Events

This October journalist Dante Chinni, director of the Jefferson Institute’s Patchwork Nation, spoke at TEDxMidAtlantic 2011. His presentation “You Don`t Know America OR How Community Triumphs Over Soccer Moms and Red and Blue States in the 21st Century U.S.”  explored how the U.S. news media often misunderstand and mischaracterize American communities.

Chinni shared how his experience as a reporter travelling to communities around the country led him to create Patchwork Nation, as a tool to gain a more nuanced perspective on the many different kinds of communities and subcultures within the United States.

 Using most every bit of demographic data about every county in the country – age, race, income levels, occupations – Chinni and an academic team broke those counties into 12 different types of place. Working with media partners including the Christian Science Monitor, the PBS News Hour and the Wall Street Journal, Patchwork Nation studies the United States as it travels through a turbulent time. Interactive maps help break down national data to analyze how it impacts communities and graphic visualizations let users see data charted and graphed by county, congressional district, or state.

 Based in Washington, D.C., Chinni has been covering politics and the media for nearly 20 years. He has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and as a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Patchwork Nation, a reporting project of the Jefferson Institute, is funded by the Knight Foundation.