1. DATA SPEAKING TRUTH TO
POWER
Peter Verweij
AMI and D3-Media

2. What I will be talking about! - 1
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Let’ s start with a small story……
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ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst
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Data are not speaking; but journalists are gathering data turn
them in to stories.
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Journalism is producing truth seeking stories in the public
interest based on data.

3. What I will be talking about! - 2
•
The digitalization causes an enormous increase of all sorts of
data stored by all kind of organization from governments to
NGO's and companies.
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Data are very fashionable
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Journalist should check policies based on data and dig in data
to find news

4. What I will be talking about! - 3
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How strong is journalism against the powers?
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Journalism can feed the public debate to help control and check
the use of power.
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But: Journalism is in crisis; subscription are dropping, lot of
journalism jobs are lost.
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Data journalism is quality reporting and one of directions to re
invent journalism.
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Here is some data about journalism:

5. Where are we going?
•From print to online
•From text to multimedia
production
•From news to
background, analysis,
investigations and
features
•Looking for a new
business model and for a
new journalist
•http://www.economist.com/node/18904136

6. 4 Year Category Trend by Quarter:
Daily Newspapers
Comment:
Circulation has declined annually by 5.75 % since 2008, equivalent to
461,000 copies.

7. Observations:
•Times remain tough for all in the print industry.
•Current GDP projections indicate that we will achieve a 2.5% GDP growth
albeit that our CPI inflation is just over 6%.
•The Daily Newspaper category continues to decline with several
sharp drops in total circulation. That said, vernacular circulation
growth continues
•Weeklies have posted solid growth.
•The Weekend English and Afrikaans categories continues to slide while
vernacular growth continues.
•Local Newspapers are down overall. However, several titles reflect strong
growth including Tembisan.
•Free Newspapers are stable overall, but it would be remiss not to mention
again the startling growth of the Zululand Eyethu, up 303%.
•SOURCE: GORDON PATTERSON

8. What is data journalism ?
• It looks like data journalism is young, but it already started
in 1968 with Philip Meyer reporting about the Detroit’s
riots using an IBM mainframe
• Is it poverty or relative deprivation?
• Other names:
• Precision journalism; analytical journalism; CARR and
now data journalism
• But all agree: Journalism can be improved by using tools
from science

9. The Guardian over Riots and
Poverty

10. Traffic Accidents
From Database: 2000
accidents
Top ten
Dangerous junctions
Map is the story

11. Hurricane Andrew and construction fraud in Miami
Classic Hurricane Andrew

12. How does data journalism
work?
Journalism
•Story idea
•Finding data sources
•Collecting data: importing
scraping
•Analyzing data
•Produce the story: visualize
Science
•Hypothesis
•Building a measurement tool
•Fieldwork and experiment
•Analyzing data
•Test the hypothesis
•Publish in a journal

13. Finding Data: story idea
Turn the web in a database
WHERE:
National Bureau for
statistics
NGO's
Web: find excel
Web: tables
HOW:
Download
Copy-paste
Scraping: Outwit Hub

14. Mother of all Data Journalism
Analyzing data
Spreadsheets
MS Office: excel
Open Office
R project or PSPP
Cleaning data: Refine
Ordering data: top10
Simple calculations
for key figures
Graphs: bar, pie,
scatter diagrams

15. Visualize!
Fusion Tables
Tableau
Qgis
Cape Town councilors
and property value

16. Data Journalism: team work and
important
IMPORTANT
More data
More use of data for
policies
Check
Find hidden trends
TEAM WORK
Writer
Researcher
Hacker
Designer
Involvement of the
editor

17. Convergence
• Cooperation between hardcopy and online
• Online interactive data
• Hardcopy static picture
• Complementing approaches

18. Are African data
speaking…..Take a datashower

19. Example from City Press
Visualize Story Sept 16
Council bigwigs get fat
cheques
http://www.citypress.co.za/Politics/News/Council-bigwigs-get-fat-
cheques-20120915

20. Data “Boot Camp” Helps Kenyan Reporter
Expose School Sanitation Woes
Link

21. Khayelitsha
•Simple and good by a
junior reporter of the
Cape Times
•Here is the link to the
story
• And here is
spreadsheet

22. So you can start simple
but…..
•Sometimes the data are
not there, although they
should
•For example members of
SA parliament
•I wanted to run a copy
of a Dutch story about
representation of the
parliament. Here is
copy

23. NRC-H over leden van de Tweede Kamer

24. Advanced stories are
possible too
•Social network
analysis of Twitter
contacts between 500
SA journalists
•Story
•Zoom

25. To conclude
• There is light at the end of the tunnel…..
• But it could mean that an other train is approaching fast
• For example: sovereign debt ratings by Moody’s
• The press release of the Treasury was saying Rating is Baa1
• But did not pay much attention to the negative outlook!
• That is a nice way to get “good news”
• Battle on!

26. THANK YOU VERY MUCH
•E-mail: peter@d3-media.nl
•Twitter: peter_verweij
•Blog: http://d3-media.blogspot.nl/