Class 13: AutoSepta

A data journalism simulation

You’ve made it this far. For the second half of our recap week, we’re going to rehash the skills we’ve covered by doing an in-class simulation exercise — it’s data journalism, applied.

The Scenario

Self-Driving Mayhem!

Philadelphia’s newest start-up, AutoSepta, partnered with the municipal government to make the impossible possible: running Philadelphia’s extensive bus system run strictly on time. AutoSepta created a fleet of state-of-the-art self-driving busses to accomplish the task. Their mission statement was simple: Dude, it’s smooth. Busses that run on time.

Launched in March, 2019, AutoSepta grew fast. Some say too fast. By August, 2019, AutoSepta was operating 40 of the city’s 124 routes, mostly around Center City.

AutoSepta busses utilize the latest advances in self-driving tech from Silicon Valley. The busses roofs are equipped with LIDAR sensors that can sense objects near and far away.

In the tech community, AutoSepta was widely heralded as a success. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said the move is making him reconsider Philadelphia for Amazon’s third headquarters. Google’s Sundar Pichai said that AutoSepta shows the world what can be done with the power of tech and imagination. But within Philadelphia, there was a mixed reaction.

Many workers complained about losing their jobs to machines. People decried AutoSepta’s marketing campaign, saying the self-driving busses are only “on-time” because AutoSepta doubled — and for some routes, tripled — the number of busses on the road. The campaign slogan, ”Dude, it’s smooth,” infuriated many who said it was a tonedeaf move in the tech industry, an industry that’s male-dominated and has a history of male chauvinism.

Joe Biden pivoted his presidential campaign, which is headquartered in Philadelphia, to be about protecting the blue-collar workforce and delivered popular rallies to that effect.

And then, what the self-driving technofuturists said was impossible happened. And in characteristic AutoSepta fashion, it happened quickly. The busses began crashing.

It starts out with small crashes in March with relatively few incidents, often without the AutoSepta busses at fault, but as time went on the toll became worse and the accidents more serious.

After 54 crashes, the federal government stepped in to put a stop to AutoSepta. Enough is enough they said. And now, as data journalists, we want to investigate exactly what actually went on.

Your task

Put on your data journalism hat. It’s time to tell a story. In this exercise, we’ll split into three groups of 3-5 people. In this exercise, we are journalists who have obtained with public records requests logs of each incident involving AutoSepta busses. It’s time to tell a story. Other journalists have obtained this same data, so we are on a deadline to get this story out as fast as possible, before class ends.

Your task is to look at the crash data that was collected in this public records request. It can be found in the sidebar below class 13. Each group will focus on a slightly different aspect, but the general task is as follows:

• Create your own spreadsheet of crash incidents, structured in a way that will be useful for the type of story you want to investigate. Data entry is tedious, so make sure to agree on standards for how the data should look ahead of time and split up the workload of inputting the data.
• Once you have data in spreadsheet form, analyze the data. You can do this however you like, but some things may be more useful than others, cough cough pivot tables.
• Based on what you see in the data, try to put together a relevant news take. What is interesting about what you’ve found out. If it differs slightly from your assigned beat, that’s ok.
• Create graphics to support your story, using Google Charts, Figma, or some combination.
• Write out a mock news story. It should be about two paragraphs long, and can include fictional details (this whole scenario is for fun, so feel free to be creative).
• Time-permitting, publish the story online. This can be done by making a web page in Codepen and sharing the URL with me. You can use PostImages to host images for free online that you can reference in Codepen — since I haven’t covered images in HTML yet (but many of you have figured out how to do it), I am happy to assist with this part.

We will have various checkpoints in class to structure the time well. Good luck! And don’t hesitate to ask questions.