The 2020 United States Census will offer an electronic response option for the first time in American history - but we don't know much about how that data will be kept secure. I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that responses to NPR's tweet of that story were largely outraged ones: "What our country has come to.🤮" "This will not be used for good." "Wow. Why would that matter at all?" It's easy to imagine a fake-news census story going viral. "$600 billion is going to be given away in the next ten years according to the count that's produced," said Mark Hansen, professor at Columbia Journalism School, director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and cofounder of News Counts, an effort to create a national journalism network that will cover the 2020 census. "Getting a good count has always been a crucially important measure of the health of our society, and we wanted to see the ways in which journalism could help not only raise awareness about the importance of people exercising their constitutional right to be counted, but also see where the census is. Where are we compared to 10 years ago?". "From the perspective of creating a journalism partnership, the census seems like the perfect place to try to set up a network where we can talk about the meaning of the census and its importance at local, state, and national levels, in different communities - and do the storytelling of the census with the people that the census is impacting, but who also really need to engage in order to make for a successful count." "The more you look at your community through the lens of the census, you get to understand who's counted and who isn't, who gets to have power over how money is spent, how transit is designed, how zoning works. A lot of that stuff is the stuff of journalism anyway, and the census provides the perfect context to think about your community a little differently. Our pitch is: Journalists, this isn't a one-off phenomenon. It's an ongoing, living record of our communities." News Counts' ambitious goal is to build a network of partnerships around the country, bringing together local news outlets, local computational or statistics groups, and social scientists and demographers to tell data-inspired stories around the census. Read more