How a Black-led journalism project uses technology to address systemic inequalities in California

In the years following the 2020 murder of Black American George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, racism was officially declared a public health crisis or emergency. Dozens of communities across the United States made these declarations, according to the American Public Health Association, with California accounting for more of these declarations than any other state. 

In order to assess if Black health outcomes were actually being addressed, Mapping Black California, a journalism project based in Riverside CA, built a dashboard that integrates Web3 authentication technology to track, verify, and report on the progress of the commitments outlined in those declarations. So far, the dashboard has been used in a series of articles that examine the impact of racism on communities of color in several communities in California, and analyze whether the declarations are actually affecting real change.

“We want to move the conversation (around technology adoption in journalism) beyond simply improving productivity,” says Alex Reed, a project manager for Mapping Black California. “How can we as Black media and the Black community media be thinking more holistically in this Wild West phase of AI? This is the time to get in.”

Mapping Black California is a project of Black Voice News (BVN), a Black legacy newspaper covering Southern California’s Inland Empire. MBC’s mission, Reed says, is to collect and publish data and build narrative storytelling tools that help eliminate systemic inequalities and provide a more holistic view of overlooked and hard-to-reach populations in Southern California and other parts of the state. 

Launched in 2015, as a standalone project, MBC serves to enhance Black Voice News reporting by using geospatial technology to better understand, report and visualize data on Black Californians. The project often collaborates with its parent newspaper to design accessible and easily digestible narrative assets, such as Mapping Hate in California, which visualizes and explores hate crimes, prosecutions and convictions across the state. After developing focusing data visualizations and journalism tools that incorporate Web3 technologies, MBC is turning its attention to AI in journalism.

Reed works with MBC founder and Stanford JSK Fellow Paulette Brown-Hinds and project director Candice Mays, who says that while grants powered MBC’s early efforts, the project is now self-funding, and can help generate revenue for BVN as well. Besides developing its own journalism products, MBC conducts research and creates data journalism visualizations for parent organization Black Voice News. Mapping Black California also collaborates with consultants on a variety of projects ranging from civic media campaigns to philanthropic analysis and much more. 

“We are the only Community Newsroom with a dedicated data journalism unit in the country,” says Mays. “After the success of the MBC Census Lab, where we were the African American statewide strategic media lead in California for the 2020 Census, our consulting arm has rapidly grown into our most lucrative revenue stream making MBC fully self-sustainable.”

Mays explains that data is not always free from bias, which has real-world implications for marginalized communities.

“(MBC) would receive a request from our newsroom for data, but we could not access that data. Sometimes it was because the data didn't exist and there were other times because the data was often not disaggregated by race and therefore, we couldn't glean important information about how various issues were impacting our communities,” says Mays. “I quickly began to learn that data has a race problem – publicly available data often fails to capture the realities of Black communities either through the lack of detailed disaggregated data information or the outright experience of Black communities. That’s why the narrative and visual aspects of our work are so important, and why we’ve been so focused on tool-building as the core product of our output.”

Thanks to ongoing developments in AI and other technologies, MBC has also begun exploring the ways to both preserve and create multimodal stories and resources.

For example, MBC uses Web3 technologies such as blockchain for provenance, specifically for documenting and tracking various municipal and state government promises related to improving diversity, even if webpages are removed and vanish from the Internet – or for potentially tracking DEI-related rollbacks.

“We utilize blockchain to capture, store, and secure important declarations and documents in a way that ensures they are sealed in time, verified, and certified, making them immune to tampering or link rot,” says Reed.

Reed says the process starts with capturing internet data in the form of links, pages, videos, images and more, then using hashes to authenticate both the content and its metadata at the point of capture. Collaborators can include ESRI, the leading provider of geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping tools.

“This allows us to embed essential provenance details throughout the lifecycle of the media, creating a clear, verifiable and decentralized chain of custody,” says Reed. “We use immutable ledgers to register and verify the digital content, enabling users to confirm its provenance and authenticity, while allowing experts to audit it when necessary.”

Mays says that data is ultimately MBC’s most powerful tool.

“Without equitable access to data, there would be no maps, and thus, no Mapping Black California. Over the years, my perspective on data has evolved from a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet to an agile reservoir of information with limitless output potential,” says Mays. “Product expansion of these resources will expand Mapping Black California beyond state lines into the African diaspora's international community through the development of templated, easily replicable tools.” 

“Instead of looking at new and emerging technologies as threats, look at them as opportunities – tech is going to be here anyway,” says Reed. “Tech is not necessarily here to harm us, but to serve us… if we involve and insert ourselves in everything.”

Mays echoes Reed’s sentiment.

“Ultimately, aiding news outlets, philanthropic organizations, community-based organizations, government agencies, and most importantly, community members with vital knowledge integral to structural racism's dismantlement.”

Mapping Black California continues to explore Artificial Intelligence and Web3, and is interested in new funding opportunities, and collaborating with mission aligned thought partners on project development. Contact MBC here.