Four years of work and 8,000 judicial rulings later, the team at Univision Data shows how in Costa Rica, a person is more likely to be convicted of a crime if they are assigned a public defense attorney than if they have a private one. Their methodology included web scraping, R and logistic regression — a statistical method common in social sciences but practically unexplored in newsrooms.
A unique database of more than 300 investigative journalism reports from across Latin America was launched this week by The Institute for Press and Society (Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, or IPYS). Called BIPYS (Banco de Investigaciones Periodisticas, or Bank of Investigative Journalism) the UNESCO-backed initiative was announced July 6 at the annual conference of Abraji, Brazil’s investigative journalism association.
More and more, Latin American journalism is thriving in the digital space. Investigative journalism platforms online are joining forces, data journalism bootcamps are taking off and there are new accelerators looking to fund innovative news projects. “In today’s world, journalists spend more time in the virtual world than in the paper stacks,” said Carlos Eduardo Huertas, director of Connectas, a nonprofit which supports transnational journalism.
