Welcome remarks

Stories & stats: the FT Coronavirus trajectory tracker explained

FT’s trajectory tracker started out with a simple graph, to help people know the rising number of coronavirus cases and deaths per country. John Burn-Murdoch will tell us how he built and updated the tracker every night, while hundreds of people asked questions, gave new ideas and feedback on social media. Thousands turned to the tracker daily to understand the exponential growth of the pandemic. Thanks to this tracker, the FT won the attention and trust of a new audience and has seen a rise in its number of subscriptions.

Confronting Racism: Real-time social issues data journalism

Less than a month after the killing of George Floyd re-ignited the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, CNN released a sweeping study of race and racism in the UK. Based on exclusive new polling, first-person interviews and never-before-seen video, the project uncovered the huge difference between black and white people's experience of life in Britain. How did we pull together this deeply researched, data-driven, multi-platform project, and how did we do it so quickly? Richard Allen Greene, the project's editorial lead, explains.

Grab a coffee & move your legs

Panel: From stories to solutions, why journalists need access to public data

Access to information held by public bodies - data, documents, visuals,etc - is often necessary for producing a wide range of stories and investigations of public interest that promote government transparency and bring power to account. In the mis/disinformation age, this access has never been more important but in certain countries, is also more challenging than ever. How do you submit a request for data? How do you deal with data access obstruction? And if you need to go to court to get the information you need? The speakers on this panel will explain how they’ve conducted demands for data, lobbied for transparency and navigated legal frameworks in their countries, and transnationally, to investigate and unveil stories on corruption, corporate interests and organised crime across Europe.

This panel will be moderated by Mathias Vermeulen from AWO

Online Lab Sessions in English, German and French

1. The human side of data matters (in English)

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, data journalism has proven to be a powerful tool to explain the math of contagion, but also highlight the people and the stories behind the numbers. These stories looked rather different when contrasting local and national data. During this masterclass, we will look at the coverage around COVID and other aspects like productivity, and learn a method to observe and analyse the figures with a focus on the human aspects that lie in data.

2. Warum wir mehr automatisierte Daten im Newsroom brauchen/ Why do we need more data automation in the newsrooms?

Wie wird sich die Pandemie in naher Zukunft auf die Wirtschaft auswirken? Das war die Frage, die Natalie und Jannes auf die Suche nach Insolvenzzahlen in Deutschland führte. Um die gesammelten Daten zu automatisieren, entwickelten sie eine Website, die täglich mit Datenberichten über Insolvenzen im Privat- und Unternehmenssektor in Deutschland aktualisiert wird.

How will the pandemic affect the economy in the near future? This was the starting question that led Natalie and Jannes on a quest for insolvency and bankruptcy data in Germany. As data was gathered, they felt the need for automatisation so they went on to develop a website that is updated daily with data reports about insolvency in the private and corporate sector in Germany since 2018. An array of stories about the economic impact of COVID-19 on German companies is emerging thanks to this new data tool.

3. Laboratoires et médecins: utiliser les données pour enquêter sur les systèmes de santé Publique / Labs and Doctors: using data to investigate public health systems (in French)

Plus de 15 rédactions de presse régionales françaises se sont associées pour publier “Transparence CHU”, une enquête révélant les liens financiers entre les entreprises pharmaceutiques et les hôpitaux publics à travers le pays. Comment les données publiques ont-elles été analysées? Comment le travail collectif a-t-il été coordonné? Quels outils et méthodes ont abouti à la publication de ces rapports? En tant que membre du collectif Data+Local et un des contributeurs de l'enquête, Frédéric partagera la méthodologie et les coulisses de Transparence CHU.

Over 15 local French newsrooms teamed up to publish "Transparence CHU", an investigation uncovering the financial links between pharmaceutical companies and public hospitals across the country. How was open-data analysed? How was the collective work coordinated? What tools and methods resulted in the publication of these reports? Member of the "Data+Local" collective and one of the contributors to the investigation, Frederic and Marie will share the methodology and backstage stories behind Transparence CHU.

3. Warum wir mehr automatisierte Daten im Newsroom brauchen/ Why do we need more data automation in newsrooms?

Wie wird sich die Pandemie in naher Zukunft auf die Wirtschaft auswirken? Das war die Frage, die Natalie und Jannes auf die Suche nach Insolvenzzahlen in Deutschland führte. Um die gesammelten Daten zu automatisieren, entwickelten sie eine Website, die täglich mit Datenberichten über Insolvenzen im Privat- und Unternehmenssektor in Deutschland aktualisiert wird.

How will the pandemic affect the economy in the near future? This was the starting question that led Natalie and Jannes on a quest for insolvency and bankruptcy data in Germany. As data was gathered, they felt the need for automatisation so they went on to develop a website that is updated daily with data reports about insolvency in the private and corporate sector in Germany since 2018. An array of stories about the economic impact of COVID-19 on German companies is emerging thanks to this new data tool.

Welcome remarks

In Conversation with...Julia Angwin

Pulitzer Prize winner Julia Angwin will talk with Adam Thomas on how The Markup is innovating in the data collection space and building data products like Blacklight and The Citizen Browser Project to counter disinformation and produce public interest journalism.

Data & the pandemic at El País

Kiko and Mariano will discuss covering the Covid-19 pandemic for El Pais as Spain was hit by one of the first and deadliest outbreaks in Europe back in March. How did the newsroom harness data and visuals to communicate effectively about Covid-19 and answer the public's most pressing questions? They will walk us through the process of building visual stories like “A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air”, which became one of El País' most-read stories in multiple languages.

One by one: using the right numbers (& stories) to place femicide on the public agenda

A team of 30 reporters at the regional newspaper, Jornal do Commercio in Brazil, came together to collect data, follow police investigations and, most importantly, tell the stories of each woman murdered in the state of Pernambuco in 2018. Karoline will share how they put together the special report #OnebyOne (#UmaporUma) filling a huge lack of official data on gender-related killings, raising awareness about the impunity involved, and pointing to potential solutions.

Grab a coffee & move your legs!

Solutions Journalism: how data can help reveal unexpected good news

Solutions journalism provides rigorous, evidence-based coverage of responses to social problems. This presentation will focus on “positive deviants” - outliers in data that show better than expected results can lead to unexpected success stories for healthcare, social policy, etc

Matthew will look at how positive deviants can be when writing solutions-focused stories and their importance in helping to counter bad news fatigue.

Online Lab Sessions in English, French and German

1. Discover Pinpoint: a new research tool to investigate large collections of data (in English)

This workshop is an introduction to Pinpoint, Google's latest research tool to enter the Journalist Studio. Pinpoint helps journalists find stories and analise huge collections of data in troves of PDFs, handwritten documents, archives, and images.

2. Présentation de Pinpoint: un nouvel outil de données pour le journalisme d'investigation (in French)

Cet atelier est une introduction à Pinpoint, le dernier outil de recherche de Google pour entrer dans le Journalist Studio. Pinpoint aide les journalistes à trouver des sujets et analyse un grand répertoire de données rassemblées dans une collection de PDF, de documents manuscrits, d’archives et d’images.

3. Entdecke Pinpoint: Ein neues Recherchetool zur Untersuchung großer Datensammlungen (in German)

Dieser Workshop ist eine Einführung in Pinpoint, Googles neuem Recherchetool im Journalist Studio. Pinpoint hilft Journalisten dabei, Geschichten zu finden und große Datensammlungen in PDF-Dateien, handgeschriebenen Dokumenten, Archiven und Bildern zu analysieren.