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.
Video series to explain the news in motion graphics, 15 seconds content for Instagram and chaptered video interviews in the program “Conversations LN” offered new impact to our content and new solutions to our advertisers.
2015 is an Electoral year with lots of opportunities to tell stories using multimedia and interactive data rich formats. We are covering not only breaking news but breaking data, and could present the first City of Buenos Aires Elections with data expressed by polling station, in an interactive map, as well as D3.js apps presenting candidates information and explanatory pieces.
Argentina, still has no FOIA and needs to open data and help citizens deal with this so as to empower them. That´s why the past year we continued to grow our commitment with open and data journalism, amplifying our open collaboration challenges.
Open data journalism, collaboration and data storytelling using free or reusable tools were our way, not only to lead in quality journalism but to envision a long term strategy that can help sustain or reinvent journalism and media even in a hostile political context.
We increased our data storytelling by using free reusable tools like CartoDB, Timeline.js, TimelineSetter, Tableau, Tabula, DocumentCloud, Open Refine and Google collaboration tools and by setting our reusable graphs in javascript and special interactive visualizations for the Elections.
Our data driven investigations are being presented in judicial cases or amplified by national TV or radios; and our news applications like “Vozdata”, “Congresoscopio” of “Open Statements of Assets” have become a new bridge to integrate our audience, NGOs and Universities using collaboration as a new form of intelligence.
We continued activating the data community via hacktivism, participating in hackathons, sharing open source code, and organizing our own DATAFEST two day event .
We learn and train, and in 2014 we gave our fifth Data Journalism internal training as well as mobile and social media journalism. Even though we have a small data team, we trained on D3, CartoDB, Tableau, ArcGis, Open Refine and Excel for DATA.
We believe in openness to serve our audience using Social, Mobile and Data Journalism, engaging hacktivism with industry experts and NGOs, and leading a movement that collaborates and opens data.
ORIGINAL REPORTING:
1) Data Section: Open data journalism for change: demonstrates how the combination of engaging a community, collaboration and transforming data to make intelligence can accelerate change.
2) INCAA. In Argentina, the local movie industry would not exist if it wasn´t for this public funds destined to support movies production. But until now the system to assign this funds was not used to be audited, to be transparent presenting its numbers. The PDFs published in the web site had just an administrative goal, and it was the work of LA NACION DatA I and II (Behind the scenes) which allowed to expose the numbers and make them accessible to citizens.
3) INDEC the Machine of Lies, a scrollytelling multiplatform format to express with all the richness of multimedia, timlines, javascript charts video and data journalism, a subject that impacts every day in Argentina, a silent growing problem that are the lies in national statistics since 2007. With this case and it´s testimonies, we wanted to cover not only the suffering of skilled respected professionals, but what is more important, the the hiding of official stats about poverty, unemployment and inflation.
USER INTERFACE AND INNOVATIVE INTERACTIVITY
1. “Congresoscopio”:
A news app that allows citizens explore in detail the parliamentary performance of individual MPs. Officially, this information is inaccessible or published in no particular order and/or closed formats, so, from now on, citizens may use this application as a new source to learn and reuse data and monitor the behaviour of those that represent us.
New functionality that allows users to follow and fav authors, tags and topics of their interest.
3. The Industrial and Financial activity Monitor
A new series of datasets that include a dataViz ready and open data. We prepared each of these series manually, to be ready to illustrate many stories that reuse data.
CREATIVE USE OF ONLINE TECHNOLOGY
1) Vozdata: open collaborative/crowdsourcing platform to transform public PDF documents into structured open data. With Knight Mozilla OpenNews fellows we developed this open source platform that served to activate a community of more than 1000 volunteers for our first, second and third 10.000 Senate Expenses project covering four years. On 2015 we used the tool to classify +20.000 audios.
2) CartoDB Torque Map & TwitterDATA3) Twitter Reverb with Twitter Data to help highlight the way a story explodes on Twitter.
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. 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 participate in the content of each blog by posting their comments. Many of them also have a very active Facebook Fan page participation . Moreover, we continue to work with our audience on Facebook, generating specific content on the various pages and fanpages of our blogs. We also are developing 6 Instagram official channels.
Highlight 2015: Facebook Q& A platform for Elections Candidates.
THIRD PARTIES SUPPORT to LA NACION include awards, special funding and/or praise from The Knight Foundation, The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews program, GEN/Global Editors Network, ICFJ, European Journalism Center, Journalism.co.uk, International Open Data Conference, US & UK Embassies in Argentina.
]]>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.
Besides this, the users can receive alerts when there are new articles of those authors or tags.
These notifications may be through a browser´s alert, a daily newsletter or the native app (IOs or Android) for a push alert.
]]>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.
International Open Data Conference 2015
We have been invited as speakers to share our experience with crowdsourcing for opening public data with Vozdata
– Global Editors Network / GEN Data Journalism Awards 2015 Finalists with 4 projects
http://www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/programmes/data-journalism-awards/
– LA NACION DATA project manager selected to advise data journalism mooc
EJC data j mooc
]]>In 2007 the national statistics and census institute in Argentina (INDEC) was intervened by government. Many or the statistitians who historically produced the CPI index or the national home surveys were forced to change the CPI index in order to hide the real inflation rates, or were dismissed.
The private consultants who dared to tell their CPI calculations that differed from the Official ones, were fined with u$ 125.000 , so many of them gathered together with opposition in congress and produced what was named the “Congress CPI” and the “Official CPI”.
The 5 provinces that measured their own CPI started to stop publishing and their indexes dissappeared.
This became an International scandal. The Economist & WSJ
USING DATA, INTERACTIVE AND VIDEO FORMATS TO TELL A STORY
Presented in a mobile responsive format, segmented in chapters, this piece was lead by our specialized journalist Francisco Jueguen, and produced by Katherine Nagasawa, a Northwestern Journalism student that came three months to Buenos Aires.
It took four months to produce and implement all the pieces inside this case that includes:
– 24 short testimony videos. Some are chaptered.
– 2 explanatory motion graphics videos
– 3 charts developed in javascript connected to data series and offering these series in OPEN DATA formats to download and reuse.
– Timeline: Open source timelineSetter reused from Propublica.
– DocumentCloud to host the full documents of judicial cases
– Doc2Media (developed and named in house): using Documentcloud API, our developer created a way in which you can select a page and add an audio comment , so the prosecutor of the case explained point by point his judicial accusation using this format.
– Finally, at the end there is an aggregation of 3 different LA NACION tags with latest reporting on INDEC, Inflation and poverty.
We consider this project Explanatory & Feature Journalism. Previously, LA NACION published had many stories regarding INDEC but this one is a whole piece explaning and analyzing a relevant, meaningful and complex subject to audiences through clear storytelling and presentation that maximized digital and mobile platforms to engage and inform audience.
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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.
]]>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.
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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 XML.
Some indexes provided include:
Monthly cars patented since 2012
Monthly Industrial Production Index since 2012
Monthly total Retail Sales since 2012
Commercial balance (imports/exports)
Monthly index of the building industry from Gran Buenos Aires since november 2012.
Volume of sales of materials for the building industry since december 2012
Amount of building companies since 2013
Monthly amount of vehicle´s production since 2013
Monthly taxes related to employment since 2013
Monthly cars patented since 1995 from DNRPA official site.
Real estate sales in Buenos Aires City since 2013.
Site: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/indicadores-economicos-t53265
]]>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.
March: the public wi-fi reached Florida street
May: new free wi-fi areas in the City of Buenos Aires Metro.
On the other hand, using Twitter Data and CartoDB torque maps, we could learn and explore trends in breaking news hashtags regarding the viralization of DubsMash and the death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
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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:
Tweets containg hashtags related to Prosecutor Nisman death related protest.
Comparing 2 candidates from a same political party for primary elections.
WorldCup #BRASIL2014
When Boca Juniors soccer Player Roman Riquelme retired
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So first we published our (A) elections calendar:
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:
(C) Mapping Buenos Aires Capital City Primary Elections, school by school
Don’t miss the step by step behind the scenes about our news app that allowed readers to perform real time analysis of the results of the elections showing as many details as possible, including the results by polling station!
(D) 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.
Learn more about these experiences with Facebook!
D) Explanatory videos
We also made animated videos explaining different aspects of coming events.
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.
(E) Twitter Reverb with Twitter Data
We played with Twitter Data to highlight the way a story develops 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.
See the example embedded in reporting.
(F) Video inverviews with candidates “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.
(G) Elections DATA: Finally, all our data journalism has a special tagging and can be accesed from the Elections MInisite.