My three years as a data journalist with the EBU

It was back in March 2019 when I started to work as a data journalist at the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva. Now in March 2022 this chapter closes and it is time to look back and move on.

I remember that when I started I had a very clear vision in my head on what I was going to do and how I was going to improve the overall level of data journalism within the EBU and the PSM family as a whole. These three years have shown and taught me that the reality of cross-border and cross-organisation cooperation is always more difficult than you think in advance.

But still I was able to do and accomplish a lot. I covered many important topics ranging from climate change via Covid-19 to F1. In total I created almost 70 data projects for the members to use which is more than 20 a year. This is huge amount as I also had other responsibilities other than just providing content for the members. I managed the data journalism community and organised trainings for the members and helped them with various projects. Organising events and preparing materials takes a lot of time. So I would say the time was very successful, maybe just not in a way I thought it would be. 

The time with the EBU has been rewarding but just different from what I expected. 

And I have to say to work as a data journalist for a member organisation like EBU where the members are completely different from each other during a pandemic has also been challenging to say the least. In a way working remotely helped the communications with members as everyone became more familiar with online tools but it made the integration with EBU Newsroom more tricky.

In hindsight I think I should have integrated more with the people in the Newsroom. Now I my role was a bit too isolated from the day to day operations. Overall I think I failed to advertise the work that I did. Not enough people were aware of my of what I was doing and offering. This was partly due to the fact that I wasn't connected enough with the rest of the Newsroom.

From the organisation's point of view the constant crisis because of the pandemic mode also prevented EBU to give the data journalism project the required focus. I think whenever you are starting something new you should make it a priority at the highest level – especially in the beginning. 

I want to thank EBU for this time and especially all the great colleagues and many friends I received <3

Reflections on the first year of the EBU’s data journalism community

We offer the members data news items.

I have been working as a data journalist for almost ten years and I have had the privilege of working on many interesting projects over the years.

In 2012 I joined the Yle, Finland’s national public broadcasting company and I was fortunate enough to follow closely on how the organisation successfully transformed from a traditional broadcaster into a forward-thinking media company.

Data and online Journalism was just gaining popularity and I immersed myself into this new world.

So when I joined the EBU in 2019 I thought I had a clear plan on how to integrate data journalism into the EBU’s framework.

I thought I knew the pitfalls and that I was prepared to fully communicate with the members. After all, I had been working for one of the members for a long time and I thought I knew exactly what the members needed and wanted.

The first year with the EBU showed me how little I knew. I realised implementing certain frameworks would be harder and understandably slower than I had imagined. 

Building and maintaining contacts was an essential, yet time-consuming task.

I was naive to think that members would automatically get excited about every project or initiative I had in mind.

I needed to learn how to advertise my work and how to create hype around it. Also, I have to say that my assumptions on what the members wanted turned out to be, if not completely faulty, not quite accurate.

On the other hand, I have learned that timing is critical when it comes to long-term projects. Even if you organise a perfect conference but when the timing is off, people might miss it completely.

At the same time, projects that you don’t expect to fly, will do so.

I have also learned how to face the unexpected. It has not been easy because I function better when there is order. I was also used to do everything on my own and now my job involves inspiring and motivating others, finding them opportunities to develop and etc.

To summarise, the first year and a half has been challenging and different to what I had in mind. However, the work turned out to be rewarding and fun. 

I’d like to emphasise that everyone has been very supportive, both in the office here in Geneva and the members. The feedback has been very positive and together we’ve achieved a lot. Just to mention a few:

• The 5th EBU data journalists meet-up.
• COVID-19 related teleconferences and COVID-19 related News items.
• News items on climate change.
• Training sessions organised together with the EBU Academy.
• Targeted focus groups like the US elections.

In the future, I’m planning to listen more to our members’ needs and react more quickly and timely to changing circumstances.

We have had good showcases with the COVID-19 and data teleconference and with the US elections focus group. With both, we have been able to exchange important information between members.

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.

Teemo Tebest: Meet the News Exchange’s new data journalist

Kirjoitin itsestäni ja työstäni esittelytekstin EBU:lla sisäisesti. Jaan tekstin myös tässä.

---

My name is Teemo Tebest. Nice to e-meet you all. I’m from Finland and I’ve just joined the EBU for two years to work as a data journalist.

What is a data journalist you may ask?

For the last six+ years I’ve have been working for the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) as a full-time data journalist in a team called the Plus Desk.

The Plus-team consists of programmers and graphic designers and together with the news teams we’ve established an ongoing operation where we produce data based journalism, visual journalism and online journalism with other news teams.

In general, one could say a data journalist is a journalist who has technical or even programming skills. Data journalist turns data into understandable journalism.

As for my background – I’m a programmer and I have a Master’s Degree in Information Technology. I studied information visualization, user interface design and user experience design.

In information visualization you study how to make complex things more understandable through ways of visualizations. Visualization can be a map, a bar graph. In my opinion, written text can act as a visualization if it delivers the message in the most efficient way.

What is data journalism?

At Yle, the Plus-team did operated together with other news teams. For example, if we created a story around the parliamentary elections we would team up with someone from the politics team. This task force of a journalist, a programmer and a graphic designer would come up with the best solution to tell the story at hand. Below are some examples of stories that we created at Yle:

Child molesters

In this story we asked the courts in Finland for all the cases where there was a prosecution on child abuse since 2018. We got over 600 PDF documents, some of them were scanned. We used OCR to get these PDFs into a machine readable format and turned them into a database with Python. Then we tailored an interface and a story where reader can go through all the cases. While the public eye often focuses in individual cases, this story showed the more overall situation through the ways of data journalism.

Municipality radar

In this story we looked into the situation in Finnish municipalities. With experts we selected and gathered 40 datasets in different areas of life that defined the situation of a municipality. These datasets were stored and combined in Google Sheets. The datasets were then divided into four categories:

• Economics
• Future
• Health of the citizens
• Atmosphere

The situation for a municipality in these categories was presented via 5-star-rating system. This was a comprehensive project and it was adopted by the citizens but also by the city council members.

Die Mannschaft against the Man

This story is not necessarily a data story but it shows what can be done while having programming and graphic design knowledge in the newsroom. This story was created for the World Cup and it showed how in the previous World Cups Argentina (and Messi) had always lost to Germany in their tournament elimination match. These kind of tailored feature stories can be made in any way of your imagination (and resources).

What next?

Data journalism gives a newsroom new ways of telling stories. Data journalism should be considered as a tool which enables enriching your storytelling. Data and visualizations are very effective and immersive as you can see from these two examples:

I'm here for you! If you have any ideas or suggestions on how EBU and I should proceed together with you. I have many ideas but I’m all ears. Some ideas what I have thought include following:

• Data journalism code storage for sharing code between members
• Data journalism data storage for sharing data between members
• Data visualization templates for the members
• Best practices introductions, how-tos, etc
• Collaborative data projects with and between members on cross-border subjects like climate change
• Consulting members' ongoing projects
• Workshops, meetings, classes and courses
• EBU could also provide data and visualizations in breaking news situations