Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Sarah Conway: Going Beyond the Data

Independent journalist Sarah Conway (former senior reporter and special projects manager at City Bureau) and Invisible Institute Data Director Trina Reynolds-Tyler won the 2024 Local Reporting Prize for Missing in Chicago, a pathbreaking investigative series on missing Black girls and women in the city that "revealed how systemic racism and police department neglect contributed to the crisis," according to the Pulitzer Board's citation. 

Like many recent Pulitzer-winning and -nominated journalism projects, Missing in Chicago coalesced as a partnership between both news organizations, leveraging their respective strengths in local journalism. "I've been really interested in the intersection between gender-based violence and policing," said Reynolds-Tyler, who holds a master's degree in public policy from the University of Chicago. "And I went to graduate school because I wanted to learn how to use machine learning and various data science tools to more easily access information. I led a project at the Invisible Institute called Beneath the Surface, which essentially built a classifier algorithm of sorts to more easily identify different types, contexts where police misconduct intersected with gender-based violence. Through that project, we identified 54 complaints between the year 2011 and 2015 that were related to how Chicago police were treating people or that were related to the ways that Chicago police were handling and engaging with [the] community around missing persons cases. Once I got those 54 complaints, I reached out to Sarah. We had coffee at Build Coffee, and I think we sat at the ledge by the window, and I basically proposed to Sarah."

Conway added: "Yeah, she did propose, and I was immediately – we didn't know what the investigation was going to be at that time, but Trina was like, we're going to look at police through the lens of gender-based violence, and specifically about missing persons. And what really intrigued me was that City Bureau, our whole ethos is we involve community members in media. We have a documenters program where we train people to document public meetings around the country. I work in our edit department with fellows, so it’s like I'm always doing collaborative media. And I was like, okay, let's go. Because my mom's sister went missing when I was six."

They’re joined by 2022 Criticism winner Salamishah Tillet (who co-founded the nonprofit organization A Long Walk Home, which "empowers girls and young women to use their voices and artistic visions to organize themselves, their communities, and our country to be free of gender-based and racial violence") to further discuss their data- and community-driven reporting, their analysis of one million police records and the divide between journalism and activism.

A transcript to this episode is available here.

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