Aline Flor, 24, Portugal

Aline is an editor at the news web portal AEIOU and trained in documentary cinema and entrepreneurial journalism for the digital age.

Data and Journalism in Portugal

Data journalism is not at an advanced stage in Portugal, first of all, because data is not easily accessible. Despite efforts like the database Pordata, which gathers demographic data and statistics made public in a comprehensive way, most critical information is available only on demand and after strong insistence since institutions are totally ignorant about this way of treating information, most of them are afraid of how journalist will handle data. Raquel Albuquerque, a journalist from Público newspaper who worked on a feature about the parties’ funding in past elections, says she received the information from the government in paper and the tables from the audit office in PDF files; the former because the original digital information was not stored in a centralised place, the latter because they were suspicious that the journalists would try to change the data.

Big Data is still not a paramount issue in Portugal, since most of the companies are not ready to make huge investments in this type of algorithms, which develop only as far as advertising needs it in most cases, not publicly and reaches us mostly through big international companies (like Ryanair floating fares). There are some attempts in the academic field, like social media analysis, trying to understand how the “postmodern campaigns” would work to gain more votes, by researchers in University of Lisbon, and sentiment analysis of microblogging posts, from INESCID. (...)

Media companies struggle to survive and have no financial availability to invest in such time consuming work, which also requires people with a new set of skills. Some exceptions are related to journalists who have academic interest (such as Raquel Albuquerque, mentioned above, who was working through a research scholarship). However, there are plenty of opportunities for Portuguese journalists to improve their skills: besides several online courses on the subject with specialists in data journalism and visualisation, such as Steve Doig, Paul Bradshaw and Alberto Cairo, there are many conferences about computational journalism not only related strictly to data, but cyberjournalism in general, which shed some light not only to the way journalists can handle data but also how we can deal with the ethical implications of the ways.