LA NACION (Argentina) General Excellence

LA NACION has an integral strategy focused in innovation to serve its audiences.

Our growing audiences represent now more than 22,000,000 UBs in our website and mobile (45%), 3.310.099 followers between our Twitter channels,  3,271.000 followers between all the newsroom staff Twitter accounts and 6.292.370  fans in total between all of our Facebook pages.

This year we introduced new formats with our first Scrollytelling case about the National Institute of Statistics,  launched new mobile apps and redesigned content to adapt to mobile platforms, which now represent 45% of our audiences, leading in this segment regarding news in Argentina.  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Dynamic personalization

It´s a new functionality that allows the users follow and fav the authors, tags and topics of their interest.

While following an author or tag, a page is built with all the articles from the last 30 days with chronological order where you can see if there is new content that hasn´t been read, or content that has already been read.  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Third Parties Support

– US Embassy and UK Embassy in Datafest

We got financial support from US Embassy in Argentina for inviting Alex Howard and Steve Doig as keynote speakers and workshops managers to our 3rd Datafest for opening, mining and visualising public data.

http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/datafest/

We also could bring Simon Rogers for keynotes presentation and workshops

 

– Knight Mozilla OpenNews Fellow in LA NACION since February, 2015

http://opennews.org/what/fellowships/2015meet/#juan

We have been selected for hosting a civic hacker in our newsroom. Juan Elosua is an experienced developer for building open data journalism platforms.  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Use of Social Tools

La Nacion has an active focus on the use of social tools for reaching and including the audience in their work. One of our main focus has always been the social media strategy concerning our more than 35 branded official channels and 130 journalists on Twitter, which we consider a powerful mobile, real time and interactive service. The branded channels by themselves have more than 3 million followers all together. We also have a + 30 blog network, which has thriving communities that daily participate in the content of each blog by posting their comments (for example, in Movies, Amateur Cooking and Gay Friendly blogs). Many of them also have a very active  Facebook Fan page participation (Cooking and Gardening for instance). Moreover, we continue to work with our audience on Facebook, generating specific content on the various pages of la nacioncom (with more than 1.000.000 fans), canchallenacom (our sports site), supplements Fashion/Beauty and Culture, and fanpages of our blogs.

Our Instagram official channels family includes @revistaohlala, @canchallena, @lanacioncom, @revistalugares, @lnmodaybelleza and @adncultura.

Hightlights 2015:

Twitter Reverb: We played with Twitter Data for different reporting situations to help highlight the way a story explodes on Twitter. Something non-coders can use to interrogate an API and create a visualization.

 

Open Interviews using Facebook Q& A platform for Elections Candidates in Buenos Aires: For the primary election in Ciudad de Buenos Aires, we wanted to focus on giving a service to the audience and to bring together the voters and the politicians. 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.

Sin comentarios

Video: 15 seconds, motion graphics & chaptered interviews

I) Instagram Video

For #WorldCup #Brazil2014 we have experimented with videos made for our growing Instagram audience in the sports channel.

Click to watch this video in Instagram

 Other World Cup examples: I y II

And we are also including them in our Femenine Magazine: I y II (GIFs)

II) Explanatory videos   We also made animated videos explaining different aspects of coming events regarding National Elections 2015.

 

VIDEO: Which are the documents you need to vote?

VIDEO: Which are the key dates and what do we vote?

VIDEO: Who are elegible to vote? VIDEO: Information for citizens less than 18 years old and for those that cannot vote VIDEO: How the primaries work? All you need to know about the primaries, open, simultaneous and compulsory elections.

 

(III) Video inverviews “Conversaciones”

Another highlight on elections reporting are interviews to candidates (presidential, governors, Buenos Aires City council) in our own newsroom. Videos have chapters for main Q&A and there is also a complete version of the conversation (around 20 minutes).

An aggregation of all Conversaciones (Conversations) project.

Sin comentarios

Industrial and financial activity data ready and open

The Industrial and Financial activity data ready series, are new series of datasets that include a dataViz ready. We prepared each of these series manually, to be ready to illustrate many stories that reuse data or that are monitoring industries, financial activities or employment.

To do this this we developed “LNViz”, a tool that takes our data from dgocs and builds a chart, keeping it updated as we update the data series. Developed once by our interactive team it allows us to build charts from data with the journalists without the need of a developer or a designer. Then these charts are embedded in the articles and allows the users to download the data series.

Example of cars patented in Argentina 2012-2015

All of these series are updated manually from PDFs, but automatically shown in the front end, and the data is opened in Csv or XMLSeguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Mapping with CartoDB and Torque

Using resources as CartoDb together with data analysis allowed us to develop original content presented as interactive maps. We spent together four full day self-learning sessions mixing together a multidisciplinary team including designers, journalists and the data team.

One of the first examples was a map with the areas that have free wi-fi in Buenos Aires, published in January and updated and published again in March and May, in related articles.

January: a map allows us to know the areas of free wi-fi access in the City of Buenos Aires in libraries, museums and public squares.  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Twitter Reverb

We played with Twitter Data for different reporting situations to help highlight the way a story explodes on Twitter. Something non-coders can use to interrogate an API and create a visual, Twitter Reverb.

The spinning circle in the middle represents the numbers of retweets and the major influencers. Context for individual retweets are shown as smaller circles.

Clicking on the circles at the bottom would take you through to the tweets themselves.

Some examples:  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios

Open Interviews using Facebook Q& A for Elections Candidates in Buenos Aires

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

Sin comentarios

Investigating Argentina’s prisons

Meanwhile insecurity is a main concern in Argentina, many myths are spread about delinquency and especially about jails and Argentine prison population. Among them, one of the common beliefs regarding inmates is that their time in jail is rather smooth when compared with their crime or prejudices that are connecting criminality with immigration. La Nación journalist Sol Amaya together with LNData team wanted to investigate data and analyse facts in an area where common beliefs are often out of touch with reality.

With our work, we showed with official data that foreigners only represent 5,7% of argentinian inmates or that half of prison population has never been condemned (one of the highest rates of the world). The team also investigated for the first time the deaths of Argentinian detainees and showed not only that violent deaths increased by 48% between 2009 and 2013 but as well that between 2009 and 2013, the Federal Prison Administration stopped informing realistic numbers of inmate deaths to NGOs. Indeed, in 2009, 79% of inmates deaths were recorded by the public administration while in 2013, only 40% of the deaths were recorded. Today, NGOs find out about deaths through families and friends of the inmates or through media coverage.

To realize this datajournalism investigation, we used both official and NGO data. We first processed all the data published by the justice ministry in their website.

MinisterioJusticia_blog.png

The data was published in PDF format.  Seguir leyendo

Sin comentarios