Pressing Pause.

The last few days we have asked you to "press play" on our new visualizations on per capita income by county.

Today's note is us letting you know that for the next month we will be pressing pause on our daily Data 4 Thought emails.

I know, many of you just got here. So the timing isn't great. We are overjoyed that so many folks have recently come across our work. For context: on May 19th, data4thepeople.com had nine active users. On July 14th, nine weeks of weekday data journalism later, we had 310. Over the nine weeks, our email list has gone from 123 subscribers to 323. This momentum is so exciting for us. We have data stories to tell, and to know so many folks want to read them… well, it just lights a fire to fuel progress towards our mission even more.

So, why press pause now?

Two reasons.

First, I will be visiting family the latter part of July and want to be fully present for this trip (rather than my mind being in the data).

But the second reason is far more important. Over the last nine weeks, we have developed invaluable institutional knowledge on how to best utilize AI to assist in data journalism. Hopefully you now see what is possible. What used to take weeks now takes hours.

But using AI for data journalism is riddled with potential land mines — from the data analysis itself to how it chooses to dangerously phrase things when it edits our writing based on how it has "clustered" what we are trying to do. These past nine weeks, we jumped off the cliff and built the plane on the way down. There were some tough times learning the limitations of AI the hard way, and many hours invested in that process. But it paid off.

This knowledge is no good sitting in our heads and on our computers. We need to take a step back and use it to train models on what we have learned.

For those who are new to our mission, it's not just to pump out data journalism. Far from it. It's to create a platform for everyone to perform data journalism, and in the process, start building a shared understanding of truth across America. To do this, we need to turn our institutional knowledge into models that we can give to you. In other words, Data 4 The People's institutional knowledge needs to become humanity's collective knowledge.

And so, unburdened by the daily writing grind, this is what we will do over the next month. Our Founding Data Architect, Amanda Sinton, is leading the charge on this critical project, and I plan to dutifully do whatever she asks of me to get this work kicked into high gear.

Having said that… it is still highly likely you will at least get a few new pieces of data journalism from us over the next four weeks. This work is our compulsion. So while we have no pieces planned now, there will be days where we just HAVE TO write. And we will share that with you. We'll also segment our mailing list, and for those who are newer to the group, we'll share some of our favorite pieces from the past nine weeks that you may have missed.

As a reminder, all our content lives — for free — at data4thepeople.com. There's enough up there to get lost in. So, go get lost! And tell a friend or three to head over and get lost in it too. We appreciate you spreading the word more than you can know!

Also, if you are looking for content to watch rather than read, check us out on Excess Returns (like and subscribe while you are over there). I recently was invited to speak on all things jobs, inflation, and Data 4 The People. This experience was just amazing, not only because host Matt Zeigler is, well, Matt Zeigler — but because after the podcast I sent over like 30 charts and videos (almost all original D4TP content) to the Excess Returns production team and they spliced nearly all of them in. So the podcast in effect has an audit trail of nearly every claim I made, in real time. Big ❤️ to Excess Returns for putting the effort in to do this. That's accountability!

Thanks again to everyone for your support. I couldn't be more excited to see where this path takes us.

With much love and gratitude,

~ Eric