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About Us

 

Our Mission: Local journalism is broken. Crosstown wants to fix it – through data. 

 

From our nonprofit newsroom in Los Angeles, Crosstown LA, we produce original stories and newsletters. We collect our data from a wide variety of publicly available sources, including law enforcement and other city government departments, such as transportation and environmental agencies. We want to help our readers make informed choices about where to live, work or send their kids to school. And we want them to hold local government accountable. 

 

We deliver this news weekly to each of LA’s 110 different neighborhoods. Sign up for your Crosstown Neighborhood Newsletter here

 

Our team of journalists, software engineers and graphic designers do this work because we believe in Los Angeles and we believe this city can always do better. The data can tell us if we are making steps forward or slipping back. Read more about our data here.  

 

Across the nation

 

But our mission extends beyond Los Angeles. We want to make local new more robust and vital everywhere. 

 

Our work at Crosstown LA offers a place for us to test out new ways of making and delivering local news. Crosstown has built a suite of services to help local newsrooms do their job better. Our system makes it possible to report news more efficiently, distribute news more equitably and monetize news more effectively. 

 

We do this by collecting massive amounts of publicly available data on topics that matter to people – crime, traffic, housing and more. We built a system that automatically sorts the data by neighborhoods, allowing reporters to easily access it and spot trends, outliers and significant developments. Within seconds, reporters can query the data through Crosstown’s dashboard to report stories that otherwise might take weeks. 

 

Our newsletter platform produces local news at scale by automatically creating geographically specific versions of stories. We partner with media organizations around the U.S., including WRAL TV in Raleigh, N.C., WBEZ in Chicago and NOLA.com in New Orleans. Think your newsroom may want to partner with us to access neighborhood-level data for your audience members? Get in touch! 

 

Get in touch

 

We want to hear directly from you, so tell us what numbers you want to know about your community. You can reach us at Twitter, Facebook and email at askus@xtown.la. Or you can come to us right here, at xtown.la.

 

We are based out of the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, in partnership with the Integrated Media Systems Center at the Viterbi School of Engineering. Our team also includes faculty and researchers from the Spatial Sciences Institute.

 

Read more about our current team here

 

Our work is made possible by generous support from the Annenberg Foundation. We also received a Community Network Grant from the Lenfest Institute, as well as grants from the Meta Journalism Project. We were also a recipient of the Google News Initiative North America Innovation Challenge.

Hyperlocal News

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Neighborhood Tracker

Crime Tracker