Summer Olympics, Biden Steps Down — Harris Steps Up, Prisoner Swap with Russia, and Identifying Gaza’s Dead

The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris have dominated the output of data journalism teams around the world during the past two weeks. Data journalists have looked at how the perfect wave is formed; broken down skateboarders’ sensational tricks; analyzed Simone Biles’s most difficult moves; identified the youngest athletes; predicted what records were likely to be broken; and, of course, have monitored the medal table. Other well-covered subjects include Venezuela’s controversial election and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. In this edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, which covers stories between July 22 to August 4, we also highlight an analysis of the tourist overload in Europe, an investigation into the sketchy nature of the Amazon carbon credit market, and a graphic report on how K-pop (Korean pop music) is reinventing itself.

Illustrated Guide to the Olympic Games

Image: Screenshot, Reuters

The Summer Olympics are being held in Paris for the third time. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Reuters explains each of the 32 events — including competition format, techniques, and schedules for each. You can also consult the updated medal table by country, and see where competition venues are located in the French capital — and outside it: the sailing competitions take place in Marseille on the Mediterranean coast, and the surfing competitions take place even further away, in Tahiti.

To understand why some of the best surfers in the world are chasing an Olympic medal 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) from Paris, check out this interesting visual explanation of how the location and geography of Tahiti — and the seabed at Teahupo’o beach, where its famous wave breaks — make it one of the best spots in the world for surfing.

Joe Biden Steps Down, Kamala Harris Steps Up

Image: Screenshot, Pew Research Center

In a surprise move, US President Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he was dropping out of his reelection campaign. Shortly after, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place as the Democratic candidate in the race for the White House against Donald Trump. To understand the motivations behind Biden’s decision, the Pew Research Center compiled some of the key dynamics of public opinion about the president in recent months, such as his job approval ratings — which since late 2021 have been more negative than positive — and concerns about his age and fitness.

It’s also worth checking out this thorough election analysis from the Financial Times, which shows how Kamala Harris, now the de facto Democratic nominee, has drawn level with Donald Trump in the race for the White House. Harris improved on Biden’s recent polls in battleground states — gaining ground among young and Black voters in particular without falling significantly among other groups — and revitalized her party’s campaign in little more than a week.

Risky Prisoner Swap with Russia

Image: Screenshot, Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal explains who’s who and where they came from in what has been described as the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. In addition to the newspaper’s own reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been imprisoned in Russia for more than a year, several dual nationals and Russians associated with opposition leader Alexei Navalny — who died in a prison camp earlier this year — were released from Russian prisons (and one in Belarus). In all, 16 people, most of them considered “political prisoners,” were swapped for eight prisoners Putin wanted: two hackers, a smuggler, four spies, and a hit man. The last of these had been a prisoner in Germany serving a life sentence for shooting and killing a former Chechen rebel leader in a Berlin park in broad daylight. The newspaper also published a behind-the-scenes story about the efforts to bring its reporter home, detailing how negotiations unfolded across three continents and involved President Biden, spy agencies, Russian oligarchs, a TV host, and Gershkovich’s fiercest advocate: his mother.

Calculating — and Identifying — the Dead in Gaza

Image: Screenshot, Airwars

How reliable are the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s (MoH) death tolls in Gaza? Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, the MoHs figures have been repeatedly challenged by Israeli authorities, who point to links between the ministry and Hamas. In a months-long investigation, Airwars used open source monitoring to independently identify where and how nearly 3,000 civilians were killed in the first 17 days of the conflict. In this special report, they list the civilian casualties identified by the team and explain how the detailed matching process was carried out. According to the report’s findings, the evidence suggests that while the MoHs figures have become less accurate over time as Gaza’s health infrastructure has been decimated by the war, the initial system of casualty registration was largely reliable, and that open testimony from Gaza is a valuable source of information in calculating the death toll.

Venezuela’s Controversial Election

Image: Screenshot, El Pais

On July 28, Venezuela went to the polls to elect a new president. Since then, the current head of state, Nicolás Maduro, and the opposition, led by candidate Edmundo González, have been at odds over who won the election. Last Friday, the Venezuelan opposition released a database with the results from each polling station. This data corresponds to information from the digitized minutes of 24,532 polling stations, 81% of the total (30,026). These documents are printed by the ballot boxes in each center during election night, in a public process. Here, El País visualizes the data from the table released by the opposition, showing the votes in each Venezuelan state, and presents graphs with the total votes and percentages for each candidate, calculated independently. According to the report, this calculated data matches that released by the opposition. The newspaper also states, in an analysis, that the Maduro government has offered scant data to support its declared victory — the opposition’s data is more verifiable and, because it’s more detailed has been exposed to public scrutiny, more credible.

Tourist Overload in Europe

Total number of combined domestic and international overnight tourist stays booked. Image: Screenshot, BIQdata

In a year that has seen anti-tourist protests in Barcelona and the imposition of a visitor tax in Venice, an exclusive data analysis from several media partners of the Urban Journalism Network shows that tourism has hit record highs in Europe post-pandemic. The analysis used Eurostat data on the number of accommodation bookings made across the EU on four major platforms. According to BIQdata, the data team at Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, while France, Italy, and Spain remain the top European holiday destinations for short-term bookings, some of the countries showing similar trends, such as Poland and Romania, may reflect an influx of refugees — mainly from neighboring Ukraine — rather than tourists. It also found that bookings for short breaks in Amsterdam are no longer as popular, perhaps thanks to a new law regulating short-term rentals in the Dutch capital.

What’s Driving Australia’s Big Mac Price Increases?

Image: Screenshot, Australia Broadcasting Corporation

ABC News uses the price of a Big Mac to understand the high cost of living in Australia, with data obtained from The Economist’s Big Mac Index, which tracks the prices of the McDonald’s staple in 55 countries — a light-hearted way to analyze the global economy. The report shows how the price rose incrementally each year until the pandemic, when it fell and remained stable for two years. Since then, it has been rising steeply. According to ABC, as tempting as it may be to attribute the Big Mac price increase to the rising cost of energy and ingredients like beef and veal — which would be passed on to the consumer so that the company could maintain its profit margins — it’s not necessarily true. In fact, what’s driving up the prices are the royalties paid for intellectual property and the McDonald’s brand.

Amazon Carbon Credit Scam

Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post

In recent years, the carbon credit market has become a lucrative business. Companies and organizations have spent billions of dollars on conservation projects they’ve built to “offset” their own emissions. But a six-month Washington Post investigation found that more than half of all such projects in the Brazilian Amazon overlap with public lands — generating huge profits on land to which they have no legal right and which is already protected by law. In addition to the unfair profits, using these lands to sell credits also does little to reduce carbon emissions. According to the report, the combined size of the projects that overlap public lands is 78,370 square miles — six times the size of the US state of Maryland. For their investigation, the team reviewed thousands of pages of corporate and court records, interviewed dozens of people across the forest, and performed geospatial analysis of carbon credit projects in the Amazon.

Taking the K Out of K-Pop

Image: Screenshot, Bloomberg

In this special report full of engaging graphics, Bloomberg shows how the K-pop industry, despite its dizzying, billion-dollar growth in recent years, has reached a crossroads. To find new markets and sources of revenue, it must become less “K” — Korean. One way of achieving this is to produce songs with more and more English lyrics, rather than a few words or phrases, which is common in the genre. Bloomberg’s analysis shows that almost half of K-pop songs released this year had lyrics mostly in English. According to the report, several factors are contributing to this phenomenon. They include the drop in sales of physical albums — of which K-pop enjoys a huge share of the global market — by half in the last 15 years, and the limited prospects in South Korea’s domestic market (the country has the lowest birth rate in the world). In addition, the big music industry areas of growth internationally are concerts and streaming — fields where K-pop is weaker. By all indications, we will find out — perhaps very soon — whether the charm of K-pop really lies only in the “K.”

…and a Little More about the Olympics

Length of time since each world record was set in all events in track and field, swimming, weightlifting, track cycling, and speed climbing. Image: Screenshot, Le Monde

How many Olympic records will be broken in the French capital? Le Monde produced an interactive piece about the search for new records at the 2024 Olympic Games. The outlet selected 90 sporting events in which a record could be broken — among the more than 300 that are being held this summer in Paris — and compiled data on the best performances in a table searchable by sport, athlete, and country. At the last Olympics, in Tokyo, 38 records were broken. (It is important to remember, however, that setting an Olympic record does not necessarily mean a world record.) The newspaper also reports that, while some historical records date back more than half a century, others are only a few weeks old. It also explains some of the reasons behind the differences in the frequency of Olympic record-setting — such as the evolution of the sport, technology, refereeing formats, and sports equipment.

Ana Beatriz Assam is GIJN’s Portuguese editor and a Brazilian journalist. She has worked as a freelance reporter for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, mainly covering stories featuring data journalism. She also works for the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) as an assistant coordinator of journalism courses.