A presentation for the Developing Caribbean conference. developingcaribbean.org

1. Open Data Journalism
Alex@oreilly.com
@digiphile
radar.oreilly.com/alexh

2. 2013: a networked public sphere

3. Natural
disasters

4. #Sidibouzid

5. #Jan25

8. How did we get here?

9. In the 1990s, government and civil
society spread the Internet globally

10. In the 2000s, mobile phones and social
networking connected us ever more

11. Open Journalism

12. The
stream

13. In the 2010s, big data will change
everything again.
Image Credit: Real Time Rome from Senseable.MIT.edu

14. An expanding number of data sources

15. Commercial and industry data

17. Social data and crisis data

18. Open government data platforms

21. Open data allows citizens to be
generative in new ways

22. 230 apps now use or are based on
open health data

24. What about journalism?

26. “We used to call it CAR”-DeBarros
Bob Woodward, via Cliff1066

27. “Data-driven journalism is the future”
Source: Tim Berners-Lee in the Guardian

28. Is “data journalism” just
computer assisted reporting
(CAR)?
• Spreadsheets
• Databases
• Text and code editors
• Statistics

29. “Trendy but not new”-Simon Rogers,
Guardian

30. Show, don’t tell
A “Sankey diagram”

31. What’s changed?
• Online spreadsheets and data tools
• Data visualization tools
• Open source frameworks
• Code sharing
• Agile development
• Cloud storage and processing (EC2 &Heroku)
• The amount of data

33. “Newspapers are either going
to start doing what we do, or
they're going to be bypassed
and out of date.”
-Elliot Jaspin
That was 1986, in Time.

34. More than 36 interactive databases published
Data sets account for 75% of overall traffic
[Source: CJR]

35. Global leaders

36. ProPublica

38. A tangled web

39. Dollars for Docs

41. New York Times

42. “Make small things faster, make big things
possible.”-Derek Willis, NYT
TimesMachine.nytimes.com cost a few hundred dollars. Hosted on Amazon EC2.

46. The Guardian

47. Guardian Datablog

50. Chicago Tribune
• Flame retardants

51. Center for Public Integrity

52. International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists
Offshoring $
80 journalists
40 countries
260 gigabytes
2.5 million files

54. Reuters: Connected China

55. La Nacion

56. Storytelling still matters.
“We use these tools to find and tell stories.
We use them like we use a telephone.
The story is still the thing.”
- Anthony DeBarros
USA Today
Source: Data Journalism and the Big Picture

57. Los Angeles Times

60. SOPA Opera

62. Best practices?

63. Understand the context
for the data

64. Show your data

65. Show your work

66. Share your code

67. Plan for reuse

68. Build on open standards

69. Citizen-centric

70. Keeping citizens safe
“Traffic on the NYC Health Department’s
restaurant inspection site has gone from
10,000 hits per month to 124,000”
- New York Times

71. Make data find the people.

72. Helps citizens who need it most

73. Privacy
challenges

74. Security challenges
• Protect your sources? Protect your data!

75. Bridge the
data divide
Digital signage on the cheap

76. FOIA &Press Freedom

77. Fauxpen Data
In an age of “openwashing”…
We need to:
Evaluate licenses.
Peruse the Terms of Service.
Review the governance.
Look at community.
Check the format.

79. Wired Italy

81. Emerging trends

82. Political tensions over open data
• Gun map graphic

83. Robo-journalism?

84. Data journalists, meet civic hackers
Source: BuzzData

85. Now it’s “Hacks and Hackers”
Photo by Dennis Crowley, from “Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer”

87. Homicide Watch

88. Citizens as Sensors: Andhra Pradesh

89. Citizensourcing

90. Makers and open source hardware

91. Safecast
open source
Geiger counter

92. Networked accountability

93. Sensor Journalism

94. “If Stage 1 of data journalism was “find and
scrape data,” then…
Stage 2 was “ask government agencies to
release data” in easy to use formats.
Stage 3 is going to be “make your own data”,
and those sources of data are going to be
automated and updated in real-time.”
-JavaunMoradi, NPR

95. Data creation

96. Data journalism with a purpose

98. Co-create a stronger union

99. Government of the
people, for the
people, by the
people, with the
people.