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.