[This story was written by Everlaw, who is providing support to ONA20 Everywhere.]
Journalists have witnessed the evolution of investigative reporting in an era of skyrocketing data volumes, shrinking newsrooms and smaller budgets. With the expectation for journalists to do more with fewer resources, many are turning to digital tools to bolster their reporting armory for efficiency gains and faster insights. Everlaw is proud to offer our technology to serve journalists’ needs through our Everlaw for Good program. With our platform at your fingertips, we aim to help you sift through troves of data to get to the issues at hand.
Everlaw, at its core, is a truth-finding machine; our mission is to promote justice by illuminating the truth. Everlaw for Good supports journalists, nonprofit organizations, pro bono lawyers and educators in their efforts by offering our platform at a significantly discounted rate (and in some cases, free!).
The journalists we work with leverage investigative tools within the platform to dig through documents, quickly surface the relevant or key pieces of information and weave them into stories. With our technology, journalists are able to uncover facts and disseminate the truth in a sea of misinformation.
“We used Everlaw to get through a lot of this complicated, technical material. We were able to gather all of these documents from all these different agencies, put them in one place and start searching them, and actually find the needle in the haystack.” — Jason Fagone, Narrative Writer, San Francisco Chronicle
Successful investigative journalism depends on the ability to craft findings into a cohesive, compelling narrative and effectively collaborate across distributed teams. Everlaw enables journalists to work with their teams in real-time — regardless of where they are located— to investigate and build their stories. With our tools, journalists can:
- Eliminate inefficient back-and-forth communication between team members
- Ingest documents provided through FOIA requests
- Create, share and collaboratively build stories in one unified place
- Share their findings afterwards to decide on next steps, at scale
In today’s increasingly digital environment, information comes in all shapes, sizes and formats. The Everlaw platform is built for petabytes of data and handles modern file formats with ease, allowing journalists to review a myriad of file types and unearth hidden information with automatic audio/video transcriptions and foreign language translation.
Everlaw has aided a number of journalists under the Everlaw for Good program, including the investigative journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle in their investigation of radioactive contamination in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hear the team from the Chronicle share their experience and insights in the video below: