{"id":17036,"date":"2021-11-17T16:22:04","date_gmt":"2021-11-17T16:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17036"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:13:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:13:50","slug":"data-driven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2021\/11\/data-driven\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Driven"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Elizabeth Tannen ’05 \/ Photo by Chava S\u00e1nchez<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalist Aaron Mendelson \u201909 has heard it again and again: numbers don\u2019t work on the radio. But he\u2019s got a different take: it\u2019s not that people can\u2019t follow numbers in audio reporting. They just need to be well contextualized in the stories those numbers tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mendelson works as an investigative reporter for KPCC, National Public Radio\u2019s Southern California affiliate. He specializes in data research, uncovering the kind of information most of us would be hard pressed to find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mendelson doesn\u2019t rely only on data for his reporting. For all the time he spends sifting through public records, he spends at least as many hours in the field, talking to people whose lives intersect with those records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, he says, the data is what can spark a story and guide him to those conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, one of his biggest recent projects: a longform expos\u00e9 of an LA slumlord. The idea came when he was on vacation in Mexico, reading Matthew Desmond\u2019s Evicted<\/em>, which chronicles the stories of Milwaukee tenants, landlords, and others caught up in what\u2019s become the big business of evictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first he just wanted to know which Southern California zip codes had the highest rates of evictions. But in poring over law enforcement records, he noticed something else: a pattern of strikingly similar names in the plaintiff column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By combing through county tax assessor data, Mendelson was able to trace the similar handles to a single owner, Mike Nijjar. A conservative estimate, Mendelson reported, is that businesses connected to Nijjar own 16,000 units. And, according to Mendelson\u2019s extensive reporting, many of those units are in devastating disrepair\u2014forcing low-income tenants, who are often also immigrants and BIPOC, to deal with bedbugs, electrical problems, mold, fires, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His story revealed not only the numbers but the personal stories of tenants like Vernon Moore, who told Mendelson about the persistent mold, and Nancy Romero, who shared about bedbugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mendelson explains how crucial data research was in developing that story: \u201cIf you want to find out who the biggest landlord is in LA, that\u2019s something you can\u2019t easily Google,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of supposedly public data, like court records, also costs money to obtain. \u201cAnd who does that hurt?\u201d Mendelson says. \u201cNot corporate lawyers, but community groups trying to research a landlord, or freelance journalists working a story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His report received a lot of attention, and some are hoping it can lead to a legislative response. Oakland area assemblywoman Buffy Wicks introduced a bill that would track data including ownership, rents, and vacancies for landlords who own more than five units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his Macalester years, Mendelson didn\u2019t imagine a career in journalism. He didn\u2019t expect much of any career upon his graduation: the Great Recession began during his senior year and prospects everywhere seemed scarce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he did develop an intense habit of reading the news while at Mac. \u201cI\u2019ve always been a super consumer of the things I like,\u201d Mendelson says. He recalls picking up free copies of the New York Times<\/em> available in the Campus Center every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also grew an appreciation for film and nurtured a lifelong passion for music. Mendelson majored in media and cultural studies, and spent much of his time in the basement office of WMCN, Macalester\u2019s radio station. In addition to hosting a \u201cprime time\u201d music show, Mendelson held just about every administrative position possible at the station\u2014including office manager, music director, and program director. \u201cThat was a huge part of my experience,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s probably not a coincidence that I wound up working in radio.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduation, during the height of the Great Recession, he worked a sequence of AmeriCorps gigs: first for a workforce center in north Minneapolis, where he encountered the Recession\u2019s brute impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His next placement was also where he got his first taste of news radio: KFAI, a Minneapolis community radio station. He recalls covering high-profile events like the mayor\u2019s State of the City address and a Habitat for Humanity-sponsored visit from former President Jimmy Carter. He also supported interns who delivered the hourly news update and, along the way, learned the tools and skills of audio production. He remembers thinking, \u201cthis is something I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That eventually led Mendelson to the journalism graduate program at the University of California\u2013Berkeley. One of his courses at Berkeley, taught by two New York Times<\/em> reporters, was in data journalism: broadly, the use of statistics to support reporting, encompassing the spectrum from watchdog investigations to features about baseball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI liked how you could find stories through examining charts and maps that you wouldn\u2019t find anywhere else,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to reporting on housing, Mendelson has investigated police shootings and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti\u2019s outsized charity fund\u2014one that\u2019s received donations from the likes of Rihanna and the government of Qatar. He and a colleague recently published an investigation about a group of egregiously mismanaged nursing homes\u2014mismanagement that has often proved deadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even when he\u2019s deep in data, Mendelson says that his work is \u201cnot as monastic as people might think.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He toggles back and forth between the numbers and the actual humans who can help him decipher what they mean. And then he turns it all into a story that listeners can understand\u2014even when numbers are involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI do get pretty excited when I come across something big,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I tend to want to share it right away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Tannen ’05 is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For journalist Aaron Mendelson ’09, numbers spark stories.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17036"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30629,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17036\/revisions\/30629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}