The leak of the Panama papers couldn’t have had a better sense of timing, coming as they did barely hours before Europe’s, and arguably one of the world’s most traditional and respected annual journalism events, started. The International Journalism Festival a weeklong festival in the Umbrian capital of Perugia in Italy, is a quality assembly line of sessions, workshops and panel discussions to introspect and take stock of journalism today. While the carnival of journalistic expression continued the narrative invariably veered towards how data is driving news content and data specialists do not just contribute to the news room. They are a part of the newsroom.
It is in this context that the session “A golden age of investigative reporting” assumed significance, the title of the session that is. The golden age, the deliberations pointed out came from the ability to mine data as a critical tool for day to day conventional journalism and use it to do better investigations which includes being able to go to the right door at the right time armed with information which data provides.
And this is what Megan Luceros’ day job is. As data Editor of The venerable Times London, her team has become arguably the most important journalistic resource almost functioning as a supplementary team of investigative journalists.
But this is nothing new. She said that even in the 1800s reporters used information and data. Even visual data visualisation is not new. But we wanted to put data into the newsroom which doesn’t add to the story. It is the story and it’s done in a manner which humans cannot do. We are ‘of the web’ and not the web. In fact some of Sunday Times biggest stories in the recent past have been data driven and based on interpreting vast amount of data and figures made available to them. One of them was tracking blood test reports of over 5000 athletes over 11 years to conclude that over 146 medals awarded at the highest levels of international competition were suspicious and the triumphs could have been due to substance use.
Three other stories based entirely on collating data were a) How General Physicians in Britain awarded 2.4 billion pound deals to their own companies, b) The tax avoiders of Britain who cheated the treasury of 4.5 billion pounds a year and c) On charity executives who earned salaries way above the Prime Minister’s and how the majority of charity funding went for salaries of charity executives.
Allesandro Accorcsi of the City University London, said, “We knew the Panama papers would break but it’s an example of what journalism will increasingly look like. Data driven investigations have helped everyone. 1500 times the scale of wiki leaks, 11 million documents. In Perugia we would have discussions on data journalism and general reporting. Today they are working together.
Meanwhile Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding Smith of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the USA explained how they mined 8.3 million records of transactions and correspondence between the US military and private operators in the drone business to explain how deep the engagement of the private sector was with super sensitive drone operations.
However, at a time during the discussion it seemed as if data had completely taken over newsrooms and journalism, Megan Luceros brought sanity back to the lives of traditional journalists by saying, “You still have to be good journalist. You still have to be completely exhaustive. You still have to dig, you have to find the best story. You still have to go to the story, like you go to a war zone or during Watergate, you had to plough through tons and tons of paper, and now almost all the information is digitized. All we are doing is giving you the technological tools to go where the stories are. Journalism is still king.”
