Profile avatar
ryanpitts.bsky.social
Journalist, coder, community developer. From Spokane. 2025 JSK Fellow at Stanford. “I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, … who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.”
132 posts 710 followers 478 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 29 Comments 20

doing this the night before hundreds of journalists are traveling to the national data journalism conference is something

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Attending #NICAR25 and curious about the JSK Fellowships? Current fellow Ryan Pitts will there and is happy to chat. Reach out to meet up and learn how this life-changing program can fit into your career.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

If you're a small/midsize newsroom or freelancer in the U.S. or Canada working on a document- or data-driven investigation, this is for you. ✅ Grants from $15K–$35K ✅ Supports text, audio, video & more ✅ Deadline: March 31, 2025

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

always fun when you see people talking about a thing you know a lot about / report on for a living and how clear it is who’s done literally any reading and who is just mouthing off with more conviction / ego then facts

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Fellowship alert! Applications are open for @19thnews.org next Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Fellowship cohort! Early to mid-career HBCU alums join our newsroom for a yearlong, full-time, remote fellowship with a minimum $70K salary + great benefits. Apply by 03/31 → 19thnews.org/apply-for-a-...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

“We’re incapable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens.” www.theguardian.com/books/2017/d...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

"Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment" www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/o...

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

That is an insane summary of his actions which, to date, have included coercing doctors to drop their trans patients, confiscating our passports, censoring any mention of us across the federal government, purging us from the Defense Department, and forcing trans women into men's prisons

submitted 4 days ago • 25 comments

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was just demolished by Musk’s team. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 million. A thread about 18F:

submitted 4 days ago • 26 comments

I worked at 18F once. We would start projects with a discovery sprint where we would come in and talk to users in an agency and listen to what they actually needed and then build it. Totally antithetical to arrogance of DOGE. No wonder they’d destroy it, they want to make it impossible to rebuild

submitted 4 days ago • 7 comments

I've lost count of the times I've been asked about bias when reporting stories about Asians and Asian Americans. I have replied, "There are more than 4 billion Asians in the world" and "White people aren't asked this when they only write about white people."

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

Nobody tells a basketball fan who played the game growing up that they can’t cover the sport. Newsrooms have a framework for valuing lived experience ~when they want to~.

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

Years ago a white editor* asked if I was biased about immigration stories because I'm an immigrant. I've been asked a version of this question dozens of times since. The driving idea is that people who embody difference introduce bias; it's the framework that maintains white supremacy in newsrooms.

submitted 5 days ago • 21 comments

The assumption that people who have no relationship to an experience are unbiased and those who do have a relationship are biased is a stupid prejudice. Often direct experience dispels established assumptions about rape, prison, etc..... Wrote about that a few years ago.

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

This is amazing. Harvard has amassed a 16TB collection covering more than 311K datasets and a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov - with ongoing updates. lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/02...

submitted 5 days ago • 6 comments

Hi there! I'm the creator of the 📰 News feed. I have over a decade of experience building highly-engaging data visualisations and delivering complex technology projects for international news orgs. I'm looking for new roles that will let me grow as an engineer. Please DM me if you have any leads!

submitted 6 days ago • 18 comments

love this, happy news!

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

At some point alot of people in the news decided that every American political event happens in a dimension absent of any question of morality and can only be spoken about in terms of who scored a “political touchdown” and not 150,000 additional children going hungry because that’s “fair”

submitted 8 days ago • 39 comments

“A huge amount of damage comes from the idea that profits … must be maximized. That article of faith needs to go away.” Really enjoying listening to this season of @sceneonradio.bsky.social again. We desperately need more orgs that believe and lead by example. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

The right’s “waste and fraud” frame is a replay of the same participatory propaganda games they played w/ “voter fraud” in 2020, “censorship” in 2022, and any number of anti-immigration frames in 2024. Set the frame, inspire the generation of “evidence” to fit it, amplify that evidence, and repeat.

submitted 8 days ago • 26 comments

Made a little tool handle

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

anthonyjosephofficial.bandcamp.com/album/the-ri...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

“The Department of the Interior issued a series of secretarial orders that position drilling and mining interests as the favored uses of America’s public lands..." www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/art...

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

Have information you think the public should know about changes at the Census Bureau or across the federal government? I'm a @npr.org correspondent who's on Signal at hansi.01 and here’s my latest reporting:

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Did some hand-building with clay, which I was really intimidated by, and recently got back a few things I never expected to see again after a traditional wood firing. This one from a VERY naive attempt at deforming a cylinder. I love how it feels and how the fire gives it a finish you can’t predict.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

“America Needs a Working-Class Media.” God yes, amen to this piece by @alissaquart.bsky.social. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project gets stories about inequality into places that wouldn’t cover it well (if at all) on their own. It’s such important work. www.cjr.org/analysis/ame...

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

And yet they'll ask why nobody reads it.

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Want to use federal data? The U.S. government used to have a prominent link to sign up for API access; that link has been removed, but the form to get it remains operative. You may wish to sign up now, on the premise you might not be able to later. api.data.gov/signup/

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

MuckRock provides more than FOIA tools, it also provides document hosting tools via DocumentCloud and expertise in public datasets. Join this event! Donate! Set up a MuckRock account!

submitted 23 days ago • 2 comments