Kirill Artemenko, 23, Russia
Kirill has a master's degree in technological entrepreneurship and a bachelor in journalism. He has been awarded with the Golden Pen Prize for being one of four best's young journalists of the year.

Data and journalism in Russia

Russian independent media are experiencing difficult times nowadays. After the Ukrainian conflict escalation and the annexation of Crimea the governmental policy is aimed to save and develop a kind of euphoria that has been spread among the Russian society. People are obsessed by propaganda and trust the traditional, pro-governmental media even more than before the successes of Russian foreign affairs occurred. The culture of media consumption decreased dramatically. In general, people don't understand the huge, principal difference between the facts and opinions, between evidence and inferences. Such kind of public reaction influences negatively the process of media production at all. The quality of media products, including the independent projects, decreased too. The non-governmental, private-owned news organisations feel the lack of money to invest into investigative journalism and trendy, rocket-science technologies and prefer making one-rubble-listicles and other cheap media stuff. Nevertheless, in my opinion, these depressive circumstances give a great chance to data-driven journalism in my country.

I think that the first media in Russia that starts presenting data in a convenient way doubtlessly gets a qualified audience and immeasurable popularity. A famous, gorgeous Reuters Data Journalism Handbook was translated into Russian in 2013 by RIA journalists who mostly lost their jobs after the reorganisation of the agency to the pro-governmental international agency “Russia Today”. It’s a pity that too little journalists of Russian media could read this data-handbook. The topics and ideas for data-driven issues are everywhere and they are suitable both for national and local press.

During the spring of 2014, the anonymous hackers started to publish the webmail archives of the people who work for the famous oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin, well-known as “Putin’s cook”. Having the criminal background and the current president’s favor, Prigozhin funds the questionable organisation emphasized on imitating pro-governmental activities on the Web. High salaries for the people’s dishonest work bring the thousands of pseudo-patriotic comments posted daily under the articles on popular news websites. The denomization of this “trolls” network became a great scandal here in Russia. Someone created a special website where all the contacts, concepts, financial documents and chats between the leaders were published. There were plenty of publications covering different aspects of this story but no media presented the big data in an appropriate way. It would be obvious idea to embody: to made, for example, an interactive graph connecting all the main characters of this network. And it would be a good and outstanding piece of investigative data-driven journalism.

Data-driven journalism would serve social, close-to-people issues here in Russia too. The “Scandinavia” road from Saint-Petersburg to Finland is extremely dangerous for the drivers all over the year. Local websites report weekly about the people who died in the car accidents. We in Paperpaper.ru are going to make an interactive map using existing tools to collect all the crashes to find out the worst road sections. According to spreading the road accidents’ coordinates, we will be able to analyse the tendencies in general and the reasons of this tragic phenomenon. I am really surprised that no colleagues from other media have published it yet.

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