Research Partnerships

Partner with USA Times on research.

We open our data and newsroom expertise to universities and academic researchers — free of charge, in the public interest — and co-author the findings. If you study pricing, platforms, labor, or cities, let’s publish something together.

What we bring

• Original datasets. Proprietary data from our reporting and platform — delivery and rideshare pricing, fleet and mobility data, and the NYC market investigations behind our journalism.
• Domain expertise. Reporters, data journalists, and engineers who know the datasets, the industries, and the questions worth asking.
• Data & engineering support. We’ll help with access, cleaning, and reproducible pipelines so your team can focus on the science.
• A megaphone. When the work is done, we publish it — in a journal and in USA Times, in plain English, to a real audience.

Areas we’re most excited about

• Algorithmic and surveillance pricing — how prices are personalized, and what it means for consumers.
• The gig economy, platform economics, and labor — take rates, incentives, and worker outcomes.
• Urban mobility and transportation — how people and vehicles move through cities.
• Consumer protection and market transparency.

Have a question outside these areas? Pitch it anyway.

How it works

1. Reach out. Tell us the question you want to answer or the dataset you’d like to explore.
2. Scope it together. We agree on the question, the data, and a simple collaboration and data-sharing agreement.
3. Collaborate. We share data (privacy-preserving) and expertise; your team leads the methodology and analysis.
4. Co-publish. We co-author the paper for peer review, and run an accessible version in USA Times.

Who we work with

Faculty, PhD and graduate students, and research labs — especially in data science, economics, public policy, urban planning, computer science, and journalism programs. We’re glad to support student theses and multi-year studies alike.