Introducing our Google Innovation Challenge project team

Late last year, Newsday was named one of 33 winners out of more than 200 applicants in the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge. This exciting opportunity will allow us to curate nextLI/Newsday’s extension collection of data so that it can be used as a resource for community groups and businesses in our region.

Read on below to hear more about the plan for the project. We’d love your ideas and feedback, so please reach out to us at datavault@newsday.com.

Introducing the team:

Joining the nextLI team of Amanda Fiscina, Coralie Saint-Louis and Kai Teoh to build this are Patty Oppenheimer, Tim Healy and Brandon Roberts.

Market Research – Patty Oppenheimer has 20+ years of marketing and research experience. She was previously the Director of Custom Content at Crain’s Business News, a division that provided clients with proprietary research, custom content and multi-platform programs.

Data Inventory – Tim Healy held several positions at Newsday during his decades at the publication. He is back to help to lend his expertise inventorying and organizing the data work he spearheaded here.

Development – Brandon Roberts is a software engineer and data journalist who has built innovative industry projects like ProPublica’s Electionland and the Nonprofit Explorer news app. He is a full stack web developer and his interests include big data, computational journalism and more.

The project:

With the team on board, we will now begin building this new data product (that we’ve dubbed the “data vault” or “data warehouse”) that leverages Newsday’s databases and expertise to serve the needs of Long Island’s community groups and businesses. 2021 will be spent surveying community groups and businesses on their unmet data and research needs, inventorying Newsday’s vast collection of data and building a framework for it, with a final product ready in 2022.