UA covid website posts final update

FAYETTEVILLE — ArkansasCovid.com, a website devoted to reporting and analysis of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic in Arkansas, has published its final update.

Rob Wells, a University of Arkansas assistant professor of journalism, led the student team overseeing the site since September of last year but is leaving for a job at the University of Maryland.

“I wish I could have found another entity or person to keep it going, but I was unable to do so,” Wells said, with Friday marking the last day for new posts and analysis of state covid-19 data. “That’s my biggest regret.”

Site founder Misty Orpin handed the reins to Wells and UA’s School of Journalism and Strategic Media after gaining a devoted following — about 12,000 followers on Twitter by August 2020 — during the pandemic’s early months.

Orpin’s one-woman effort developed under Wells into a learning lab for UA students who crunched data and wrote about the pandemic.

“We were able to train up a number of student journalists and do some important investigative reporting through the project and grew our social media base,” Wells said.

Speaking from the road as he moves across the country, Wells said he hadn’t given much thought about the ArkansasCovid social media accounts. Students posted charts and graphs — frequently more than once each day — and the project’s Twitter account as of Friday had about 14,900 followers.

While the social media accounts will likely be taken down, the full website may stay up for a few months longer, Wells said.

Remaining online indefinitely will be a repository of data published on computer-code sharing site GitHub. com. Wells said he wants to keep the data and analysis available for all researchers.

“We have, to this point, the only publicly available historical archive of covid in Arkansas,” Wells said.

Wells said the UA effort appears to have been unique, as he never came across a similar student-run journalism school project with the type of focused reporting and data analysis done at ArkansasCovid.com.

The university’s journalism department fully backed the site, Wells said.

“We approached the data and the stories with a more independent perspective than you’re going to get from the government or a hospital,” Wells said.