Nieman Journalism Lab

How La Nación is using data to challenge a FOIA-free culture

Posted: 23 May 2012 11:54 AM PDT

One year ago, La Nación (Argentina's second largest newspaper) revealed that the government had spent $34 billion — in eight years — to subsidize the operation of 9,516 private buses. The investigation not only uncovered that financial aid increased 1,965 percent, but it also identified the 20 companies that benefited most from the plan.

Too much data? Not when you have the tools to sort through it. All that information was hidden in 285,000 records scattered on government websites and in official documents. The only way to make sense of it was to pair journalists with programmers (and computers, of course).

And that's what La Nación did.

As part of its innovation strategy, the newspaper is training its reporters, editors, designers, and developers on how to access information, and make it accesible to a general audience.

Data journalism produces more for La Nación than original reporting. The data visualizations are also enabling the newspaper offer a better online experience.

"We are adding more dimensions of interaction with our content," Angélica Peralta-Ramos, La Nación's Multimedia Development Manager, told me.

La Nación is following in the steps of The Guardian and The New York Times, internationally acclaimed for their interactive news projects. The paper’s investigation into government subsidies is a finalist in the world's first Data Journalism Awards, which will be announced on May 30.

"Colleagues from abroad tell us we have made great progress, although we think we're on a very early stage," Peralta emphasizes.

Building a team

La Nación realized it needed a formal data journalism team after its 2011 coverage of the Wikileaks' cables, and a data-heavy investigation of Argentina’s former secretary of transportation. In both cases, it was clear that it took more than traditional reporting to do the stories. “The journalists were in front of a pen drive full of information and weren't able to 'solve the puzzle' without help from a programmer," Peralta said.

To prevent that from happening again, they decided to build a team that specialized in data. They looked around the newsroom, and gathered a group of tech-friendly reporters and designers. They were easy to find because three years ago La Nación started a department (led by Peralta, who is by training a computer scientist, not a journalist) focused on teaching multimedia reporting skills.

The next challenge: coach journalists on how to use Excel as a reporting tool. Two workshops were enough to narrow the gap that often exists between journalists and numbers.

"From the beginning, our goal was to see Excel [as] more than just a tool to analyze information; it was about learning how to organize the data so it can be visualized or shared in a open database," Peralta explained.

La Nación DATA comprises 10 people; six from the tech side (a project manager, a trainer, two designers, two IT folks), and four full-time data journalists. It is a small team but the data movement is thriving in the newsroom. Two weeks ago, La Nación created a data producer position to spot and convert useful data that comes in via press releases, emails, or PDFs. There are 8 data producers in different sections of the newsroom, and the plan is to keep adding more.

"At one point, they should be able to actually work with that data," Peralta said.

Trascending journalism

In Argentina, a great deal of computer-assisted reporting involves building datasets from scratch. Most of the information is available in government websites, but most of it is in PDF files that need to be converted into CSV and Excel formats.

"When the documents can't be read by scanners or are not digitalized, we have to enter the data manually," Peralta said. For the bus subsidies piece, for example, La Nación's team had to convert six years of PDFs (about 13 MB). Not only that, but the datasets and visualizations have been updated monthly since they were created. The frequency of updates in the future will be determined by the public's interest, she said.

But whether the updates come every month or every quarter, the database is not going anywhere. In a country where there are no FOIA protections, La Nación is aware that information is valuable, not only for journalistics purposes but for citizens. That's why they launched an open data platform, where anyone can access and use the data.

"We want to open new sources of data,” she said. “Part of our mission is to activate the demand for information. Otherwise no one will generate it.”

Obama directive means federal agencies have to go mobile — can newsrooms keep up?

Posted: 23 May 2012 08:03 AM PDT

Okay, newsrooms: The race is on. Think you can innovate faster and better than the federal government?

Major federal agencies are getting 12 months to implement new mobile strategies, the White House announced on Wednesday. President Barack Obama says each major agency has to pick two “key government services” to make available on mobile phones. Obama said in a statement that “Americans deserve a government that works for them anytime, anywhere, and on any device.”

Exactly what that means will be up to individual agencies. The idea is to make sure the federal government finds ways to “keep up with the way the American people do business,” as U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said in a statement.

More and more newsrooms are making the same realization. One in four American adults now has a smartphone, and one in five owns a tablet, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism 2012 State of the News Media report. The White House estimates that by 2015, more people will access the Internet via mobile phones than via traditional desktop computers.

The shift under way means consumers already expect access to news and information when and where they want it. The federal government’s mobile shift, should it be implemented as planned, will only serve to reinforce those expectations. And yet Pew finds that newsrooms have struggled to understand how people behave differently on mobile versus online. It’s worth watching how the feds approach that challenge.

From the White House: “To serve the American people as they make this transition, the Administration is committed to making the mobile shift right along with them. The digital strategies announced today intend to do just that. By next spring, the American people will be able to access dozens of additional government services on their mobile phones for the first time.”

Bernt Rostad’s photo of the White House used under a Creative Commons license.

YULI AHMADA

Kamis, 24 Mei 2012