EBU Data Journalism Community eyes growth, further collaboration in 2020

Countries and members that have already made use of the data projects provided by the EBU News Exchange include Ireland (RTÉ), Germany (DW), France (FR24), Poland (TVP), Croatia (HRT), Switzerland (SRF), Finland (Yle). The Map was made with Mapchart.

We are nearing the end of the decade and I thought it was a good moment to catch up with you in terms of the data journalism initiative. If you are not familiar with the initiative you can catch up with the previous posts from this blog.

I have just two points!

FIRSTLY we have continued to share data stories and visualisation for you via the News Exchange and Social Newswire and we are keen to do this also in the future.

Here are some examples of the stories that we have provided to the members.

• Visualisation of Bitcoin value skyrocketing over the course of its existence
• Animation shows the evolution of the Arctic ice cap surface from 1979-2019
• Animation shows changes in temperature per country from 1901-2016

For example SRF/Switzerland used the Polar Ice Cap video on the SRF News Instagram account and the video got over 12,000 views. Another example comes from TVP/Poland who made use of the Bitcoin visualisation on their Facebook account. And just today DW/Germany released the temperature animation on their DW News Twitter account.

–––––––––––––––––––––

SECONDLY I’m keen to support the collaboration between EBU members. In September we organised a meeting in Hamburg for the members and we are planning to have the next event in the spring. We are also working together with the EBU Academy.

We are also looking into supporting data journalist exchange. We have a great community but we should and could learn more from each other. One way to accomplish this is to work with each others hands-on.

EBU data journalism status update

EBU has now had a data journalist in the for two and half months and it is time to catch up what we have accomplished. We’ve focused mainly on three areas.

1. Creating the community

We have been starting to plan events and we are organising an event on fact-checking on 25th of June. We have about 30 people joining us in Geneva. Fact checking has a strong link with data journalism.

For data journalists we organised a conference call in May and the 4th data journalist meeting is also planned in Autumn. Before we have met in Milan, Geneva and London.

To support communication we have promoted the data journalism mailing list which now has over 50 people on it. The amount of members on this list has almost doubled in past months. We will use the mailing list on informing about events.

We also have an existing Facebook group which we are now starting to activate.

2. Implementing data story templates

We have started to implement data story templates. The idea in this is to create wireframes that EBU members can develop further to make into journalistic stories. Members are able to translate, to localise and to implement their company styles. This can be together with EBU. The projects can be hosted on member's own CDNs.

3. Data story exchange

We've asked members to share their best data story examples with could be share with other members. Some of the data stories that members publish on their own audience have more wider interest and these could be quite easily transported from one member to another. There can be some technical issues but we can tackle those.

So far the most concrete example have come from SVT. They built an interactive quiz which challenges the reader in a fun way to know about the past events in European history.