International Journalism Festival in Perugia 2014 Angélica Momi Peralta Ramos from LA NACION Argentina

1. Data Journalism in a hostile political
environment
LA NACION
Momi Peralta Ramos
@momiperalta
LA NACION DATA
www.lanacion.com.ar/data

2. About LA NACION
• Based in Buenos Aires,
Argentina
• Sunday print circulation:
+ 330.000
• www.lanacion.com
unique visitors/month:
+ 15MM
• 9 magazine titles
• Impremedia (90%): US hisp.
leading publishing company

3. LA NACION Data
It s LA NACION s initiative to develop data
journalism and contribute to opening data in
Argentina

4. Transparency?
http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/

5. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1857498
David Banisar, FOIA Expert. October 2012
Not law,
but decree

6. Argentina s Official advertising funds distribution
2009 – 2013: Friends, politicians and… a stylist!
50% of this amount went
to 10 media groups …
the ones closer to
Government.
In the last period even a
hairdresser (stylist)
received more
advertising money than
the largest newspapers
in Argentina.

8. Why DATA?
- Data is a new raw material for journalism
- Activate demand of public information
- Discover stories hidden in datasets
- Allow citizen´s collaboration
- It is the future of journalism
@momiperalta
CHALLENGE STATUS QUO

9. HOW...is this possible??
• EXCUSES:
– There is NO DATA or DATA is not credible
– We are not the US or the UK in terms or
transparency
– We DON’T have programmers in our newsroom
– We DON’T have skills in our newsroom to gather
or analize datasets
– We don’t… we don’t…
KILLING THIS SCKEPTICISM
ONE BY ONE

10. 1. NEVER STOP LEARNING!
• Learn free online in MOOCs , webinars, blogs, books
• Go to conferences or follow them online.
• ONA 2010 was our first inspiration into dataj, a pre-
conference workshop in ONA.
• Become a member. Subscribe to DDJ Lists.

11. 2. EMBRACE HACKTIVISM
Big community of developers and NGOs willing
to help!
@momiperalta

12. 3. START CREATING DATASETS,
START SMALL
…BE
HUMBLE,
BECOME A
DATA
BUILDER

13. 4. THE TEAM. look around…
• The TEAM is your ENGINE, first HEART then BRAINS…
The perfect team…
DEVELOPER JOURNALIST
IMAGE from Scraperwiki
https://scraperwiki.com/
@momiperalta
DESIGNERDATA MINER

14. Tools & technology
D3.js

15. Tableau Public for data interactives (without developers)

16. DATA: The Guardian Data
store
PLAY WITH OTHER´s DATA!

17. DATAJ CASE
INFLATION in ARGENTINA
How to show (with data)
what you can’t tell?
@momiperalta

20. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/argentina-becomes-first-nation-
censured-by-imf-on-inflation-data.html

21. @fcoel - @momiperalta

22. ADELCO (Consumer Association)
Monthly registration, since 2006, of the same 28 products, untill September 2012
2 Baskets of product prices index

23. ADELCO (Consumer Association)
@fcoel - @momiperalta

25. http://data.lanacion.com.ar/dashboards/5068/inflacion-y-precios/

27. DATAJ CASE
ARGENTINA SENATE EXPENSES 2004-2013
@fcoel - @momiperalta

28. SENATE EXPENSES 2004 – 2013
@momiperalta
Processed
more than
34.000
scanned
image PDFs
to build a
structured
dataset,
published
front page
stories now
being
investigated
by justice
…….

29. …for example after analyzing dates we found
overlapped ranges of trips

30. …so why not ask for people s help to
extract MORE data and more
stories???
REUSE

31. Open Collaboration. Citizenship,
NGOs & Universities. Long Term
engagement

32. Senate Expenses – Team Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEZ2xMwPMWo&feature=youtu.be

33. La Plata City Major
Floodings
(April 2013)
• Collaborative Tools:
Google Spreadsheets
Google Maps
Google Fusion Tables
• Other tools: Excel, Tableau
Public.

34. Hypothesis: Gov was hiding real number of deaths to
diminish impact of its own responsabilities
• We got 150 copies of
handwritten death certificates in
La Plata for April (1st-15th).
• We made a database model,
typed each case details into a
spreadsheet, then ordered,
filtered, analysed…
@fcoel - @momiperalta

35. • Visualizations for time & place
helped us confirm that most
deaths happened between April
2nd and 4th (or were directly
related) and many were located
over water streams running
under the city and/or flooded
blocks.

36. Impact. Starting from 51 deaths …
One day after publishing: A judge
confirms 60 deaths due to major
floodings
45 days after: 78 deaths officially
confirmed

37. http://youtu.be/a56fWexw8uo <- Meet the team. Journalist,
dataminer, programmer, designer, data producer and me, multitasker.
Goodie for later!
Team explains how collaboration worked

38. Open Assets Declarations. News App in
collaboration with 3 transparency NGOs,
Collaborative Tools:
Google Spreadsheets
Trello
Document Cloud
Team: around 45
LN staff, NGOs staff
+ 30 volunteers

39. Before & After
Public servant declaration of assets.
In total we typed 15.000 rows x 28 cols

40. The Check-a-thons (checking marathons)
@fcoel - @momiperalta

41. Collaborative Checking
(in presence & remote)

42. OPEN

43. DATAFEST
Engaging the knowledge community
@fcoel - @momiperalta

44.  Opened +30 datasets and made “Dataset cheat sheets” to make them
accessible and ready for analysis with data mining techniques or data
visualization in our first DATAFEST 2012 and 2013.
• Organized by LA NACION and UNIVERSIDAD AUSTRAL Masters Degree in
Data Mining and Universidad Austral Communications Faculty.

45. Journalists explain
raw DATAsets
content and what
could be asked
Dataminers ,
developers and
statistitians help
solve this questions
adding value to the
datasets

46. DataSets inventory and their “cheat sheets”
SHARE!

47. Cheat Sheet : Subsidies for the Public Bus Transport System – Cleaned ,
normalized and open DATA

48. keep SELF MOTIVATED
IF LOCAL FRUSTRATION?
No resources, no Foi, no Data?, no mindset?!...
THEN GLOBAL INSPIRATION!
Same world regarding technology, talent,
and the explosion of open knowledge and
digital data.

49. Thanks…
@momiperalta
LA NACION DATA – @LNdata
May 2014