Your information life is more abundant than ever in your role as a consumer, worker, or audience member. But as a voter, you often lack the knowledge necessary to hold institutions accountable. The decline of public affairs reporting and investigative work in the US means that, especially at the local level, there are many stories that go undiscovered and untold that are hard for media companies to monetize but would easily pass a social cost benefit test. The central question I work on is how to sustain the accountability function of journalism, in an era of diminishing financial resources. I believe that the nascent field of computational journalism will play a part in answering this question. Through my teaching, research, and work as Director of the Stanford Journalism Program, I hope to help surface the problems faced by journalists to those looking to use computational methods to solve puzzles that will benefit society.Interested? Follow the work of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab at http://cjlab.stanford.edu/Read more about this authorRead less about this author