AZ Data Central is information for our daily life
At The Arizona Republic, there are some things that have always been true.
We don’t just cover this community. We’re part of it.
We care about whether our streets and neighborhoods are safe. We care about whether our children are getting the most out of our schools.
We care about how we’re going to make a life. Because this is our community, too.
That’s why we’re launching AZ Data Central (azcentral.com/data), a trove of public data to help you make better decisions about how you live, vote, invest and explore.
This project opens with four interactive pages, simple to search and easy to understand. Over time, AZ Data Central will grow tenfold. We’ll build it as we keep doing the things we’re known for: defending public access and fighting for disclosure of public records.
Last year, our reporting revealed that complaints about charter schools had never been uploaded to a government website. Instead, that site assured parents “no complaints” had been filed, even when that wasn’t true.
We were the first to let Arizona parents know they had been misled. We’re still fighting to obtain the hundreds of actual complaints. When we prevail, we’ll deliver them to you.
We’ll take dense or poorly organized data and sort it in a way that helps you.
We’ll use government data — and databases we create in the newsroom — to fuel investigative journalism: shining a light on the hidden or unknown. That helps the community, and it helps you.
“AZ Data Central is a perfect extension of the investigative work we aim for at The Arizona Republic,” said investigations editor Michael Squires. “It holds people accountable — whether an elected official, CEO, or the person who prepares food at your child’s day care.”
When you use AZ Data Central, you’re benefiting from a significant investment The Republic has made, in time and reporting.
Over the past six months, we’ve doubled the size of our data team, adding expertise in programming, data scraping and analysis, digital visualization and mapping.
This team of data specialists is led by two editors who helped run The Republic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning project, “The Wall”: stories from the border that were built on the bedrock of computer analysis and visualization.
They are not the only Republic experts you’ll encounter.
Many of the reporters at The Republic are skilled in data analysis, and their talents underpin recent investigations into environmental degradation, unequal discipline by race in schools, patterns of abuse in migrant detention centers and the stunning wave of evictions in rentals countywide.
AZ Data Central will put more of that information in your hands.
The team behind AZ Data Central
AZ Data Central is powered by four full-time data reporters and two editors.
Rob O’Dell is a senior reporter at The Republic. He specializes in using data to drive investigative reporting. He was a crucial part of The Republic’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning team, helping perfect the visual mapping data that logged every foot of border fencing in a 2,000-mile stretch. His work on school vouchers in Arizona helped lead to a ballot referendum in 2018 and was noted by the prestigious Toner Prize for political reporting. He has been named Arizona Journalist of the Year four times by the Associated Press, most recently in 2018.
Agnel Philip was the inaugural Don Bolles/Arizona Republic Fellow for News21 and graduated summa cum laude with undergraduate degrees in journalism and economics from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and W.P. Carey School of Business. His work as a data reporter at The Republic has helped prompt a state investigation of migrant shelters, uncovered troubling financial performance at many state charter schools and revealed an alarming cycle of evictions in Maricopa County.
Justin Price specializes in computational journalism, which means he writes code to help tell stories. He joined The Republic from Kentucky, where he worked for the investigative team at the Louisville CourierJournal uncovering racial disparities in the state’s largest public-school district, exposing the deadly risks and human toll of old church vans and scraping government websites designed to be inoperable. His work on the Republic series “The Charter Gamble” revealed that statewide, charter schools spend more on administrators and less on classrooms than district schools.
Pamela Ren Larson is a mapping specialist covering bias and diversity through data analysis. Before joining The Republic, she was an urban planner for the city of Austin, a case manager for asylum-seekers and a research associate in the Bay Area using geographic information systems and statistical programs to sort through extensive data sets. She came to The Republic as part of our prestigious Pulliam Fellowship program, where she was essential to our coverage of the familyseparations crisis, and she became the first reporter in America to quantify just how many times the federal government had been warned of migrant children falling ill before two children died last year. She also was a key data reporter in “Poisoned Cities,” our USA TODAY NETWORK investigation of systemic pollution at the border of California and Mexico.
Michael Squires is the editor of the AZ Data Central team. An Arizona native, he was named The Republic’s investigative editor in late 2017. During his two decades in journalism, he has led political, governmentwatchdog and investigative work, including a groundbreaking series on hospital injuries that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He was a key editor throughout The Republic’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, work that won the Pulitzer Prize.
Josh Susong is The Republic’s senior news director for investigations and enterprise. For years, he helped lead front-page coverage at The Republic, and later led its first longform storytelling team. He was a key editor in coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the Yarnell Hill Fire — both of which were Pulitzer finalists — and was the lead content editor for “The Wall.”
Information for your life
Whether it’s a life-changing decision about where to live and work, or a simple choice such as where to eat lunch, information is power.
At AZ Data Central, you’ll find data you can use about:
Where you eat: Our data experts gathered three years’ worth of restaurant inspection data from Maricopa County. Here, you’ll see how every spot fared on its most recent inspection, and the history of what inspectors found over time.
Where you work: We’ve compiled data about how much top bosses get paid at companies across Arizona – and how much more money they make than the average worker.
Where you send your kids to school: See how every school fares in the state’s letter-grade score system, and how its students perform in math and English.
You’ll also see our commitment to useful and revelatory data across azcentral.com. Here, you’ll connect with Street Scout — by far the best source of information about your home values and real estate trends Valley-wide. And you’ll learn more about how to find public records for yourself.
What you see here is only the beginning of AZ Data Central. Is there more you’d like to see? More you need to know? Tell us what, as we build more information into this page.
Greg Burton is the executive editor of The Arizona Republic and azcentral .com, and the west regional editor for the USA TODAY NETWORK.