What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 14-22: document mining for journos (@pudo), R & rvest web scraping (@Computerworld), arms exports (@srfdata), Spain elections (@elmundoes), German hospitals (@ARDde), a “magical Piano app,” and more.
I have been involved in politics and policy-making for over 50 years, and as you can imagine I hold strong feelings about reporters and the media. They’re not what you might think, however. Far from considering journalists to be irritating pains in the neck — though I’ve known a few who qualified — I believe them to be indispensable to our democracy.
Burma is one of the world’s champions of media censorship. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently ranked my country as No. 9, while listing Eritrea and North Korea as the most censored countries worldwide. Should I be proud of this? Ironically, yes. Burma, also known as Myanmar, was ranked No. 2 in 2006 when I started working as a journalist, so this ranking is an improvement.
For the second time, organizers of MezhyhiryaFest are going to bring together more than 300 journalists and public activists on June 6-7, establishing a tradition of celebrating the Journalist’s Day in the former billion-dollar estate of runaway President Viktor Yanukovych, who continues to hide out from murder and corruption charges in Russia.
Over the past few years we have seen the huge potential of data and document mining in investigative journalism. Tech savvy networks of journalists such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have teamed together for astounding cross-border investigations. OCCRP has even incubated its own tools, such as VIS, Investigative Dashboard and Overview. But we need to do better. There is enormous duplication and missed opportunity in investigative journalism software.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 8-14: Seven reasons to use dot graphs (@maartenzam), 5 truths about the UK election (@SPIEGELONLINE), ICIJ’s #luxleaks (@cabralens), history of men’s tennis (@duc_qn), U-shaped challenges (Data Colada) and more.
Journalism start-ups from throughout Europe gathered at DataHarvest 2015 in Brussels on May 8, for a roundtable discussion on possible cooperation and collective needs. With journalism increasingly seeking new business models and investigations coming out of non-traditional media outlets, there is much to gain by fledgling publishing platforms, investigative centers and non-profit organizations in sharing knowledge and strategies.
As the glittering PEN awards ceremony came to a close on Tuesday, a set of cartoons flashed onto the screen. At the end of the night, postcards were handed out to members of the audience bearing the same cartoons. The pictures all told aspects of the story of a journalist from Azerbaijan. Khadija Ismayilova had just been presented with PEN’s Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write award – in absentia, since she was unable to attend the ceremony herself.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 1-8: Easy-to-use historical maps (@wired); Lobbyradar (@ZDF); @GENdjawards shortlist gradients+news graphics (@EdwardTufte); network analysis tutorial (@cguibourg); Saudi death penalty (@jeune_afrique), and more.
