About the Project
CalMatters exists to tell Californians what their state government is doing for them and to them. How we’ve excelled:
- Our unprecedented new Digital Democracy project deploys AI, bots and data scrapers to demystify state government. It collects transcripts and video of every word spoken in a public meeting, six categories of financial giving, each bill introduced and vote cast, every supporter and opponent, every lobbyist and interest group, and more. A single query can swiftly reveal the power behind the policy. And AI constantly scans the vast database for potential stories — producing “tipsheets” that go to human reporters. We’re sharing this resource with journalists who admire the stories it’s enabling us to produce — e.g. of the past million votes cast by CA legislators, Democrats voted “no” less than 1% of the time. This CBS piece explains why Digital Democracy is a “game changer.”
- We don’t just report from the Capitol down, but from the ground up. Take our dissection of California’s unparalleled pandemic-era unemployment fiasco: The state sent tens of billions of dollars to scammers while denying the claims of desperate workers who lost stability, homes, even their lives. We found workers on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, and from more than 500 responses to our online survey. Our calculator invited readers to see how long they’d need to work to earn what the state lost to pandemic unemployment fraud (for someone earning $80,000 a mere 250,000 years.)
- One of California’s gravest, growing threats is wildfire. Other trackers miss opportunities to provide vital context, so we launched one that tracked real-time flare ups and historical trends. An updated map visualizes active large fires using points and fire perimeter shapes, while a time-lapse shows historical wildfire burn areas from 1900 forward, and illustrate the costs in dollars and lives. We manage the dashboard via Github Actions and Netlify through a largely automated data pipeline: taking bot-scraped and manually compiled data, and cleaning and structuring that data into custom APIs.
- In 2023, California became the first state to recommend reparations to Black people for the harms of slavery and discrimination — triggering a flood of social media misinformation. CalMatters responded with a multimedia card deck to resolve debates over facts, such as whether slavery had existed in CA, and to hold ducking lawmakers accountable. We built a customizable tool so people could see what might be owed them, and a Google form solicited questions for follows. State commission members cited our work to explain theirs; the chairperson touted our calculator.
- Our reporting documented an accelerating trend of California hospitals shuttering or suspending maternity wards. In 12 counties, no hospitals deliver babies — and our Census tract analysis showed Latino and low-income communities hit hardest. To enhance this story, we interactively mapped gap areas, constructed a sortable table of ward/hospital closures, and embedded unfurlable cards rich with Digital Democracy detail about key legislators — plus a clickable link to email them. Now they’re citing our story as they pursue a legislative fix.
