For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Barbara Maseda, the founder and editor of Proyecto Inventario, an open data platform for journalists reporting on her native Cuba. She told GIJN about the investigative tools she uses to overcome the difficulties of data reporting in and about Cuba.
What reporting and storytelling techniques do you need to master as you head into your next investigation? We’ve rounded up some of GIJN’s most popular how tos from our story archives, as well as select items from our growing Resource Center.
The Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English each week, includes the Sigma Award winners for data journalism, two stories about increased surveillance on journalists, and an interview with BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 6 to 12 finds the New York Times exposing partisan editing in school textbooks, a new data science platform from Turkey, Delayed Gratification’s infographic on how to become the British prime minister, Alberto Cairo making his graphics available for free, and an analysis of fact-checks of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
GIJN asked investigative journalists around the world to look ahead at what’s in store for 2020. Here are the trends, key forces, and challenges they expect will affect investigative and data journalism in the coming year, as well as the new skills and approaches we should be thinking about.
GIJN’s ever-growing Resource Center added many new or substantially revamped guides this year, including packages on climate change, land ownership, women journalists, data journalism, tracking planes, and working with whistleblowers.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 4 to 11 finds The New York Times analyzing more than 11,000 of Trump’s tweets, The Financial Times measuring air quality in London’s Underground, Der Tagesspiegel creating an interactive of the Berlin Wall, and Nieman Lab discussing data voids exploited by media manipulators.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 28 to November 3 finds The Economist’s summary of a great year in print data journalism, an interesting visualization by Deniz Cem Önduygu of key arguments in Western philosophy, Datajournalism.com’s guide to editing data journalism, and BBC News’ analysis of outgoing House of Commons Speaker John Bercow’s career in numbers.
To investigate radicalization on YouTube, journalists from two Dutch media outlets teamed up and examined 600,000 videos, 120 million comments, and 20 million automatically-generated recommendations —using software they wrote for this occasion. Dimitri Tokmetzis, who runs the data desk at De Correspondent, wrote about how they did it for GIJN.
Increasingly, the most ambitious data journalism projects are fueled by collaborations. But these take a lot of planning. Before you embark on a collaboration, check out ProPublica’s playbook.
