MyTwoCensus was founded in 2017 by two former Census Bureau analysts and a data editor from The Marshall Project, on a premise that turned out to be unfashionable: verification was the missing step in civic-data publishing. Federal tables were being released faster than newsrooms could check them, and the cost of quoting a wrong number had become indistinguishable from the cost of quoting a right one. We built a small operation in Washington, D.C., that would not publish a figure until two independent sources agreed on it, and we wrote the disagreement down when they didn't.
Seven years later, the team is fourteen people — three of them former Census Bureau employees, two IRE Award winners, and a rotating bench of NICAR-trained data reporters. We still do not run display advertising on data pages, we still publish a confidence score on every figure, and we still refuse to ship a release that arrives with a single source. The work is unglamorous. It is also the reason 1,800+ bylined news articles at The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, ProPublica, and The Atlantic have cited the site since launch without sending a single correction to the data desk.
We are a publisher, not a portal. We are not the U.S. Census Bureau, we are not affiliated with it, and we do not pretend to be. We are an independent, grant-funded newsroom that reads the federal release calendar more carefully than anyone else, and then writes the briefs that grant writers, journalists, and local-government analysts can quote.
