Iulian Birzoi, 23, Rumania
Iulian is finishing his thesis about data journalism for his bachelor studies. Since three years he has been working along his studies at the Romanian student newspaper Opina Studenteasca.

Data and journalism in my country

Let’s face it. 90% of today’s existing data have been generated in the last two years and the volume of data created every second now is bigger than the one the Internet had 20 years ago. Big Data is something real, happening right now, but in some countries like Romania it’s still an abstract term, something which many think that it should only concern the IT specialists. We still don’t realize that in a modern age like ours, data is everywhere. From our Internet habits, to the products we buy at the local store every day, almost anything can be described with the help of a binary code. Here in our country, we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to the Big Data, merely trying to understand it first. Problematics like the ethics of data-mining, privacy or storage space  are close to unknown in the public.

But Big Data became an obvious important tool in domains like the business world, and more and more journalists should really look into. Because when you combine those huge volumes of data with the open data movement, you can achieve many great things. From discovering stories about corrupt officials to basically fulfilling the watchdog function of journalism. Also, the ever developing free tools which a few years ago were accesible only for specialists, lead to the growth of data journalism. And although there is an argument today stating that everyone can become a data journalist, in Romania at least that’s very debatable. Yes you have a shiny belt of tools, but it’s also very easy to fail, because data journalism implies some processes which require a lot of work.

From the gathering of data which could take months, cleaning it for errors, analyze it and find stories, „translate” it, and choosing the right visualizations, most of these actions are barely done on their own by our journalists. That because we don’t really have a tradition in working with high volumes of data and also the budget of many of our media institutions is very limited, which left jobless many experienced journalists in the last few years. Indeed the tools used by data journalists are free, but looking for a story requires time, effort and people, which our media institutions rather use for the easier materials, certain to have a positive outcome.

There are of course some exceptions, and on the other edge we have Rise Project, an NGO formed by investigative journalists, activists, programmers and graphic designers which are using data journalism to generate investigative reporting on local and cross-border organized crime and corruption networks. They are constantly producing articles, visual databases, advanced tools and are trying to educate both journalists and public about the places and techniques they should look into when it comes to investigations.

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