A record 950 journalists, data experts, and students from 20 countries gathered last weekend for NICAR14, the annual data journalism conference organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). The five-day gathering, twice the size of last year’s conference, has tripled in size over the past five years.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for February 13-19), including items from The Tow Center, The Financial Times, and IJNet, among others. Also, it’s funny to note the influence of Valentine’s Day on the list.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for January 23-29). If you click on an image, you’ll be redirected to GIJN’s new Pinterest board, where you can find links to the stories.
This week our links include items from the Global Editors Network, Journalism.co.uk, Askmedia.fr (and GIJN’s own data resource page in Spanish. Thanks to Marc Smith of Connected Action for gathering the links and graphing them.
In Kenya’s poor, dry Turkana region, recent discoveries of water and oil could change the lives of residents who depend on food aid for survival. In March 2012, the country’s President Mwai Kibaki announced that oil had been discovered in Turkana after exploratory drilling by an Anglo-Irish oil firm. And last year, UNESCO announced that large reserves of groundwater had been discovered in the drought-ridden area. How much will the new resources help Kenyans, and how much of the new wealth will flow back to European investors? The answer is complex, but a team of data journalists is working to make it more clear. Land Quest, a cross-border investigative journalism experiment which launched last week in beta, is using data to illuminate the competing financial interests in Kenya. It maps the flow of aid money from Europe to Kenya, and the flow of profits from Kenya back to Europe.
This intriguing graph depicts a network of 989 Twitter users whose tweets from January 13 to 24 contained the hashtag “#ddj” (data-driven journalism). We’re pleased to see that our site gijn.org was among the top domains and our data journalism resource page among the top URLs that appeared. This work is the brainchild of Marc Smith (@marc_smith), a sociologist of “computer-mediated collective action” who, among his varied activities, maps social media networks that reveal “the key people, groups, and topics discussed in a public conversation.”
As our governments and businesses become increasingly flush with information, more and bigger data are becoming available from across the globe. Increasingly, investigative reporters need to know how to obtain, clean, and analyze “structured information” in this digital world. Otherwise, they and the news organizations they work for will miss some of the most important […]
So you’ve amassed terabytes of data, reams of documents and hours of expert testimony, all backing up your conclusions. What’s the best way to convince people you’re right?
Tell them a story.
Ideally, a compelling, colorful tale weaving in memorable anecdotes and striking details. Printed in a clear, legible font. Oh, and it helps – no kidding – if it rhymes.
At least according to Nobel-prizewinning economist Daniel Kahneman, author of the outstanding Thinking, Fast and Slow, who’s made a career out of understanding – experimentally – how our brains take in information and make decisions. It isn’t always pretty, but it does help explain why storytelling is a centuries-old means of passing on information.
Hacks and hackers meetups. Open government initiatives. Hackathons and datafests. The media development world has discovered big data, and it is embracing it big time. Donors like the Knight and Omidyar foundations are focused almost exclusively on tech fixes to what ails the media. As one prominent donor told a nonprofit newsroom executive, “We no longer fund content.”
Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.Scarecrow
In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.
