Data-driven radio journalism

An introduction to the workshop

Jacopo Ottaviani – @JacopoOttaviani

Istanbul, 28-29 September 2015

Input

• Data
• Numbers
• Statistics
• Tables
• Reports with figures
• Spreadsheets (e.g. Excel)
• Geographic data
• Other structured datasets

Output

Stories packaged in various formats, such as:

• Text articles
• Video
• Radio pieces
• Visuals (charts, maps)
• Series
• Vaster media operations

Data journalism in a nutshell

Input

• Data
• Numbers
• Statistics
• Tables
• Reports with figures
• Spreadsheets (e.g. Excel)
• Geographic data
• Other structured datasets

Output

Stories packaged in various formats, such as:

• Text articles
• Video
• Radio pieces
• Visuals (charts, maps)
• Online media
• Vaster media operations

Data journalism in a nutshell

From this:

To this:

Or this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/14/world/middleeast/syria-war-deaths.html?_r=0

Or this:

Or both 

i.e., running a cross-platform strategy

1. http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes
2. http://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief

www.themigrantsfiles.com

Data is not necessarily the only element the story is based on.

Data is not necessarily the only element the story is based on.

Data journalism can be integrated within traditional content

Data is not necessarily the only element the story is based on.

Data journalism can be integrated within traditional content

Data is a tool to strengthen and 

complement existing methods to tell stories

Data can be seen as a goldmine of stories, as well as a resource to contextualise narratives

Digging into a dataset can lead you to interesting stories.

You can aggregate, filter, refine, cross and finally visualise data.

We'll explore tools and methods that can be combined to package and publish your content

Calc / Excel – spreadsheets

CartoDB (maps)

OpenRefine

Datawrapper (charts)

Generic methods to build radio data-driven narratives, e.g:

• More inspiration to find data stories here: http://datatherapy.org/activities/activity-finding-a-story-in-data/

1. Research questions
2. Zooming in/out
3. Local vs. Global
4. Data humanisation
5. Contextualisation

Micro-data teams

• data expert

• radio journalist(s)

Micro-data teams

• data expert

• radio journalist(s)

We'll interact and combine different skill sets and experiences to make experiments of radio data-driven journalism.

We want to build data-driven radio stories based on datasets made by human rights advocates.

Human rights advocates and journalists will join forces to maximise the impact of the stories and HR advocacy

We want to build data-driven radio stories based on datasets made by human rights advocates.

Thank you!

Questions?