Jun 24, 2026 · 39 min · 10 segments
Doug Smith is a reporter at the Los Angeles Times who’s been with the paper for over 50 years. He was also the database editor there from 2004 to 2015. We sat down with him at NICAR to talk about…
Scott KleinHost
Simon RogersHost
He's a senior writer at the Los Angeles Times, and he was also the database editor there from 2004 to 2015.
Uh, he started working at The L.A. Times in the 1970s and has a real, uh, really interesting vantage point about how not just data journalism, but all journalism has changed over the many years he's been working in news.
As soon as we found out he was gonna be at NICAR, we knew we had to record an episode with him, so I reached out and, and we were able to get him on the show.
Um, he's just somebody who's got a, a remarkable career and incredible war stories.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to meet him just because you got a real sense of how he sees data stories, and at the heart, they are human stories that he's wanting to tell, and he's very keen on kind of keeping that humanity, and I think has an incredibly, um, human approach to the whole way he works, and just a charming, fantastic, uh, interview.
So this is part of our series of interviews that we recorded at NICAR this year, and, um, you'll probably hear a bit of background noise because of that.
But you can get to hear a lot about how he decides which stories are data stories, and that is so relevant for today.
Yeah, a, a lot of the projects that he'll talk about are, are some of the most influential and important projects.
Their project about teacher evaluations was an incredibly important data journalism project and really taught a lot of us about how to do large scale data reporting.
Um, you know, he ran the team and brought in incredible people, including Ben Welsh, uh, who was just on the show.
But listen to how often Doug credits the people on his team and the people he works with.
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He's a senior writer at the Los Angeles Times, and he was also the database editor there from 2004 to 2015.
Uh, he started working at The L.A. Times in the 1970s and has a real, uh, really interesting vantage point about how not just data journalism, but all journalism has changed over the many years he's been working in news.
As soon as we found out he was gonna be at NICAR, we knew we had to record an episode with him, so I reached out and, and we were able to get him on the show.
Um, he's just somebody who's got a, a remarkable career and incredible war stories.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to meet him just because you got a real sense of how he sees data stories, and at the heart, they are human stories that he's wanting to tell, and he's very keen on kind of keeping that humanity, and I think has an incredibly, um, human approach to the whole way he works, and just a charming, fantastic, uh, interview.
So this is part of our series of interviews that we recorded at NICAR this year, and, um, you'll probably hear a bit of background noise because of that.
But you can get to hear a lot about how he decides which stories are data stories, and that is so relevant for today.
Yeah, a, a lot of the projects that he'll talk about are, are some of the most influential and important projects.
Their project about teacher evaluations was an incredibly important data journalism project and really taught a lot of us about how to do large scale data reporting.
Um, you know, he ran the team and brought in incredible people, including Ben Welsh, uh, who was just on the show.
But listen to how often Doug credits the people on his team and the people he works with.