data speaking thruth to power. keynote at highway africa conference 2013

DATA SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Peter VerweijAMI and D3-Media

What I will be talking about! - 1

● Let’ s start with a small story……● ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst● Data are not speaking; but journalists are gathering data turn

them in to stories.● Journalism is producing truth seeking stories in the public

interest based on data.

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.

● Data are very fashionable● Journalist should check policies based on data and dig in data

to find news

What I will be talking about! - 3

● How strong is journalism against the powers?● Journalism can feed the public debate to help control and check

the use of power.● But: Journalism is in crisis; subscription are dropping, lot of

journalism jobs are lost.● Data journalism is quality reporting and one of directions to re

invent journalism.● Here is some data about journalism:

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

4 Year Category Trend by Quarter:Daily Newspapers

Comment:Circulation has declined annually by 5.75 % since 2008, equivalent to 461,000 copies.

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

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

The Guardian over Riots and Poverty

Traffic Accidents

From Database: 2000 accidentsTop tenDangerous junctionsMap is the story

Hurricane Andrew and construction fraud in Miami

Classic Hurricane Andrew

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

Finding Data: story ideaTurn the web in a databaseWHERE:National Bureau for statisticsNGO'sWeb: find excelWeb: tables

HOW:DownloadCopy-pasteScraping: Outwit Hub

Mother of all Data JournalismAnalyzing dataSpreadsheetsMS Office: excelOpen OfficeR project or PSPP

Cleaning data: RefineOrdering data: top10Simple calculations for key figuresGraphs: bar, pie, scatter diagrams

Visualize!

Fusion TablesTableauQgisCape Town councilors and property value

Data Journalism: team work and importantIMPORTANTMore dataMore use of data for policiesCheckFind hidden trends

TEAM WORKWriterResearcherHackerDesigner Involvement of the editor

Convergence

• Cooperation between hardcopy and online

• Online interactive data

• Hardcopy static picture

• Complementing approaches

Are African data speaking…..Take a datashower

Example from City Press

Visualize Story Sept 16Council bigwigs get fat chequeshttp://www.citypress.co.za/Politics/News/Council-bigwigs-get-fat-cheques-20120915

Data “Boot Camp” Helps Kenyan Reporter Expose School Sanitation Woes

Link

Khayelitsha

•Simple and good by a junior reporter of the Cape Times

•Here is the link to the story

• And here is spreadsheet

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

NRC-H over leden van de Tweede Kamer

Advanced stories are possible too

•Social network analysis of Twitter contacts between 500 SA journalists

•Story

•Zoom

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!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH

•E-mail: peter@d3-media.nl•Twitter: peter_verweij•Blog: http://d3-media.blogspot.nl/