Phillips briefed journalists at the 2023 Crime Coverage Summit in January 2023: What Journalists Get Wrong About Race and Crime. 

Cheryl Phillips is the director of Big Local News in the Stanford graduate program in journalism and faculty director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab based in the engineering school. She teaches data journalism and co-founded the Stanford Open Policing Project in 2017, which collected, analyzed and released data on more than 250 million police stops across the U.S., as well as trained more than 200 journalists in using the data for stories. Previously, Phillips worked at The Seattle Times from 2002-14, focusing on data and investigations. In Seattle, she twice worked on breaking news stories that received a Pulitzer Prize and were twice on teams that were Pulitzer finalists. She has worked at USA Today, and at newspapers in Michigan, Montana and Texas. She is a former board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors.