fact chec maybe like proofread some of it It's ground proofing, right?

Like you could, you know, here's a really good example, actually.

So that same dataset basically s that Boeing was poisoning a good part of Por Right.

Which would have been lik And it was very surprising to lots of people.

When we went out there, we could anything that seemed to indicate You know, people around there di that that was necessarily happen We weren't sort of running into a lot of people who said they were having troubl you know, with cancer, I mean, m anybody does.

And when we really probed and started asking Boeing, at first they wouldn't talk to u And we said, hey, we're going to that you're causing huge cancer, you know, problems within Portla They were like, wait, wait, let me let us check the da that we've been to the federal g And it turned out that they had reporting incorrect data to the federal government, and t been checking it that whole time So once they went back and they revised the data, that in which they have to like submi to the federal government under So pretty sure they weren't, hopefully weren't lying this tim That cancer cluster or that sort of cluster of toxic air went away out of our data.

And that was a way that we could check our data ana using sort of on the ground repo After you moved to the New York after the Los Angeles Times as an interactive news developer Tell us about that experience.

Yeah, it was really exciting to work for The New York Times.

I was working at sort of a weird department.

The interactive news department is sort of a weird de that straddled the business side and the editorial side of the co And because of that, you know, I had less opportunity to work on straight news than I but I ended up working on a weir little bot called the Fourth Dow which would sort of like talk about probabilities in football games, which is not but was sort of an interesting thing to work on.

I ended up writing this thing that allowed people to track people as they ran the New York City Ma in sort of a fun way.

So like as you were looking at t it would say like, hey, if you're at mile marker 12 like clap for this person in thi because like they're passing you and some data analysis like and stories about that.

The reason I wanted to move to ProPublica was because it was a editorially focused job at that Yeah.

When you first started with ProP you were a news app developer for ProPublica's Election Land.

What is this project and what was your involvement?

Yeah, so Election Land was a pro that we worked on in 2016 where ProPublica sort of created giant project that involved a lo of other newsrooms all over the And we got access to a database from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under which operate a hotline called 866-OUR-VOTE.

And so what happens is if you're a voting troubles or something l or you have questions about voti you can call this hotline.

And a couple of other hotlines in different languages as well.

And the lawyers who staff that h on a volunteer basis, they enter the details of your c into a database.

And so what we were doing was we were pulling information out of that database and kind of using the exhaust fumes of like their legal proces to kind of look to see whether there were v problems happening in 2016.

And voting has only become a more contentious issue in this since then.

But at the time, you had, you kn then candidate Donald Trump sayi you know, he wanted people to go down to t and rough people up and things l And one of the reasons we starte the project was we wanted to see whether that was happening, whether we could identify that happening in the world, and then tell local reporters who had signed up with us that like, hey, you should go to this polling pl because there's this problem hap right there.

And while we did tell people when there were sort of problems happening at polling places, it was never really that, right?

It wasn't sort of like big fight or things like that.

It was more like a workaday election issue.

So like an entire set of systems goes down or what frequently happens is like at sc gym doesn't open because somebody forgot to come and like unlock it that day and so nobody can come vote.

And it really exposed me to like just how bizarre the federal election system is in this count And that really a lot of the pro when it comes to voting are not like people down at the you know, causing problems, but like really structural issue just in the way we vote.

How did you uncover stories like your piece on Cloudflare?

Yeah.

So at ProPublica, I worked on another project that was sort of spiritually similar to election It was called Documenting Hate, and it was looking at the incide of like hate and bias incidents in the countr So we had people telling us, you whether they experienced a hate crime, essentially, and w necessarily turning that in the More like tips for like other reporters to foll And that's why it was sort of similar to electi But as I was doing that, this sounds weird to say and I can only just say it.

I was reading a lot of Nazi webs at the time, which was like part and it was super depressing and I was sort of monitoring this sort of like extreme right wing activity.

I would not recommend doing that but as I started looking at them I realized they were all hosted sort of protected by this company called Cloudflar And that is something, you know, ProPublica uses Cloudflare, righ Like it's a pretty like big company that like protects w from being attacked.

But also part of what it does is it secures people from knowing who your ultimate h So, like, where your website is actually h And it also makes it so it's imp to sort of complain to your hosts that like you're d something horrible or illegal.

And so what Cloudflare was doing what I realized at the time, and sort of like looking up and researching a little bit, was that they had a policy essen that if you complained about a w through them, they would just send the complai to the website owner and that website owner in this c like, Nazis, would then like post your private info The company would send your phon and your email address to the Na and the Nazis would take that and they would post it on the we and say, hey, go harass this per And so I ended up calling some of those numbers because I found them on the webs talking to people who had been h And then we wrote a story sort o about how Cloudflare had this po of basically tipping off Nazis, that you were upset at th and that was, you know, people were experienci really real bad harassment.

And Cloudflare ended up changing their form so that they no longer did that at the time.

So that was your goal to kind of to uncover those stories and kin move toward a policy change in some kind of way?

I don't know if I was writing it necessarily thinking that I wanted a policy I was just like so outraged that it was happening.

And I figured other people would also be outra The fact that they decided to change the policy, I think wa smart and reasonable on their pa I don't know if ultimately I had that idea going into it, t it makes sense because I think that policy was indefensible.

Are there any specific steps that you take or boxes you check while investigating fo And when do you know that it's ready to publish?

That is a really good question.

I think, you know, you want to make sure that you'v at a story from all sides.

I don't mean it's like you should write both sides in t that, like, you know, every opinion is like equally as valid on a subject, but you should really probe basically the, like, basic assumptions that you've made about this.

So if somebody tells you, you know, as you're reporting, you should talk to people who, you know, will tell you that you Right?

And while ultimately you may disagree with them, their critique will make your story stronger as long as you accept it in good you know?

And so there have been many time that we have gone to people who we knew would be like, you're doing this data analysis We don't think that this is the right thing to do.

And you have them write out, you and tell you in detail what their problem is with it.

And you go and you report all of those prob and you say like, okay, you know, like this ends up being like a differing point of more than it is we are wrong on And sometimes you look at it and you're like, You That person was right about this Like, as we've sort of reported what they've told us, like they were right about somet And so I think you should defini take your critics seriously as long as your critics are bein Not all critics are serious.

And like that to me is like a really key thing, especially when you're doing inv reporting.

Also, you know, fact check.

You've got to go through every p every fact in your story.

I highlight it, and then I check when I have gone back to my sour and checked it.

And I have never once in my life not found something that I have mis-transcribed, like wrote the number down because I did it fro And so I would like super encour anybody to do that.

In 2018, your story ‘Dead-named focus on how cops in Jacksonville investigate the murders of transgender women Why are these and other LGBTQ st important to share?

That's a good question, especially right now.

I think, you know, in 2018, you I am a gay man, my reporting partner in this was trans and we were sort of interested i and just like looking up, you know, sort of looking into trans issue that, you know, may be of intere to investigate.

You know, we started thinking, do we want to track trans murder And like that is something that people ha And also, like there are some, you know, you don't only want to dead trans people.

That seems like a bad thing to sort of only do.

But as we were sort of like looking at that idea and sort of putting that aside, we saw a number of murders of tr women in Jacksonville and we pulled those police repor We pulled a lot of police report from all over the country.

And what we noticed was a really consistent pattern in the way police described trans women which was like, you can only really describe it as like horribly transphobic.

It was like we came across a man in a dress or like describe it in like real like ways that seemed bad, right It just seemed like you could hear the transphobia on the page in the police report And we decided to focus on Jacks because there have been a number of trans murders.

And some activists there have been talking to the m and there were sort of ongoing d I think another death had happen sort of around the same time tha reporting on this.

And so like that was an instance where like we had put aside an i but while we were like intereste in this idea, we had pulled a bunch of documen like public records and sort of came across what the story ultimately was, w which was that once we had gone and talked to people, they were saying like, how can you investigate this mur if you won't even say the name of the person, you as they lived in their life?

Right?

It would be like if you called m and said, like, does anybody know what happened to Jo And nobody would know who Joe wa Because my name is Ken.

And these people were not going by the names that the police wer you know, investigating them as.

And like when we talked to people down th it seemed really clear that not only was it hurting the comm and sort of the community relati with the police department, but ultimately it seemed like it was hurting the investigation Yeah, and that's really importan because I mean, I personally have never thought about that.

So I think that's really great t you would uncover something like And is that where the term dead naming kind of comes from, is to not properly identify someone as they identified thems Yes.

I don't think it was anythi with like being murdered so much as it was, like, if you use somebody previous nam That is called dead naming, yeah So now you're the editor of the app team.

What is your day to day work loo Yeah, I manage a team of six peo journalists who also do software development And I mean, my day to day is like a lot of meetings, which is ultimately not that int But the best parts of my day are developing story and project ideas with the people that I work with And I work with a lot of really journalists who are really eager to take dat or build interactive pieces that tell interesting stories or investigate problems in the world, or help hold powerful people to It's really nice.

It's fun.

And you're actually here because received the University of Flori Award for Investigative Data Jou at the 2022 Online News Associat for your Sacrifice Zones: Mappin Causing Industrial Air Pollution You mentioned that before, but what exactly did this story Yeah, so it all had its roots in a 201 that we did with a paper in Loui through our local reporting netw And in looking at this area call Alley in Louisiana, where there are all these petro chemical plants, that spew really hazardous chemicals and there's like lots of identifiable cancer clus One or two of the journalists on my team, Al Shaw and Leila Yu they pulled this data from the E called Resi, the risk screening for environmental indi And what it does is it divides the US into 810 meter by 810 meters squares and it says for each square what the concentration of toxic chemicals is in that square from industria what those chemicals are and whe they come from, which is super c The thing that we had realized and the thing we used in Louisia was that nobody had ever really mapped it When you map it, what you see are these like blooms of toxic a Like, it's actually really cool.

And the data is actually modeled of like wind patterns and emissi that the companies submit to the government.

And so after the 2019 project, you know, the folks in my team a we should do this for the whole It would be really complicated, but we could do it.

And so the problem with 2020 was the 2020 was 2020, and there were all sorts of othe pressing issues like COVID to at Not not to mention, you know, li police violence and like all sorts of other othe but in 2021, we came back to that project and used essenti Google supercomputing power called Google BigQuery to chew through billions of rows and not only analyze this data for the country, but map it at a where anybody could look up their neighborhood essentially and see whether they being exposed to toxic chemicals from industrial plants near them And then we took that data and a talking about, sort of identifie areas for people to go down to and report out that information.

We also did something really coo which is we have a thing called the engagement team at Pr and they think of really interes to get communities engaged with our journalism.

And they sent fliers to all of t heavily exposed areas, like post And then we hired people to put fliers up in places like librari like learn more about the possib risks from industrial plants nea And that got like a really good amount of community engagement out of i So much so that like a mayor and I think Verona, Missouri, Mississippi, a mayor in one of the cities we reported on got together, you know, the town and EPA administrators and sort like yelled at them until they g monitors installed in their comm very recently.

And so that sort of engagement with the community can really le interesting impacts.

Yeah, well, I can see why you have won an award on it now and I think that's really import to make something so visual that really everyone can underst and then take it a step further by trying to get people interacting with it just seems l a cool way to go about it.

So yeah, where did the idea come Was it something that you've heard abou And you were like, We really need to get on this?

Yeah, well, you know, I think it was the Times-Picayun Louisiana had this idea in 2019 sort of for this Cancer Alley, l can we sort of like use data to report out the sort of toxic air and cancer problems in this area in Louisiana?

And once we had sort of found th and realized we could map it, then we realized like, let's blo and do it for the whole country.

Yeah.

So you put data out in digestibl for the world to see.

How do you gauge audience recept and impact of your work?

Yeah, impact is sort of, like, a squishy thing to measure Like you could say, you know, li that community got air monitors, And like that was pretty direct from our reporting.

In Cancer Alley in the 2019 stor we reported on a petrochemical p a multibillion dollar petrochemi that was going to be moving into And again, this was like one of the most cancer, like, industrial toxic areas in the co and another multibillion dollar petrochemical plant was going to open there.

And it's hard to say whether thi entirely based off of our reporting or not.

But the residents there sued and you know, definitely cited our r and our investigations on it.

And that plant is no longer open And so, like, you know, can we s that was like impact from our pr Like probably, but who knows ultimately what the decisions and factors were that went into You know, another thing is just readership, like measuring how m click on something or read a pag or share it on social media.

Whether members of Congress write letters, you know, about something or write a law that they attempt to based of something that we write So impact can come in all sorts of differe But it seems like you do it real because you're interested in it?

It's something that you enjoy?

Yeah.

I mean, it's something we enjoy and it's like an injustice that you sort of see in the worl And like a nice thing about working at a place like ProPublica, sort of a place where we can do investigative an you know, public interest report is that we get to say, Hey, we found this injustice in the w Like, let's spend some time writing ab And our bosses are like, Great, that's our job.

That's why people give us money to do t And it makes me think, you know, not all heroes wear capes.

You know, some of them work at P Listen, can you cut that and Il send it to the bosses.

Anyway so for our last question, what would you want aspiring investigative journalists to kno Oh, boy.

You know, I think that there's a place for you know, like there's a real hu for this kind of reporting in the world.

We get letters and feedback and stuff from people when we pu you know, investigative reportin where they say, you know, like I earlier, like I've always though and now you're putting it into w and this has always been a probl for my community.

And it's so wonderful to see som taking this seriously and to show like what this probl And it's like really rewarding w You know, it's not the only work they can do.

Like I said, going to city council meetings and stuff like and reporting on stuff in your c is super impactful work as well.

And like, I don't want to give the impress that investigative reporting is awesome reporting that you can d but it's really nice to be able to get the time and the space to work on project like that.

And, you know, if it's something you're interested in, I think what I always tell people, you k I've taught investigative reporting classes and I tell people you should be about the world as a journalist especially as an investigative j And you should see things that you're interested in in the today, that you're just walking and saying like, Hey, I wonder what the deal is with t and you should just start lookin and see what you find.

File some public records, talk to some people and you'll really never know what shakes out.

I agree.

I feel like it's similar in the research area, at least i grad school, because you're kind to be this social scientist and and ask questions and kind of un the things going on out there.

So I think that's really great.

Well, thank you so much for your and really thank you for coming and talking to us and telling us about all the great work that yo Thank you.

I appreciate it.

And thank you, viewers for joini Until next time, goodnight.