When the president of the parliament states that there are some MPs “doing nothing,” you know what to do as a data journalist: you turn to the numbers. This is how I did that and how I got a scatter plot in a printed paper and an interactive one online.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 26-Oct 1: future journo tech-jobs (@mkramer); open-source search tools (@OpenSemSearch); data viz projects (@chrtze); isotype chart generator (@albertocairo); data & digital collaboration (@jwyg); and more.
The job of journalists in Italy uncovering and reporting scandals about the Catholic Church has changed. The news media are dedicating more space to these stories, while internal factions within the Church have given an advantage to reporters on the Vatican beat. But dealing with the topic can still be quite tricky…
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 19-25: brilliant info graphics (@visualoop); data state of mind (@MaryJoWebster); global temperatures visualized (@NASAEarth); African grants (@Sage_Of_Absurd); DDJ and investigative tools (@M_Mandalka); and more.
As we gather for the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference, this seems a good time to share again with our colleagues where the Global Investigative Journalism Network and its conferences come from. It was a simple idea at the end of the 20th century — to gather the world’s investigative journalists to share their knowledge with each other — that gave birth to GIJN, which has now grown to 138 member organizations in 62 countries.
Independent news organizations in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea are experiencing both direct and indirect challenges in cyberspace, from content blocking to censorship and self-censorship. Edgardo Legaspi, executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, says threatened governments are “playing catch-up” after recognizing that the Internet can be an effective tool for voices to be heard.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 5-10: America’s shrinking middle class (@FT); Latino voters & Trump (@UniNoticias); iPhone7 rave (@newyorker); DocumentCloud (@SchoolOfData); Chicago’s sensor net (@arrayofthings); Visual Vocab (@MartinStabe); and more.
Highway Africa — Africa’s largest annual gathering of journalists — brought together a host of media practitioners from across Africa. Discussions at the two-day conference this year ranged from the challenges of media sustainability in the digital age to digital activism and internet regulation in Africa.
At this year’s Highway Africa — the continent’s largest annual gathering of journalists — watchdog groups showcased a host of open data and accountability tools aimed squarely at Africa. Here are six of them, developed by Code4SA and presented by Wellington Radu of Media Monitoring Africa and Levi Kabwato of the Open Democracy Advice Centre.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 29-Sept 2: Earth warms at top rate in 1000 years (@NASAClimate); 2 million oil/gas docs (@Open_Oil); G20 CO2 emissions (@CarbonBrief); German dialects (@SPIEGELONLINE); Munich massacre on Twitter (@puls_br); ;and more.
With freedom of information statutes in over 100 countries today, the laws have become a key tool for journalists from India to Mexico. But their success depends on how they’re used and implemented, as Swiss scholar Vincent Mabillard explores in his recent paper, Freedom of Information Laws: Evolution of the Number of Requests in 11 Jurisdictions. We are pleased to present highlights from his paper from the University of Lausanne.
Many great actors failed to adapt from silent movies to the “talkies” and disappeared from the big screen. By the same token, many great journalists risk fading away because they are not adjusting from the era of virtually silent audiences to the virtual era of talking audiences.
For eight years India has been a fixture on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where journalists are slain and their killers go free. Perpetrators are seldom arrested and CPJ has not recorded a single conviction upheld in any of the cases of journalists murdered in India in direct relation to their work.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 23-28: Paris cost of living (@ParisMatch); graphing my life (@benorlin);Olympic female athletes (@FiveThirtyEight); graphic design skills (@albertocairo); R (@storybench); human rights research data (@EngnRoom); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 15-22: Mexico’s secret trust funds (@ElUniversalData); Brexit data (@jakeybob); animated forest fires (@geojournalism); visual vocabulary (@FT); Google Trends data (@GoogleTrends); common data problems (@qz); & more.
Engaging and interactive journalism is still possible even without an extensive knowledge of coding. But how? We’ve taken the guesswork out, scouring the internet to find the most accessible tools to create multimedia content.
A growing cadre of journalists is pursing assertive reporting on the deterioration that they see and experience daily, and which represents, for many of them, a more acute threat than the battles over radical Islam that dominate American coverage of the region.
The relationship between transparency and political stability in democracies is simple: More transparency means more stable democratic rule. As transparency rises, democratically elected leaders are less likely to be ousted through extra-constitutional methods like a coup. In non-democracies the situation is more complicated. But greater transparency still means fewer coups.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 9-14: NYT interactives (@archietse); Trump’s tweets (@drob); Olympics data viz (@thegamma_net); Kenya teen abortions, HIV (@dailynation); Mapbox (@mcrosasb); US household debt (@lenkiefer); & more.
At First Draft, we frequently receive emails from a whole range of people asking how they can start doing the sort of online open-source investigation and verification that they’ve seen us doing. The skills and methodologies used are all something that can be learnt through a little persistence, but here are a few pieces of advice to get you started.
Threats to NGOs and civil society actors have escalated in a number of countries across Asia and the Pacific, among them the arrests of activists opposing the referendum in Thailand and supporters of the West Papua freedom movement in the Pacific.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 2-8: poverty redefined (@nytimes); Spain’s elections (@politibot); Nigeria’s debts (@BudgITng); subway directions, shown above (@nicolaskruchten); PokemonGo social divide (@lemondefr); 3D incident reconstruction (@TB_Times); & more.
There is a silent crisis afflicting our democracy: the implosion of journalism as we have known it. Its most obvious symptom is the tens of thousands of journalists who have lost their jobs in the last decade. Those jobs were never refilled. Economists may call this destruction of traditional journalism “creative” but it is nothing less than a pressing matter of national security.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for July 25-Aug 1: terrorism deaths (@guardiandata); US demographics (@jh_viz); global science collaboration (@storybench); China’s Africa aid (@EvaConstantaras); Alcohol use (@data_match); Nigerian money (@smartmonkeytv); & more.
In everyday journalism, to get the public to pay attention to your story, to make it not only truthful, but also credible and attractive, is a hard task. And it has become even harder in the digital era. Information flows constantly through our portable electronic devices, like a river of muddy waters, dragging the authentic pieces of story-telling together with the fake; the verified; and the gossip. So if journalists want to have any chance at succeeding in this battle, they must not only find good stories, but must also elevate their story-telling to an art.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for July 18-24: Trump and more Trump (@chiquiesteban, @washingtonpost); data-driven justice (@Esri); create your own database (@flexiodata); Onodo data viz tool (@civio); wind map (@planetlabs); German commutes (@zeitonline).
In the very early days of building Sonr*, we talked to newsrooms all over New York City and London to get a sense of what tools journalists are currently using to get the job done. Some of these newsrooms were more traditional than others, but we found that there was a core set of digital tools that most writers and editors couldn’t get through the day without. Let us know what you think, or if this list is missing anything in the comments!
