What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 3-12: #ddj awards (@GENinnovate); China’s EU stereotypes (@foreignpolicy); Atlantic slave trade (@slate); French employment (@Data_Match); Germany’s green cities (@morgenpost); bubble maps (@datawrapper); & more.
Only one-tenth of national data is really open and free, according to the third annual Open Data Barometer by the World Wide Web Foundation. “The open data movement is at a turning point,” the report finds. “If we allow this moment to slip away, however, open data could fade into a ghost town of abandoned pilots, outdated data portals, and unused apps.”
Mauri König is a Brazilian investigative reporter. Last October, at the Global Investigative Conference in Lillehammer, König shared first place in the Global Shining Light Awards for his investigation “Empire of Ashes” on tobacco smuggling in Latin America. In this interview, Konig shares his views on what it’s like to uncover illicit interests involving the president of a country while working in a highly dangerous environment.
The trove of files that make up the Panama Papers is likely the largest dataset of leaked insider information in the history of journalism. For ICIJ’s Data and Research Unit, it offered a unique set of challenges. The overall size of the data (2.6 terabytes, 11.5 million files), the variety of file types (from spreadsheets, emails and PDFs to obscure and old formats no longer in use), and the logistics of making it all securely searchable for more than 370 journalists around the world are just a few of the hurdles faced over the course of the 12 month investigation.
Facebook and Google and their humongous data crunching machines flourish while fine media wilt. How to compete? They take media’s original costly-to-produce-content for free and make it available to users to circulate, anticipating their needs with their intelligent algorithms.
Some of the best tips and techniques come out of the annual meetings by our colleagues in Scandinavia, and this year is no different. More than 600 participants attended the SKUP conference in Tønsberg, Norway, on April 8-10. Among the tip sheets presented was this gem of 25 practical tips that reporters in even the smallest newsrooms can use to good effect, focused on finding great characters and cases to bring your story to life.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 26-May 2: Pirated Papers (@sciencemagazine); Panama Papers tech (@ICIJorg); Europe Open Research (@ddjournalism); Water Webinar (@code4africa); 6 Data Story Rules (@DataScienceCtrl); German E-Cars (@BR24); & more.
Friday, November 13, 2015 was a strangely balmy night in Paris, the kind that makes visitors fall in love with the city. People spilled out of the cafés, winding down the workweek over glasses of wine, their chatter and laughter creating a soft hubbub on the streets, as pedestrians sidestepped the crow
The story published in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog ended up being about race, but it didn’t start out that way. Nick Diakopoulos, who leads the lab, wrote for the Wonkblog last year with a story on how surge pricing motivates Uber drivers to move to those surging areas, but does not increase the number of drivers on the road as Uber claims.
Global press freedom declined to its lowest point in 12 years in 2015, as political, criminal, and terrorist forces sought to co-opt or silence the media in their broader struggle for power, according to Freedom of the Press 2016, Freedom House’s annual report on media freedom worldwide. Only 14 percent of the world’s population enjoys a free press—that is, where coverage of political news is robust, the safety of journalists is guaranteed, state intrusion in media affairs is minimal, and the press is not subject to onerous legal or economic pressures.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 19-25: Amazon delivery & race (@business); Cartodb.js map (@maartenzam); ICIJ slides (@cabralens); SRF data GITHUB (@SRF); France immigrant dataviz (@data_match); Flint’s water (@nytimes); and more.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has released its World Press Freedom Index, ranking 180 countries according to the level of freedom available to journalists. “It is unfortunately clear that many of the world’s leaders are developing a form of paranoia about legitimate journalism,” wrote RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire. The index showed a deep and disturbing decline in respect for press freedom, and a climate of fear and tension combined with increasing control over newsrooms by governments and private-sector interests.
People regularly ask what tools to use or what programming language to learn for data-driven journalism (ddj). There is no right answer for it, especially considering that technology and tools available are evolving quickly in the field.
From a media outlet that pays citizens to report from remote areas of Kenya to a portal that uses humor as its main strategy to inform Russians, journalism faces different challenges in different cultural and social contexts. Creativity, however, seems to be a common skill that media entrepreneurs shared in addressing their problems at the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) on Saturday, April 16.
Since premiering in the United States in late 2015, the movie Spotlight has earned US$88 million in revenue, split almost evenly between U.S. ($45 million) and international sales ($43 million). Along the way, the movie has earned two Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay) and given journalists around the world a needed boost. But winning Academy Awards didn’t lift Spotlight too high. The movie is the second lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in the last 38 years.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 2-11: Behind the Panama Papers Investigation (@ICIJorg, @SZ); Best #ddj on taxes (@OKFN); Spies in the Sky (@BuzzFeed); EU Data Journalism Manifesto (@medium); World scientific collaboration (@storybench); & more.
The ongoing and spectacular investigation “Panama Papers” represents the culmination of a significant shift in the way journalism is now practiced. The project also represents 40 years of work done by groups of investigative reporters to bring the profession into the 21st Century. “The Panama Papers showcases not so much technological power but the power of the global investigative reporting movement,” says Sheila Coronel of the Columbia Journalism School.
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.” They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
This June, the membership of the Global Investigative Journalism Network will vote to elect members of the GIJN Board of Directors. The board consists of 15 members. Of these, seven seats are now up for election — all for a period of two years.
“Hello,” wrote the anonymous source to a German newspaper, “this is John Doe. Interested in data?” Thus began what would soon become an international financial investigation into what are being called the Panama Papers—an investigation so massive that even whistleblower Edward Snowden, on Twitter, called it the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism.”
We do agree with Ramon Fonseca about one thing: that “Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar.” But that’s where our commonality with co-founder of disgraced Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca ends. This scandal isn’t about privacy. If anything, it’s about the need for transparency about how the powerful wield their power.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 20- April 1: ddj without borders (@Maid_Marianne); time-lapses basics (@vimeo); Berlin bikelanes (@morgenpost); data ebook (@jonathanstray); North Korea missiles (@bbc); death penalty stats (@guardian); and more.
GIJN and its partners are excited to officially open registration for Uncovering Asia — the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference, to be held in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 23-25. Our keynote speaker will be Walter “Robby” Robinson, who led the Boston Globe Spotlight team’s Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Robinson was played by actor Michael Keaton in the movie Spotlight.
At a recent meeting of the Institute for Nonprofit News – for my sins, I now sit on INN’s board – we learned an interesting statistic: About half the organization’s members have a strategy to drive readers to their own sites/destinations, and the other half count on distributing their content via other platforms. Does it matter how we reach readers? And should we care?
A Round-up of Recent Debates about Community Support and Culture Change in Newsrooms. A study released earlier this month suggested that 40% of Americans would buy digital newspaper subscriptions if they were presented with a persuasive argument. It is worth spending a minute unpacking what that “persuasive argument” might look like.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 14-21: undercovered stories (@JigsawTeam); NICAR links (@MacDiva); Madrid conference (@JPDatos); podcasts (@carlapedret); GEN Awards (@GENinnovate); R for annotations (@hrbrmstr); German elections (@zeitonline).
