A partnership between Local Media Association, Comcast NBCUniversal, and Opportunity Insights produced a year of data-driven journalism across five U.S. regions — and a free guide for newsrooms who want to do the same.

A year after its launch, the Economic Opportunity Lab has released a new playbook designed to help local newsrooms, city governments, and community organizations report on the policies and places that shape economic mobility in their own backyards.

The Lab, a partnership between Local Media Association, Comcast NBCUniversal, and the Harvard-based research group Opportunity Insights, brought together 48 local newsrooms and 10 NBC Telemundo stations across five regions — Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, the Bay Area, and Washington, D.C./Baltimore — to report on how place and policy shape access to opportunity, with a goal of inspiring action that drives economic mobility.

“We’ve had a really wonderful time doing this economic opportunity lab with newsrooms from across the country,” said Dana Piccoli, Managing Director of News Is Out and Project Manager of the Economic Opportunity Lab. “Some really incredible work, incredible research from Opportunity Insights, who was our research partner — just a really lovely experience.”

A playbook built from a year of reporting

The regions were selected based on Opportunity Insights’ research into economic mobility, and newsrooms ranged from longtime LMA collaborators — including News Is Out, Word in Black, and LatidoBeat — to first-time partners like the Miami Herald and Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ).

Reporters worked directly with Opportunity Insights researchers, including David Forte, who helped reporters and editors interpret datasets from the Opportunity Atlas — down to block-by-block detail on how factors like a highway can divide a city’s economic outcomes — and turn that data into story ideas.

The resulting playbook, available as a free download at economicopportunitylab.com, walks newsrooms and organizations through the full process: identifying the problems to solve, selecting a market, building a production workflow and support systems, immersing reporters in research and data training, and hosting public listening sessions to build trust with the communities being covered. A built-in checklist helps organizations assess their own readiness to take on a similar project.

“We really structured this,” Piccoli said. “How to start, what the problems were that we set out to solve, how to select the market, how to work with newsrooms, how to collaborate, how to bring in research and immerse yourself in that.”

Stories with real-world impact

Across the five regions, reporting trended toward three recurring themes: education, housing, and employment — the forces Piccoli said “build us up as cities and as towns.” Coverage ranged from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s look at the challenge of measuring workforce outcomes, to Metro Philadelphia’s reporting on child wealth-building programs, to Pulso’s examination of whether hosting World Cup matches could improve social mobility in Miami.

One story in particular illustrated the Lab’s potential for direct community impact. The AFRO’s Victoria Mejicanos reported on credit scores among Baltimore’s Black population — reporting Piccoli said “jolted” the local banking community enough that bankers convened a session to discuss the findings and invited Mejicanos to join the conversation.

“They realized this is not good. We need to be doing something about this,” Piccoli said.

Several newsrooms used listening sessions to build the trust needed for residents to share personal financial stories. One reporter, a former bartender, drew on those relationship-building instincts to talk with neighbors about their experiences. “This is something that these folks do every day,” Piccoli said. “And there’s a lot of built-in trust there.”

Covering gaps in the data — and in the news

Piccoli also highlighted the work of colleagues in LGBTQ+ media who took part in the Lab despite working with less robust demographic data, a reflection of how queer communities are often undercounted in public datasets. Partners drew on outside research, including from the Williams Institute, to fill in those gaps and report on economic opportunity within LGBTQ+ communities.

That work connects to News Is Out’s broader mapping project, which tracks the state of LGBTQ+ media coverage nationwide and has identified significant news deserts for queer communities — a concern Piccoli tied to broader research on the cost of shrinking local news. Research from Rebuild Local News has estimated that news deserts cost the country roughly $1 billion, a burden that falls hardest on communities that are already underserved.

“When you’re a marginalized community in an area that doesn’t have a lot of local news, who’s giving you the information to help you advocate for yourself?” Piccoli said.

What’s next

The Economic Opportunity Lab playbook is free to download and, according to Piccoli, intended to be “a living, breathing document” that newsrooms, chambers of commerce, and city governments can adapt to their own regions. Piccoli said she’s available to talk directly with any organization interested in building something similar.

“If you want to form a coalition in your area and try to tackle these subjects… it’s free for you to utilize and work on,” she said.

The playbook is available now at economicopportunitylab.com. Organizations interested in learning more can reach Piccoli at dana.piccoli@localmedia.org.

Keep It Local is a podcast from Local Media Association featuring conversations with the people building the future of sustainable local journalism.

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