Data journalism: new informative challenges

Technological advances and open data movement have been factors in progress in the journalistic sphere. Nowadays, these professionals combine financial reports, interpret municipal budgets and explore geospatial information to generate stories based on large amounts of data. Data journalism investigates the sources of information, open or not, to build a bridge between data and citizens who need that information is treated, interpreted rigorously and understandable across different formats: articles, graphics, visualizations or interactive applications.

Open data would not only be a resource for the development of new services and products that boost job creation and economic growth; they are also essential for citizen participation and democratization of public processes. At the moment, there is still a large number of citizens who are unaware of the potential of open data and ignore its role for the whole society. For these reasons, data journalism has become so valuable; without it many open data would remain hidden, losing the information that this group can generate from them, and diminishing its powerful social value.

However, none of this would be possible if these experts find obstacles on their way to information and the subsequent story. Restricted access, non-reusable formats or licenses that block the re-use are barriers, many times insurmountable, that hamper their research work; a key element for a well-informed society.

In order to find possible solutions to these challenges and promote data journalism in this industry, during the month of May two big meetings will be held for national and international community of data journalism. For the fourth year in a row, the Jornadas de Periodismo de Datos (Data Journalism Conference) are held in Madrid from 5 to 7 May. Through lectures, workshops, panel discussions and debates attendees will be able to bring positions and share their knowledge on investigative journalism, visualizations, open data, digital literacy, security and privacy.

To develop a program tailored to the professionals needs, participants can collaborate in the elaboration of the agenda, suggesting topics or workshops, presenting projects or performing demonstrations of their initiatives. To do this, the event organization has opened a collaborative section where ideas can be presented. During the conference, international experts will participate such as Sandhya Kambhampati from Correctiv.org (Germanu); Antonio Cucho from Ojo Público (Peru); Marcos Vanetta from Continuum.io (USA) and the data editors from the The Washington Post, Kaeti Hinck and Helena Bengsston from The Guardian. The latter is one of the most relevant newspapers in data journalism, which has a multidisciplinary team formed by journalists, programmers, computer scientists and professionals with other technical profiles, all of them working together to develop the information for its data section.

Attendance is open and free; nevertheless, those ones interested in attending the conference need to register in advance through the digital platform Meetup or getting a ticket via Eventbrite. Those who cannot attend the meeting will have the opportunity to follow the event in streaming or on Twitter by following the hashtag #JPD16.

Only a few days later, the city of New York will host the Data Journalism Unconference, an event organized by the private entity Thomson Reuters where eighty participants from the five continents will meet on May 10 to discuss about data journalism without borders.

On many occasions, data journalists work on stories with international impact; however, they rarely have the opportunity to exchange best practices and new models with colleagues from other countries. Processes and working methods differ depending on the point on the planet where we are and, for this reason, discovering the point of view of journalists from Asia, Africa, Europe and America can be a really useful and enriching experience. In this context, this event aims to be a meeting point where professionals from around the world find solutions to challenges of data journalism and international collaborations help build a viable future for this discipline.

Both events are supported by Google platform for journalists, News Lab; whose goal is to organize information and make it universally accessible and useful through a resource center that provides tools, programs and data for professionals and entrepreneurs. So, Google offers up to four different tool categories -research, report, distribution and optimize- for journalists to improve their information searches, create new data visualizations or increase the distribution of news .

Today more than ever, media are opening up new ways to investigate, discover and create informative content based on data; however, it is still necessary to continue working on open access to information, public and private, and the development of tools to facilitate the extraction, treatment and, of course, data transformation.