M100 Young European Journalists
Under the topic “Data and Journalism: Between Big Stories and Dirty Surveillance”, 25 young aspiring journalists from 18 countries across Europe got invited to Potsdam by M100 Sanssouci Colloquium to explore the topic of data-driven journalism. The participants came from Armenia, Belgium, Belarus, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Georgia, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain and Ukraine.
The University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the Hasso Plattner Institute, this year’s cooperation partners, supported the journalists in digging through countless data sets and exploring the stories within them. As a result, the participants of this year’s M100 Young European Journalists workshop created six impressive data driven stories around political, economic and cultural issues, centred at the crossroad of visual journalism, interactive storytelling and investigative journalism and published them online at the M100 Data Journalists Platform.
Monday: Big data, big day
The morning agenda started with a round of upspeeded presentations to introduce the participants at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The participants had to describe themselves using a maximum of five slides, 20 seconds for each. “This 'ice-breaking' game really helped to get a better insight on people and to realise what a range of countries is being represented at the conference. Also, it was interesting to share experiences and understand how many people are familiar with the conference topic,” recalls participant Ekaterina Kuznetsova, 23, from Russia, about the experience.
Dr Jan Arpe of the Bertelsmann Foundation opened the workshop by speaking about storytelling and an understanding of globalisation. He also introduced the GED VIZ tool. Then it was time to dive further into the topic. Mentor Till Nagel, a research associate at the Interaction Design Lab, began by explaining the difference between data visualisations and data journalism: “Data journalism is much more than just putting dots on a map.” Rapid switching between apps, graphics and designs kept all the participants of the conference fascinated from the very start. Participants were faced with questions such as: “Should all data journalists learn how to code? Do they need to understand the appropriate tools, standards and interfaces?” In the afternoon, the hands-on experience started with Till Nagel, Sebastian Meier and Jan-Erik Stange presenting tools, apps and websites that can help the future data journalists when working with data visualisation. The last but not least part of the day consisted of the participants working on their own projects. Participants had to come up with a data story from their countries. Within small working groups, they discussed their ideas and chose the six best ones:
• Kiev – a crime map before and after the revolution
• Gender distribution in EU politics
• Exploration of humanitarian aid and weapons trade data
• Europe’s beer consumption
• Brain drain – emigration in Ireland
• Most popular bike routes in San Francisco
(All projects can be found at the M100 Data Journalists Community Platform.)
Tuesday: Making sense of big data
If there’s one thing that the 25 young journalists took away from this day’s Young European Journalists workshop, it is that big data is not just a fancy buzzword, but is here to stay. The highly informative talks at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) only scratched the surface of big data’s potential and pitfalls. The day kicked off with a thought-provoking talk by Felix Naumann, professor for Information Science at the HPI in Potsdam. He spoke about how big data can improve transparency and the quality of products, whilst simultaneously warning the students about the negative side effects of data crunching (data processing): What happens when companies or governments collected all the data they desired without informing the users involved? Social networks can provide myriad sets of information, but analysing the content is still tricky since most algorithms and machines have to learn to “understand” what they read. However, some limitations remain, like their inability to identify irony. This is what makes it still so hard to establish a definitive distinction between positive and negative posts.
Maximilian Jenders led the group in the methods of text mining, a branch that tries to derive high-quality information from texts by identifying patterns and trends. The afternoon started with a deeper dive into sentiment analysis. Philipp Berger explained the algorithms behind Blog Intelligence, a tool developed to search for content in the blogosphere, classify blogs by relevance regarding the subject and identify the main tone of the article. With Jörg Waitelonis, the participants took a brief look at the future of content analysis, namely Semantic Multimedia Retrieval, an automated analysis that consists of searching for video archive automatically.
After a full day of lectures, it was time to shine the limelight on some of the participating students and their previous data-driven projects: such as the Ukrainian border conflict project of Yaryna Mykhyalyshyn, Roman Melnyk’s crime maps of Ukraine and the city of Kiev, Alice Coronas and her compelling visualisations on political and surveillance-related topics, and Ani Hovhannisyan’s political investigations for Armenian online newspaper Hetq.am. Martin Gonzalez provided us a visualisation of the import of primary ressources of Spain, displaying the labour conditions under which they were produced. Two students highlighted the idea that data journalism does not necessary equal heavily weighted topics: Kirill Artemenko’s well-designed game at paperpaper.ru let us ponder the fun aspect of data journalism, whilst Oliver Schnuck’s World Cup graphics for the Süddeutsche Zeitung showed us the football event from a completely different perspective.
Wednesday: Excursion to Berlin
From tabloid paper to data visualisation: a visit to Bild.de
The third day of the YEJ workshop took the young journalists to Berlin, where the group started the day by participating in the editorial conference of BILD at the German publishing house Axel Springer S.E.. The young journalists witnessed the meeting of the various newsrooms across Germany. In a 15-minute video conference, BILD editors from other offices gave feedback to the editorial staff on the content, both in print and online, on a daily basis. Despite being a tabloid, the group was pleasantly surprised when Dirk Aschoff, data journalist at BILD and spokesperson of the day, explained his work as the head of data journalists and of his department. The subsequent Q&A session, with examples of BILD´s data journalism, found widespread acclaim, though Dirk Aschoff stressed that true big-data-driven journalism has not yet arrived in established German news media.
Google from another perspective
Afterwards, Google at Unter den Linden opened its doors for the young journalists. Senior manager of communications and public affairs at the Google office, Dr Ralf Bremer, gave a tour of Google´s office that left many of the participants very impressed, before entering the conference room for the many questions that the young journalists were eager to ask. Interaction between the young journalists and Bremer was more than fascinating especially after they discovered that Google has a big interest in medicine (Lens for Diabetes), astronomy (Google Moon), and policy work on issues across Europe. The Berlin office puts a focus on sales and marketing, but also on advocacy concerning Internet privacy policies with European legislatives. Other questions revolved around the data systems Google owns, but also around surveillance topics. During the debate, the participants learned that Google has started dealing with user requests related to “the right to be forgotten”. Regarding the topic of surveillance, many journalists had questions about Google’s potential “trade of identity”. The time passed too quickly, especially since the photo box in the playful lounge was a very popular distraction among the journalists.
Zeit Online cares about data journalism
The final stop of the Berlin excursion was a visit to Zeit Online’s office near Potsdamer Platz. A dream job for many of the participants, they posed several questions to Sascha Venohr, development editor and data journalist at Zeit Online. While also fielding questions, Kai Biermann showed us some of his best work, for example “Ein Netz zerfällt” (A Network Crumbles), an interactive map, which was based on government data and embedded in an article, showing the crumbling infrastructure of Germany’s railway network. Another interesting example was “WM Fieber” (World Cup Fever), which was made by grabbing social media traffic and combining it with Zeit readers’ tweets to replay and visualise key World Cup 2014 matches. Unlike many German news portals, Zeit Online have their own investigative department for data-driven stories, consisting of four journalists working on the same topic. Some insights gained from the stimulating discussions were that data driven journalism could be used to describe and present the truth and to start important discussions. While data journalism will become increasingly important, it does not mean that every journalist who is training now needs to become a specialised data journalist. What it does mean however, is that journalists will need to become team players with the expert developers and designers who can help them investigate and visualise their stories.
Thursday: Creating the data stories
At the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Jan-Erik Stange, along with Sebastian Meyer and his team of researchers and PhD students, assisted with the data stories of the participants.
After a short introduction, the journalists split up into working groups to present their ideas and initial approaches on how to visualise their story before lunch. An intense working atmosphere dominated the rooms throughout the afternoon.
The projects included amazing in-depth research and interesting insights into not only data visualisations but also into the correlations and implications that the data sets revealed. For a full overview of the six projects, please visit the M100 Data Journalists Community Platform.
In the evening, the ZAB Zukunftsagentur Brandenburg invited the journalists to take part at a bilingual meeting titled “Digital Publishing”. Though not directly linked to the workshop’s topic, many journalists were interested in the future of the book market in times of digital change and in the musings of font-designer Prof. Lucas de Groot, designer of the LucasFont, whose work has embellished prominent news magazines from DER SPIEGEL to Le Monde.
The practical applications and hands-on-experience of data driven journalism and the excursion to Berlin was what the journalists enjoyed most during the short week. After an intense programme, the journalists looked forward to enjoying the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium "Media Freedom in the Age of Big Data" on Friday and the opportunity to engage with its participants. They followed the lively debate in two round table sessions and witnessed the grand award ceremony of the M100 Media Award with its two laureates Vitalio Klitschko and YanukovychLeaks.
This collaborative report has been co-produced by the participants* of the M100 Young European Journalists Workshop. The full version, as well as all projects of the YEJ mentioned can be found at http://m100-data-community.m100potsdam.org/main/index
*Ekaterina Kuznetosva, David Trvdon, Ani Hovhannisyan, Lucie Dupin, Aline Flor, Maaike Goslinga, Una Maria Kelly, Anna Kakalashivili, Jim van Nunen, Petr Obrovský, Miroslav Čakširan and Isabel Gahren
