This 2015 will be a year full of elections in Argentina: Regional PASO elections, Regional final elections and the mother of all… Presidential elections.
Argentina voting is a compulsory right, so Argentinians will be voting many times during this year. The PASO elections are not withheld inside the political party affiliates but rather extended to the whole census.
To introduce our users to the candidate´s background, we published a (B) special interactive in which you can find detailed data and even the affidavit of the candidates: Seguir leyendo →
The main goal LA NACION had behind the coverage of the primary election in Ciudad de Buenos Aires, was to focus on giving a service to the audience and to bring together the voters and the politicians. With this in mind, the social media area was asked to think of a tool to help accomplish this goal.
Immediately we thought about the Q&A platform Facebook have recently made available. The huge amount of Facebook users in Argentina, the affinity politicians have with it were some of the excuses we needed to try it out.
The Q&A is a platform in which a celebrity or politician recieve questions from the audience, and answers them in real time. The hosts, in this case LA NACION, establishes a duration of this action (in our case was 30 minutes per interviewee), and make a Facebook post in its fan page. There, the guest can choose which question to answer. Seguir leyendo →
In a conjunction of efforts done to transform the newsroom into a data aware one, we worked hard to make a special coverage of the World Cup using data. In most of the visualizations, the information was analyzed and checked on the FIFA webpage. In the case of goals data, the information was manually updated each day.
A team integrated by a journalist, a Data Miner and two visualizations experts were able to create 5 different articles that included data pieces. These were:
The article provided information about the tendency there is of football players preferring to play in Europe (76% of them) rather than in other continents. The article included a Tableau that showed where each of the players actually played during the year. Seguir leyendo →
The candidates for president in Argentina are already immersed in the complex electoral race with focus on arriving to the Casa Rosada by the end of 2015. A good exercise for voters is to explore as a wayback machine and review the political past of each candidate, and get more background beyond their promises or public statements.
LA NACION launched by the end of 2014 “The Political Maze 2015”, an interactive tool for visualizing the political path made by the major candidates and crosses between them in different political parties during previous elections. Seguir leyendo →
LA NACIÓN produced a multimedia and multiplatform coverage of the 2013 parliamentary elections with a focus on innovation through database journalism as the fundamental tool to show the contents in a new way and to present the information transparently for the electorate and citizens in general.
To add value to the press coverage and not repeat classical approaches, the 2013 Elections project included the development of different interactive and research pieces using data as the primary source.
These contents were included/ grouped in a specific item of the coverage called The electoral magnifying glass (La lupa electoral). Journalists from both platforms (online/paper) worked on the productions of this category. In fact, many of the works published in this space were generated by editors that were in the Data Journalism Program, a LA NACIÓN special training program for its journalists. The project lasted 6 months. 15 people participated. It was an internal challenge for the company, since it implied the integration and the joint work of the paper and online staff, the LNData team, and the Product and Marketing areas.
The map in CartoDB combined the geo-localization of voting centers with the number of votes and the distribution of those votes by party in each center. The size of the bubble on the map represented the difference between the winner and the runner-up.
The team did a pilot test for the primaries (known here as PASO) and repeated the experience in the October 27 election.
On the day of the election, October 27, LA NACIÓN participated together with the NGO Red Ser Fiscal (Electoral Control Web) implementing a “Map of Electoral Criminality”, an online platform where citizens could report in real time irregularities in the election.
The platform had two levels of verification of the reports sent by users, to ensure the veracity of the information published in the map. A Red Ser Fiscal team, specifically crated for this task, was in charge of approving and verifying the reports.
On the election day, an interactive map showed live the results with multiple layers of analysis, according to what the reader was looking for: for the whole country, by province, by district, and even by neighborhood or commune. At each level the order of the parties was presented with bars and also the description (with name and last name) of the legislators that won seats and those that did not in each district, with the possibility of seeing according to the colors how the new political map of Argentina was being defined in real time.
– Creation of the databases with complete lists of all the candidates of all parties in all provinces. Another variable was added to the original matrix: the place in the country where each candidate competed to reflect it on the map. Also a color was assigned to each political orientation, to geo-localize on the map the balance of power in the whole Argentine territory.
-The previously mentioned program was used to calculate in real time on the day of the elections which of those candidates obtained the necessary votes to win seats in Congress and those who did not.
– The information of the databases combined with the results obtained live drew the map automatically, with the program previously created.
– The map was designed specifically to be able to present the minimal composition of each place in the country, showing in all cases the following geo-localized information: vote percentages, the names of the winning candidates, the political orientation and the political party of each of them, among other information.
The databases were always available for the reader to download the files.
At the time of the election interactive pieces were produced to see in real time the results in a new manner, with databases previously created. For example, the seats in the Deputies and Senators chambers were completed live with the complete names and political parties of those that won them as soon as the electoral results were in. The political orientation colors “colored” in real time the balance of power between the parties in the new Congress.
The project implied the following technical stages in the work:
– Creating the databases with the complete lists of all candidates of all the parties in all provinces of the country. Also, a color was assigned to each political orientation, so that it would appear in the visualization of the balance of between the parties in both chambers.
– A program was developed that could calculate in real time on the election day which of those candidates received the necessary votes to win seats and which did not.
– The information in the databases combined with the results of the election obtained live drew automatically the hemicycle with the seats, based on the program created.
– The design for this piece allowed a real time view of the hemicycle and how the seats were dividing according to the different political orientations, including also the names of the new legislators and also a comparison with the previous composition of the Congress, to show the changes in the party distribution.
The databases were always available for the readers to download the files.
The pieces developed in the period previous to the election focused on presenting complete information on the candidates in a friendly way with databases specially organized for this. Political labyrinth is an application created specifically to visualize the political story of the main candidates in the October 2013 legislative elections, discovering past alliances, contradictions and party gyrations. Also the reader could choose the circuit for several candidates and compare and find coincidences or divergences in the past.
Technology used and stages of the process
The project implied the following technical stages of this work:
-Building databases with information on each candidate in the different election years (from the 2001 elections to 2014). What political party each candidate belonged to at each moment. What elective post they were aspiring to. With whom they had an alliance at the time.
-The application was designed to encompass the complexity of what we wanted to show, considering 3 variables (name, political party and year), which implied a challenge, with a triple combination of data. Links, photos and videos were added to the information on each candidate for the different years.
