Nerea Martínez García, 23, Spain
Nerea is finishing her degree in journalism and has worked at the internet department of Radio Catalunya.

Data and Journalism in Spain

A great opportunity for journalism has come up with the Big Data era but we are still at risk to be left behind by the sudden changes in the technologic field and the inability of the Spanish media to adapt. There are no multidisciplinary teams on the business, though some journalists work with these tools on their own. To my knowledge, data-driven journalism is pretty new in my country, it was introduced two or three years ago thanks to Mar Cabra, member of ICIJ, and Karma Peiró. Both organized this April the II Data Journalism and Open Data Conference. Actually, Peiró organizes DDJ workshops monthly and the first time I heard about data journalism was last December, on a meeting with Michael Bauer, from the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Aron Pilhofer, from the New York Times.

Data journalism is still unusual on the traditional media but there are really interesting projects being done outside the newsroom. Fundación Civio is a non-profit organization inspired by the work of MySociety (United Kingdom) and the Sunlight Foundation (USA), and they have a lot of useful initiatives like ¿Quién manda?, a map about the power connections in Spain, ¿Dónde van mis impuestos?, a visualization that shows how much money is spent by the Government and how it is distributed, or the Indultómetro, about the pardons granted since 1996. They are not the only ones, we have also Data’n Press, a multidisciplinary team specialized in visualizations, and individual projects such as Vidas contadas, about the victims of the Franco regime.
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It may be more expensive and time consuming than the ordinary news process but it is worth it: it is a breath of fresh air given the current dependency on the news agencies; it has the potential of making comprehensible difficult topics and is also a way to stand out in the business. Sadly, the Spanish transparency law – that will be operational this December – is too limited: the authorities can refuse the requests easily and the list of exceptions is extremely wide so its usefulness is questionable.

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