Dear reader,
My name is Erin Petenko and I am the data reporter here at VTDigger. There is less than one week left in our Fall Member Drive and our goal has special significance this year.
Recently the Center for Community News at UVM released a study showing that Vermont has lost 75% of its journalism jobs in the past quarter-century. VTDigger is working to fill that gap, and we need your help to raise $75,000 to reinvest in local news for Vermont.
As a data reporter, my work looks a little different from that of my colleagues. Instead of human sources, I spend my days combing through spreadsheets, looking for trends and stories buried in the data. Sometimes this means using programming to crack open millions of rows of data that can’t be opened in Excel. Sometimes it’s painstakingly cleaning “dirty” data line by line before I can even begin my analysis.
The most work I’ve ever done for a VTDigger project was for the Full Disclosure* series, for which we turned individual PDF forms into an interactive, searchable database detailing the financial disclosures of Vermont lawmakers. There is no easy way to turn the obscure, handwritten records into data; two interns worked alongside me to manually enter it into a spreadsheet.
It took months to finish data entry, cleaning and building the database from scratch. But I think the hardest work is the work most worth doing, because if we as journalists can’t find this information, how in the world is the public going to find it?
I can’t do this work alone. VTDigger relies on support from readers like you to make this kind of in-depth, investigative journalism possible. Will you help me keep uncovering the stories hidden in the data?
If you are already a recurring monthly supporter of VTDigger and you’d like to make a special gift during the Fall Member Drive, it will be matched dollar for dollar up to $50,000 by a generous Vermont donor.
Your contribution ensures that VTDigger can keep reporting the full story—one that combines both the data and the human lives behind it.
Thank you for joining our effort to rebuild local, people-powered journalism for Vermont.
Sincerely,
Erin Petenko
Data Reporter, VTDigger
* Explore the Full Disclosure project and learn how it led to increased transparency around Vermont lawmakers’ personal finances and potential conflicts of interest.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Fall Member Drive: Help us keep uncovering the hidden stories.