Petr Chernetckii, 23, Russia

Petr has studied journalism in Czech, Sweden and Russia, and has currently begun to examine the theory of journalism for his PhD Studies. He is the editor in chief of the regional news website Krestianin.Ru.

Data and Journalism in Russia

First of all, a term “Data-driven journalism” is quite new for Russia. And, of course, it’s new for provincial journalism. But it does not mean that we don’t use this kind of journalism.  The phenomenon, connected with gathering and analyzing of big amounts of data, is widespread in my country. We often analyze large data sets for the purpose to create an interesting news story. So, we do use “Data-driven journalism”, but we actually did not know that we can use this term until recently.

I live in provincial Russian city Rostov-on-Don (not far away from Ukraine) and work as an editor of news website Krestianin.Ru (in English it means a peasant, but we also cover social and political life of our region). This is a part of the publishing house “Krestianin”, one of the biggest in southern part of Russia. We are absolutely independent. We do not depend on government. We earn money only through advertisement. It's pretty rare for Russia, I must say. So, it means that we have to be absolutely objective to get the respect of our readers. In this case “Data-driven journalism” often helps us.

One of the recent examples: the press services of the various regional ministries informed us about plenty of refuges from Ukraine. Numbers were unimaginable: allegedly tens of thousands of refugees seek shelter in the Rostov region every day. But a simple analysis helped us to understand that it’s not true. First of all we checked the data of the different ministries and found many contradictions. Then we decided to ask the Border Service about the average number of Ukrainians who crossed the border every day in the last months. We realized that this amount is not much less that today’s amount. Of course, we have Ukrainian refugees in Rostov region, but not as many, as our government declared.  So, the simple analysis of the data helped us understand that our authorities tried to declare that usual business trips and visits to relatives are attempts to escape from Ukraine.

Sometimes we use date journalism to create different infographics and maps. For example, the Russian-Orthodox Church tried to take away the land of the Rostov Puppet Theatre. They wanted to use it for their own religious purposes. Then we created a map to show how many churches are in the city, and to point out that there is only one theater:
https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zzQcXF8IkSI8.kgNl4yjihcgM (the theatre is in blue, churches are red)

These simple graphics caused a great response in our city; we even decided to collect signatures against the transmission of the theater building. We collected several thousands of signatures and commentaries, analyzed them and sent them to our regional government. Now we are waiting for their response:
http://chn.ge/1lednIO
(...)