In researching data journalism in the era of big data, I have found myself trying to define what “data” means in this context. Of course when we refer to data we usually envisage significant amounts of numerical information, but as data sets get unimaginably large this itself becomes problematic. So I decided to take a step back, and look at a successful story that is data driven closer to home.

I chose,a cluster of stories,  from Manila, by the Reuters reporting team of Clare Baldwin, Andrew Marshall and Manny Mogato, who covered Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drug suspects. (Transparency alert: I was, until earlier this year, an employee of Thomson Reuters.) The three of them won a Pulitzer  in the International Reporting category for this coverage. I wanted to just focus on a couple of stories because I think it helps define what data journalism is. This is how their story of June 29 2017 described how Philippine police were using hospitals to hide drug war killings:

• An analysis of crime data from two of Metro Manila’s five police districts and interviews with doctors, law enforcement officials and victims’ families point to one answer: Police were sending corpses to hospitals to destroy evidence at crime scenes and hide the fact that they were executing drug suspects.
• Thousands of people have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 30 last year and declared war on what he called “the drug menace.” Among them were the seven victims from Old Balara who were declared dead on arrival at hospital.
• A Reuters analysis of police reports covering the first eight months of the drug war reveals hundreds of cases like those in Old Balara. In Quezon City Police District and neighboring Manila Police District, 301 victims were taken to hospital after police drug operations. Only two survived. The rest were dead on arrival.
• The data also shows a sharp increase in the number of drug suspects declared dead on arrival in these two districts each month. There were 10 cases at the start of the drug war in July 2016, representing 13 percent of police drug shooting deaths. By January 2017, the tally had risen to 51 cases or 85 percent. The totals grew along with international and domestic condemnation of Duterte’s campaign.

This is data journalism at its best. At its most raw. The simple process of finding a story, finding the data that supports and illustrates it and then writing that story and using the findings to illuminate and prove it. Of course, the data set we’re talking about here is smaller than other data-driven stories but it’s still the point of the story, the difference between a story and much lesser one.

But how did they come by that data? Andrew tells me it was done the old fashioned way: first, they got the tip, the anecdotal evidence that police were covering up deaths by using ambulances to carry away the dead. Then they went looking for proof — for police reports, which are public information in the Philippines and so can, in theory, be obtained legally. These they found, because they looked early and persistently. Then it was a question of assembling these, and cleaning them up. In some cases, it meant taking photos of barely-legible police blotters at a station entrance.

All their stories, Andrew told me, were driven by the reporters already having a sense of what the story was, and then looking for proof. That means already knowing enough about the topic to have formed an opinion about what to be looking for: about what may have happened, about what angle you’re hoping to be able to prove, about what new fresh evidence you believe the data will unearth for you. A data-driven story doesn’t always mean wandering around the data without a clear idea of what you’re looking for. In fact, it’s better to already know. “The key thing,” he told me, “is that this all grew out of street reporting. We wouldn’t have thought to look for it if we hadn’t heard.”

That’s the first lesson from their experience. Data is something that is there that helps you prove — or refute — something you have already established to be likely from sources elsewhere. 

This is where I think sometimes data journalism can come adrift. By focusing too much on the “data” part of it, we lose sense of the “journalism” part of it. “It’s the blend of street reporting and data analysis that paid the great dividend,” Andrew said.

A  definition of data journalism should probably start somewhere there; but it tends not to. Instead we tend to get: data journalism as a “set of tools’, or “locating the outliers and identifying trends that are not just statistically significant but relevant”, or “a way to tell richer stories” (various recent definitions.)  These are all  good, but I’m not sure they’re enough to help us define how to best use data for journalism.

By emphasizing data over journalism we risk removing and rarifying the craft, creating a barrier where it doesn’t need to exist. As in the previous examples in the Philippines, data is not always something that sits in databases, servers, libraries or archives. Nor is it something that you have to ask for. It’s something you use to gather information to help better storytell and to reinforce the facts in your coverage.  A study by Google last year trumpeted that more than half of newsrooms surveyed had a dedicated data journalist.

Aren’t we all, or shouldn’t we all consider ourselves, data journalists? Shouldn’t we all be looking for data to enrich — if not prove the thesis that underlies — our stories? 

Back to Andrew’s example. For the team it was something of a no-brainer to work on attaining this data. The story would have been unthinkable without it. This might not be part of every journalist’s instinct, but it’s telling in this example, that it became central to their story and took weeks, months to assemble.

The place to start from was with the local police and hospitals to get this data.  To do so was legal. But it wasn’t easy, and became increasingly less so as the work developed.. Clare Baldwin was greeted at one station by homicide detectives who shouted and lifted their shirts to display their guns. Later, Andrew told me, it became much more difficult to have access to this information as the Duterte government realized what it was being used for.

The lesson from this is that data is not necessarily something that is easy to get, or easily given up. Or that arrives in pristine form. It requires some major work in verifying, identifying and compiling. is more akin to the example of Bellingcat, the crowdsourcing website created by journalist Eliot Higgins, which conducts what it calls open-source investigations of data sources, ranging from social media photographs to online databases.

Of course, not all stories are going to be like this, and not all data is going to be like this. But all journalism, data or otherwise, requires thinking that starts from a similar place: a strong knowledge of what the story might be, and where to find it; whether there might be data that might help, to know where to find it, to not be daunted in obtaining it, or by the condition it is in, and to understand the context of the data that you have, and to know what to do with it. And finally, in Andrew’s words, “to use that data quickly, not just to sit on it“.

The aforementioned team’s stories stand on their own.  As another example, the Reuters’ graphics team, led by Simon Scarr, also did some extraordinary visualizations which helped readers understand stories better, and provided additional impact. Visualization and data journalism are obvious bedfellows.

This isn’t to say sometimes the idea for a story doesn’t lie in the data itself. Data journalism can mean taking data as inspiration to explore and write a story — rather than beginning the process by talking to sources.. At its most basic this could be a simple story about a company’s results, or a country’s quarterly trade figures — data-driven stories where the journalist reports the new numbers, compares them with the earlier numbers, and then adds some comment.

But when there is overemphasis on data journalism as a separate part of the news process it can pose problems. There’s been quite a lot written about a backlash against ‘nerd journalists’ and an exodus of those computer-literate staff in newsrooms who are sick of the skepticism and relatively low salaries. I’ve not witnessed this firsthand, but I have seen how little interest there is in learning more about the ‘techie’ side of journalism that might help reporters wrestle with data beyond their familiar charts and tables. Editors are partly to blame: stories that involve dirty or larger data-sets do take longer and so are often unwelcome, unless they fall into a special category. So reporters quickly figure out they’re better off not being overly ambitious when it comes to collecting data.

Data journalism tends to be limited to a handful of really strong players. In my neck of the woods in South and Southeast Asia there’s an impressive array of indigenous (i.e. not one of the big multinational) outfits: Malaysiakini are almost old hands at this process now.  Their sub editor,  Aun Qi Koh told me that as it gets easier in terms of knowing which tools to use and how to use them, so it gets harder because “we want to push ourselves to do more, and to better…and of course, there’s the challenge of trying to streamline a process that often involves a team of journalists, graphic designers, programmers, social media marketers and translators.” she tells me.

This is impressive, and is demonstrating what is possible. News organizations are making the most of governments’ gradual commitment to opening up their data, and to leveraging issues that the public care about. In the Philippines Rappler has been making waves, and won an award for its #SaferRoadsPH campaign, which compiled and visualized statistics on road crash incidents and has led to local police drawing pedestrian lanes outside schools.

These kinds of initiatives are tailor-made for visual data journalism. Not least because journalists don’t have to rely on government data that might be either absent, incomplete or wrong. Or, in some cases, just unreliable. Malaysiakini’s Aun Qi Koh said that the data in a government portal set up in 2014 was neither “organized properly nor updated regularly.” That seems to be par for the course. And while staff everywhere need better training, those that do have the necessary training tend to get snapped up by–and attracted to–private sector companies rather than relatively low paying journalist positions, according to Andrew Thornley, a development consultant in Jakarta.

I’m impressed by all these projects, especially those doing great journalism on a shoestring. But I hope it doesn’t sound churlish if I say I still think this is scratching the surface of what is possible, and that we may not be best preparing ourselves as well as we could for the era of big data.

Take this story as an example: Isao Matsunami of Tokyo Shimbun is quoted in the Data Journalism Handbook as talking about his experience after the earthquake Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011: “We were at a loss when the government and experts had no credible data about the damage,” he wrote.  “When officials hid SPEEDI data (predicted diffusion of radioactive materials) from the public, we were not prepared to decode it even if it were leaked. Volunteers began to collect radioactive data by using their own devices but we were not armed with the knowledge of statistics, interpolation, visualization and so on. Journalists need to have access to raw data, and to learn not to rely on official interpretations of it.”

The data he’s talking to was created by Safecast, an NGO based in Japan which started building its own devices and deploying its own volunteers when it realised that there was no reliable and granular government data on the radiation around Fukushima. Now it produces its own open source hardware and has one of the largest such data-sets in the world, covering air quality as well, covering sizeable chunks of the world.

The future of data journalism lies, I believe, in exactly this: building early, strong relationships with outside groups — perhaps even funding them. More routinely, journalists should find their own sources of raw data where it’s relevant and practical, and fold the mindset, tools and approach of data journalism into their daily workflows the rest of the time. You can already see evidence of the latter on sites like Medium and Bloomberg Gadfly, where journalists are encouraged to incorporate data and charts into their stories and to build an argument. Much of this is already happening: Google’s survey last year found that 42% of reporters use data to tell stories twice or more per week.

But the kind of data being used may be open to question. Data is no more a journalist’s friend than any source — it has an agenda, it’s fallible, and it can often be misquoted or quoted out of context. As journalists we tend to trust statistics, and interpretation of those statistics, a little too readily.

For the sake of balance, here’s a Reuters story from 2014, still online, that quotes an academic study (“Anti-gay communities linked to shorter lives”) despite the fact that in February this year a considerable correction was posted to the original study. (“Once the error was corrected, there was no longer a significant association between structural stigma and mortality risk among the sample of 914 sexual minorities.”) We are not, as journalists, usually given to expressing skepticism about data provided by academics and similar but maybe we should. (And I suppose we should be better at policing our stories, even if the correction is required years after the story first appeared.)

Tony Nash, founder of one of the biggest single troves of economic and trade data online at CompleteIntel.com, believes journalists tend to let their guard down when it comes to data: “The biggest problem with data journalism is that data is taken at face value. No credible journalist would just print a press release but they’ll republish data without serious probing and validation. Statistics agencies, information services firms, polling firms, etc. all laugh at this.”

Day to day journalism, then, could benefit from being both more skeptical and more ambitious about the data it uses. Tony says he’s tried in vain to interest journalists in using his service to mash stories together, so instead writes his own newsletter, often ‘breaking’ stories long before the media: “In July 2017 I showed that Mexico and China are trade competitors but journos always believe China has an upper hand in trade. For all of 2017, Mexico exported more TVs to the US than China. For the first time. It was not a surprise to us. Most journos still have not woken up to that,” he told me recently.

Coupled with tools that make it easier to combine visuals into their stories — Datawrapper, a chart making tool, for example, has launched an extension called River which makes it easier for journalists to identify stories or add data to breaking stories.

But this is just the start. We are in the era of big data and we are only at the beginning of that era. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fancy term to cover the trend of devices being connected to the internet (rather than people through their devices, as it were.) There will be sensors on everything, but there will also be light switches, washing machines, pacemakers, weather-vanes, even cartons of milk, telling us whether they’re on or off, full or empty, fresh or sour. All will give off data. Right now only about 10% of that data is being captured. But that will change. According to IDC, a technology consultancy, more than 90 percent of this IoT data will be available on the cloud, meaning that it will be analyzed, by governments, by companies, and possibly by journalists. The market for all this big data, according to IDC, will grow from $130.1 billion in 2018 to over $203 billion in 2020. This market will primarily be one about decision making: a cultural shift, to “data-driven decision making”.

You can see some of this in familiar patterns already: Most of it is being used to better understand users — think Amazon and Netflix getting a better handle on what you want to buy or watch next. But that’s pretty easy. How about harder stuff, such as taking huge disparate data sets — the entire firehose of Twitter, say, along with Google searches, Facebook usage (all anonymized of course) — to be able to slice target audiences very thinly. One Singapore-based company I spoke to has been able to build a very granular — as they call it — picture of who they want to target, down to the particular tower block, their food preference (pizza), music (goth) and entertainment (English premier league). Not only does this make advertisers happy they’re going after the right people, it makes it much cheaper.

But this is just the beginning of big data. Everything will be spitting out data — sensors in cars, satellites, people, buildings; everything we do, say, write etc. Knowing what data there is will be key: Another Reuters graphics story — which won the award for Data visualization of the year at the Data Journalism Awards 2018 involved realising the value of a data-set of GPS coordinates of infrastructure gathered by aid agencies working on the ground at a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar to analyze the health risks of locating water pumps too close to make-shift toilets. And then there’s knowing whether there might be other data hiding within the data: Buzzfeed’s application of machine learning to Flightradar aircraft data to single out the clues that revealed hidden surveillance flights, which also won a Data Journalism award.

These are small glimpses of the future of the kinds of data journalism we might see.

In the future it will be second nature to journalists to not only know what kind of data is being collected and to turn it to their own uses, but to try to pre-emptively collect it. This will require lateral thinking. Journalists have been using satellite imagery for several years as part of their investigations but this is likely to become even easier, cheaper, and more varied. One entrepreneur I spoke to recently is launching dozens of micro-satellites to monitor methane emissions — data of interest to oil and gas companies worried about gas leaks, governments enforcing greenhouse gas regulations, as well as hedge funds looking for exclusive economic indicators. Imagine if a journalist is able to peruse that data and uncover military activity from heat emissions even before governments know about it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and while journalists may not be at the front of the queue for this kind of data, it’s going to be important to know what kind of data is out there. Already the notion of what a “leading indicator” is has begun to change — an investor in China is much more likely to be trawling through data from Baidu than government statistics to get a sense of what is going on, and smart journalists already know that.

The future of data journalism, if it is successful, will still be journalism. And data will still be data. But as the world of data gets bigger, it pays to remember that the relationship between ‘data’ and journalism is still about thinking and acting creatively and quickly to uncover stories others may not want us to tell. 

Guide #3 – Best Practices for Data Journalism, by Kuek Ser Kuang Keng.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Guide-3-Best-Practices-for-Data-Journalism-by-Kuang-Keng.pdf” title=”Guide #3: Best Practices for Data Journalism by Kuang Keng Kuek Ser”]

About author: Kuang Keng Kuek Ser is an award-winning digital journalist. He produces and consults on data-driven reporting and interactive journalism projects. Keng is also the founder of DataN, a training program that lowers the barrier for newsrooms and journalists with limited resources to integrate data journalism into daily reporting. He has more than 10 years of experience in digital journalism. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2013 to further his studies at New York University’s Studio 20. In 2015, Keng was selected as a Google Journalism Fellow and a Tow-Knight Fellow.
You can contact him via e-mail or follow @kuangkeng on Twitter.

Facts and discourses can be verified across borders, since most information is searchable globally. Data-crunching software can enable a journalist to spot a criminal pattern or abusive commercial practices in minutes. The possibility of classifying and extracting information from massive sets of leaked documents in coordinated global investigative journalism efforts, have made it possible for reporters to provide evidence on  shady dealings on a global scale. Social networks, transparent government practices, public databases, image recognition, mapping, geo-location and open source tools – most of them free – have grown exponentially. They provide an opportunity to any citizen with a computer or a smartphone, special training and good intuition to expose lies behind wars. And free applications and software make it easy for reporters investigating a public interest issue to link a name with a phone in many places of the world, or track criminals’ movements by connecting their usernames and locations.

Of course, journalists still have to do the tedious digging and street reporting, cultivating sources, and clinging on to stories until they make sense. They must have the courage to resist powerful pressures to give up, even when these seem unbearable. But to be a true investigative reporter today; to be able to cope and respond to challenges posed by globalised and sophisticated trends of crime, corruption and environmental depredation, among other evils, it is indispensable to fine-tune the old philosophy with three new practices: be Open, Systematic and Safe.

To be ‘Open’ means to look beyond the borders of your country. While it is true that most people prefer local stories, finding the links to the outside world would probably make them better, as facts can be widely verified and contrasted. Hence, if a reporter finds a corporation polluting a river in her country, she can go to international resources, such as Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Investigative Dashboard, or to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Corporate Watch. She may find that this same company is owned by an industrial group with equally poor environmental practices elsewhere.

Sometimes a story is too dangerous or too complex for a reporter to cover it alone. So to be “Open” also means to collaborate, sometimes even with media competitors. Moreover, it implies that investigative reporters need to work with experts of other professions, which is partly what, for instance,  Finance Uncovered and Thompson-Reuters’ Reporting on illicit finance in Africa attempt to do in their cross-border investigations.

To be ‘Systematic’ entails a proficient use of tools and software to scrape data and clean it; to organise and visualise it so that the numbers can tell the story. This is what India Spend does so well to explain, for example, the magnitude of pre-trial detention in India, or what the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism did to profile this year’s candidates in the general elections. The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) has, among many other resources for investigative journalists, a complete list of tools to get anyone started on data journalism.

There is another side to practising a systematic investigative journalism. It means to look for information in an efficient way, for example, having at hand a template to continuously request public information and even inviting your readers to use it, like Atlatszo.hu does.  Investigative journalism of this kind can also mean systematically encouraging the public at large to help you complete investigations with data, documents, photos, like the OCCRP does with its OCCRP Leaks. Finally, reporters must be systematic in doing their searches. There are sites that help a reporter to connect a domain with a name; or see social media activity underway in a given place. These and many other tools and resources are explained by Paul Myers in his Research Clinic.

The third condition that an investigative journalist must include in their daily routines is Safety: physical, legal and digital. Watching out for yourself, your data and your sources in the digital environment is mandatory and there are many easy to use tools and tutorials – such as Tactical Tech’s resource-packed website – that can guide journalists. Physical security and legal protection are vitally important habits and below is a list of resources and organizations, which provide security advice and support to journalists.

The search tools, the global reach, and the efficient management of huge databases surely make today’s investigative journalist capable of going wider and deeper when fighting more complex and invisible abuses. Indeed, to take advantage of this potential, they must master new tools and make them part of their everyday journalistic practice. But, beware: for all the ingenuity of new digital tools at our disposal, investigative journalism is still about the story, getting it right, making it fair and uncovering wrongs to the public good that some prefer to keep hidden. And that has not gotten any easier!

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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Stories such as this one, when the sheer impact of the revealed truth rocks the audience, are occasional at best. In everyday journalism, however, to get the public to pay attention to your story, to make it not only truthful, but also credible and attractive, is a hard task. And it has become even harder in the digital era. Information flows constantly through our portable electronic devices, like a river of muddy waters, dragging the authentic pieces of story-telling together with the fake; the verified; and the gossip. So if journalists want to have any chance at succeeding in this battle, to keep people informed about what really happens and why, amidst the immense debris, they must not only find good stories, but must also elevate their story-telling to an art.

There are examples of this inventiveness all over the world. For example, there is the traditional long-form literary journalism, of which Latin Americans seem to be masters. El Faro in tiny El Salvador just won the Gabriel Garcia Marques Excellency Award for their moving stories and documentaries.  Other organizations, like Initium have created a data sounds project where average temperature for the last 131 years in Hong Kong is visualized and played as musical notes.

Others are turning to explaining and making things more understandable in a confusing world of multiple competing versions of every event. One of the first to try this was US Vox.com, with “explainers” in short cards, such as this one about the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The New York Times created The Upshot, with pieces like this one that shows people how to read the current conflicting polls on the US presidential election. In the South, GKillCity from Ecuador has tried a similar version of explaining cards like in this story about UN human rights recommendations to Ecuador. There are other tools to make things clearer to the audiences:  timelines about the history; maps to locate the events; or even crossing place and time in interactive multimedia like this one made by Kloop in Kyrgyzstan to show how a protected forest in the capital Bishkek is disappearing as developers expand on ever-stretching rules.

The best way to tell stories is conversation. In the recent coup attempt in Turkey, journalists of Medyascope explained to their followers in a live-broadcast on Periscope what was going on and how they understood it and bringing the makers of news closer to their audiences. The news bots are actually lots of fun, particularly for topics people get passionate about, like soccer and elections. Univision tried the Purple Bot during the party primaries and the number of its fans grew by thousands. You don’t have to be rich or sit in the Silicon Valley to develop a bot.

Two young Spanish entrepreneurs developed politi_bot in the chat application Telegram, and did a great job informing people about the latest elections in their country.

Bots imply that a journalist and a developer have sat together to think about stories: like in art, content and form become one concept.  The potential to communicate and engage depends a lot on how well the journalist and developer work together. The result of such team work could be games, such as this one developed by ProPublica in which the user not only knows about failures in health care services to treat emergency heart attacks in New York City, but can also personally experience the anxiety of the patients; or this one crafted by Caixin, in which users can help a mayor of a Chinese city reduce pollution. These games can say a lot more about what’s happening in your part of the world than many editorials.

Where things are tough, and telling truthful stories can cost you your liberty or life, many journalists have become experts in nuance and subtlety. And under such circumstances, good political humor is always truthful. See how Medialab from Armenia reveals their political scene through cartoons.

The name of the story-telling game in the digital era is to be creative, break molds, think about your audience and work with other professionals, such as artists and software engineers. The trick is to make the routine news of everyday a bit more fun and engaging; and the deep and dead serious, attractive and, yet, still believable.
This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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However, just when many were forecasting doomsday for journalism, stories of Davids against Goliaths spring about in the world: small teams of journalists using the same technologies developed by the giants to find sources out in the world wide open web, to produce stories that expose wrongdoings by mighty rulers and potent corporations. These reporters learn how to play with the available software, use social networks and chatting services to collaborate with each other across borders and also, to contrast information and then, publish simultaneously to give power to their punches.

For example, Bellingcat, a group of citizen investigative journalists, tracked the route of the Buk missile-launcher carrying the missile that was to down the Malaysian Airlines plane over Eastern Ukraine. They used Google Earth (as well as work on-site), to verify the locations depicted in photos posted by the public; satellite pictures (the purchase of which was crowd-funded) and photos of Russian soldiers on the social networking site VKontakte that enabled the investigators to determine to which military unit the missile launcher belonged. Bellingcat also used Checkdesk, a collaboration platform, to ask citizens to verify the authenticity of specific videos and photos posted in social media and Bridge, a crowdsourcing translation tool, for quick verification of significant events during the war in Ukraine.

Journalists of Rutas del Conflicto are completing a data-base of massacres in Colombia with the victims’ aid. They want every name to be right, to bring back some humanity to the insanity of a country still resistant to look at the real face of its own tragedy; Kenyan Joshua Ogure and his friends managed to use GPS to put their beloved neighbourhood of the Kibera in the outskirts of Nairobi on the map and discovered that 81 percent of the schools were considered informal and that the government had only built 4 percent of Kibera’s schools to host almost 60.000 students.

Other groups, such as Chequeado in Argentina, Africa Check in South Africa, Stop-Fake in Ukraine, follow public discourses of their leaders and fellow journalists, join forces with users and check them with publicly available data to help citizens sort out truth from deception. According to the Reporter’s Lab, there are currently 96 active fact-checking projects in 37 countries; the third Global Fact-Checking Summit will bring leading fact-checkers to Buenos Aires in June.

Despite the uncertain future, opportunity is knocking on the door of journalism. Millions of sources –from public databases and leaked documents to photos posted in social networks and experts and witnesses among the readers – are open to be used by journalists and techies. There seems to be no limit to what reporters can discover and verify across countries and topics to hold power accountable and unearth thorny truths.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
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World Newspaper Congress

There were five key takeaways: constant innovation (‘think like a startup’); blending tech, content and development; collaboration (‘why go it alone?’); mobile; leveraging technology and data.

The five takeaways are all driven by one “simple” fact: the digital transition. Speaker after speaker “gave pleas, encouragement and warnings to their colleagues about the urgency of today’s publishing environment”.

As George Nimeh, Chief Digital Officer for Kurier in Austria, put it: “If you don’t start every day by thinking about your digital journey, you are in deep trouble.”

Constant innovation

“Innovation is day-to-day business,” said Thiago Madeiros Ribeiro, Digital Product Manager of Brazil’s RBS Media Group. Newspapers must break away from the assembly-line approach. Instead they need to make it possible for staff with different skills to come together to solve problems and get new products to market.

“The days of launching a product, letting it just sit there, and then moving on to another product are over. Everything needs to be tested, evaluated, developed and refined… constantly.”

Blending tech, content and development

Publishers need to blend tech, content and development. Tech isn’t an end in itself, it’s the means of telling a better story. Developers have to be at the same table as developers. Newspapers need to involve developers and designers in the news meetings and strategy discussions – “they are just as much storytellers as journalists are”.

Collaboration

To prosper, the media industry has to be as good at collaboration as it is at competition.

“Whether it be mobile, video, analytics, the upcoming onslaught of wearables, etc., it’s obvious that collaboration and partnerships are a key part of any publisher’s digital strategy, particularly when going up against goliaths and especially if you are a smaller publisher.” Collaborating enables publishers to access skills they don’t possess in-house, while at the same time saving costs.

“Although we often say that small and nimble is better, most of us are about as nimble as a big cargo ship.”

Mobile

In the current environment, mobile is first, last and everything in between. Partnerships are essential if you’re to succeed in that format – news publishers aren’t mobile companies and app development talent can only be found in specialist companies. Focus on what you do best and collaborate to do the rest.

“If you want to figure out social, then you have to figure out mobile. If you want to figure out video, you have to figure out mobile.”

Leveraging data

Data ‘oils’ the digital news business. You need to collect and analyse as much relevant data as you can to get the best out of your products and services. But for most it still has only potential value. “The actual monetisation of data is a much more involved process even after the not-insignificant work of collecting it.”

World Editors Forum

Key themes of the editors’ meeting were: the ongoing transformation of the newsroom; the impact of Edward Snowden; press freedom; video; pushing the boundaries of globalised journalism and digital journalism.

Ongoing transformation of the newsroom

“Stories under 500 words do well. Stories longer than 800 words work well. And in the middle there’s a deadzone.” – Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice; Co-Director, Media, Economics and Entrepreneurship; Director, Future of Journalism at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, USA

“We still get people saying ‘we should hold this for print’ and I say ‘why not just throw it in the trash?’ Convergence is the only way forward. You cannot keep print and digital separate. It won’t work, not even in developing contexts.” – David Callaway.

Press Freedom

“This Golden Pen [of Freedom award] …materializes the support and shows that he is not forgotten. That he is one of us. That an attack on one journalist is an attack on us all and that jailing a journalist is a crime against humanity.” – Swedish journalist Martin Schibbye, accepting the 2014 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), on behalf of imprisoned Ethiopian publisher, journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega.

National security, liberty, regulation and the role of a free press in the post-Snowden era

“It’s created a very real chilling effect among our sources. They’ve become nervous about talking with us. They don’t want their phone numbers associated with us. And government employees who previously routinely talked to us, now won’t.” – Gary Pruitt, President & CEO, The Associated Press, USA.

“Journalism may have to be moved ‘off shore” to avoid creeping surveillance” – Janine Gibson, Editor-in-Chief, theguardian.com and Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media, UK.

Pushing the boundaries of global journalism and digital journalism

“I believe we are at the beginning of a major movement in cross-border, collaborative investigative journalism.” – Rosental Alves, Professor, Knight Chair of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin, USA.

“Geography in the newsroom is the most important: having coders, designers, product people in the same room.” – Aron Pilhofer.

“Consistent revenue comes from a combination of both short, sharp video and long, evergreen content.” – Marie-Noëlle Vallès, Head of Video, AFP, France.

“Younger generations are increasingly interested in news but increasingly cynical about sources of news.” – Jason Mojica, Editor-in-Chief, Vice News, USA.

World Advertising Forum

The trends that have been shaping the industry in recent years show no sign of slowing, though digital revenues from tables are encouraging. The key takeaways were: print is in decline, but still the main source of revenue; accountability, ROI essential; new ways of measuring impact; programmatic may save digital advertising; and tablets offering good yield.

Print in decline, but still the main source of revenue

“The real money in newspapers is still in print – digital is our future, but it is a future not yet realised.” The situation isn’t helped by the fact that “advertising fatigue” is growing, with more people turning to ad blockers for browsers, mobile and TV.

Accountability, ROI becoming essential

Today’s advertisers expect return-on-investment (ROI) and a much higher level of accountability than in the past. Businesses are buying into ROI, and it is increasingly governing decisions.

New ways of measuring impact

The industry needs to look at new ways of measuring its impact. “We need to stop thinking in terms of how many people read us every day and focus on how many people we influence every day”.

Programmatic is saving digital advertising

Programmatic advertising isn’t a passing phase, “it’s very much a stable part of the digital ecosystem”. “It’s no longer a question of should publishers get involved with programmatic, but how do we get involved?”

Tablets offering very good yield

“Tablet advertising is giving a very, very good yield. That is something that is similar to print in giving good value for us,” with tablets showing responses of up to 40 times higher than online ads.

1) Data will become even more of a strategic resource for media.

2) Better tools will emerge that democratize data skills.

3) News apps will explode as a primary wayMeasuring the impact of data-driven journalism for people to consume data journalism.

4) Being digital first means being data-centric and mobile-friendly.

5) Expect more robojournalism, but know that human relationships and storytelling still matter.

6) More journalists will need to study the social sciences and statistics.

7) There will be higher standards for accuracy and corrections.

8) Competency in security and data protection will become more important.

9) Audiences will demand more transparency on reader data collection and use.

10) Conflicts over public records, data scraping, and ethics will surely arise.

11) Collaborate with libraries and universities as archives, hosts, and educators.

12) Expect data-driven personalization and predictive news in wearable interfaces..

13) More diverse newsrooms will produce better data journalism.

14) Be mindful of data-ism and bad data. Embrace skepticism.

Read more:
The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism
Data Journalism Handbook

Read more: UK daily newspapers have doubled in price since 2004 and shrunk in size – no wonder sales are down

In this episode you will learn about methods for investigating corruption and organized crime. You will meet Paul Radu from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the most inspiring investigative reporters from Romania. He tells the story of those working at the new frontiers of investigation.

The ad is a sign of the times for Nepal where owning a mobile phone has become common throughout the country, even on the slopes of Mt.  Everest.  The Nepal Telecommunications Authority reports that in August 2013 mobile phone penetration reached 72% of the population.  Mobile “smart phones” have also contributed to the rapid increase in Internet penetration in Nepal, growing from 19% in 2012 to almost 27% in August of 2013.

Newspaper publishers in Nepal have begun to experience the early stages of their audience’s shifting media habits.  Consequently, Nepal’s Centre for Investigative Journalism hosted “Doing Digital” a seminar for publishing executives trying to understand the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital transition.  MDIF presented “Journalism in the Digital World” a summary of the opportunities and the challenges presented by readers, listeners and viewers all merging to become the digital audience.  The digital transition is clearly a tale of the best of days and the worst of days, the good and the bad.

For publishers, the best of days is epitomized by the wealth of new tools and techniques.  Digital has made online story-telling a new narrative form combining the use of text narrative, audio, video, data and infographics.  Examples discussed included the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning “Snowfall” as well as other examples from around the region.  The discussion highlighted two key points.  First, for these multimedia stories to be successful, journalism has to be combined with technology.  Second, the recognition that most publishers do not have the resources of the New York Times and that there are free or low cost tools like Timeline.js to help publishers tell multimedia stories.

Digital technology has also made data journalism a new opportunity for journalists and their audiences to find patterns and stories in the data.  Data journalism like Veja’s Rede de Escandalos provided tangible example of data journalism’s reporting power.   One of Brazil’s oldest news magazines, Veja used its own past reporting on scandals in Brazil to create a unique database of scandals, actors, government bodies involved in each scandal.

Finally, digital technology revolutionizes the way publishers, editors and reporters communicate with their audience.  Digital in many cases has turned audience communication into stories.  India’s website “I Paid A Bribe” website demonstrated how audience engagement and communication can create ongoing coverage of key themes, like corruption.

But publishers attending the seminar also focused on the business models needed to survive the transition. Unfortunately, the discussion of business models presented the challenge facing all digital publishers, where will online revenue come from.  The challenge is acute in countries like Nepal, where audience adoption of online has grown much faster than local advertisers’ transition to online.

During the seminar, MDIF discussed several examples of revenue streams that publishers should evaluate as they begin to actively publish online.  Since online advertising remains a very small revenue opportunity in Nepal, the discussion focused on enterprise and project social funding services, often called crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding services have expanded greatly with regional specialists, like Africa’s mobile fundraising platform M-changa or industry specialists like IndieVoices, which focuses on independent media and journalism projects. In addition to crowdfunding, syndication and content expense sharing partnerships were also discussed where two organizations partner to share the cost and potentially the revenue of a digital reporting project.  Finally, different subscription and paid content models were presented.  Though many of the Nepali publishers believed that the technology to easily collect revenue from their online audience was not yet available in Nepal.

Nepali media and media in any region undergoing a rapid digital transition face both opportunities and challenges.  Digital reporting and story telling tools have created a whole ways of communicating a story.  But, these new tools require training, technology and infrastructure support.  None of these are free.  Revenues from advertisers typically lag the audience’s move to digital platforms, creating a gap in digital’s ability to generate revenue.  This leaves publishers who move online with the challenge of how to generate some new revenue to support these new requirements.  CIJ Nepal’s seminar for regional publishers created a foundation for an active discussion and experimentation with both the opportunities and challenges facing Nepal’s traditional print media.