The Trace is excited to announce the launch of its Gun Violence Data Hub, an initiative created to provide data for newsrooms around the country.
The Data Hub went live with its site in early November. Made up of three parts, the site offers a help desk, reference material and resources, and an upcoming data library. The live help desk is staffed by three journalists who will field questions, clean and analyze data, and offer information to bolster coverage across the nation.
The Hub’s resources include reference material including tip sheets, a glossary, and information on best practices for reporting on gun violence. In Spring 2025, the Hub will unveil its data library, which will make datasets about gun violence easily accessible alongside the right context, instructions, and summary statistics.
The idea for the Data Hub was born of the need to improve how the news media covers gun violence. “Years of reporting on America’s gun violence crisis pointed our staff to a key problem: the lack of solid, accessible data on our issue,” said Tali Woodward, editor in chief of The Trace.
Gun homicide stories can often be described with the grim journalism adage, “if it bleeds, it leads.” This type of coverage can leave audiences afraid and fearful; they give a sense that crime is up and happening right outside their front door, even when it’s very possible a shooting was an anomaly. “We’ve designed the data hub to be a resource for every journalist in America who wants to do reporting that is more empirical and grounded,” Woodward said. “Its necessity feels even more apparent now, as the Trump administration is likely to roll back nascent efforts to research and track gun violence.”
The Data Hub aims to provide information that can help contextualize gun violence. One way we’re doing this is by finding out what data is available in a specific place and then bolstering it through reporting and analysis. In early November, our first collaboration was published by Verite News, a nonprofit digital newsroom based in New Orleans. We helped Verite analyze police department data that showed a striking racial disparity in whom officers use force against. We went through court documents and reports and summarized the information that became the spine of that story.
Another type of story the Data Hub will surface comes from national data sets that can be localized. In June, The Trace published a story about shootings that take place near schools, information we pulled from the Gun Violence Archive. The reality is that a mass shooting is statistically very unlikely to happen in a particular school in America, but when we mapped where shootings happened relative to school buildings, we found that many were uncomfortably close, within a 500-yard radius. In Philadelphia, we found, several schools experienced these events more often than others. After our story published, the Police Department said it would look into this pattern of violence.
In April, when the Data Hub opens the data library, it will make information that is often hard to parse accessible to newsrooms that don’t have dedicated reporters. To start, the Hub will clean and localize data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Both agencies post information that is rich but cumbersome to navigate. But we’re not just working with CDC and ATF data; we’re acquiring and analyzing data sets from many other sources.
The success of the Data Hub is dependent on journalists using it, and once it’s fully up and running, the editor of the Data Hub, George LeVines, will pay close attention to metrics that will measure success. How will he do this? By focusing on impact. “By how many newsrooms are able to leverage our information for transformative journalism,” he said. “And by how many lives that journalism touches.”
Please be in touch with our help desk if you are a journalist who is interested in working with us, or just want to say hello.
Initial funding for the Gun Violence Data Hub was provided by Arnold Ventures, the Kendeda Fund, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. For information about how to support this initiative, email [email protected].
