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 →
On April 26th Buenos Aires City has held its first Primary elections (PASO). PASO stands for Simultaneous and Obligatory Open Primary elections. In this election two main things are decided:
Which candidate will pass as the official candidate for each political party for the final elections
Each political party has to achieve at least 1.5% of the total votes to be able to continue on the election race.
Solving problems on the fly
The local government decided to switch technological providers for this and upcoming elections and as usual there is some adjustment time to get things working smoothly. Seguir leyendo →
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 which allowed to expose the numbers and make them accessible to citizens .
This series of articles produced a strong impact in the movies industry, and those who participated in this investigation were accused of trying to destroy the system that allows local movies to be produced. The investigation was raised by other media including radios and TV which amplified its reach . It also served as base to amplify corruption cases presented in justice.
This dataset for us is not only a source of stories, it also represents the power of data to start monitoring public spending, and we are keeping it updated to follow up, as we demonstrated in the Subsidies for the Bus Transportation System, updated as well by our team. Seguir leyendo →
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.
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 NACION continued in 2014-2015 with its effort to use data as new raw material for journalism and to contribute to open data in Argentina while reporting or as a way to activate demand of more public information, in a country still without a FOI Law.
After another year of training and consistency in the data project of LA NACION, opportunities of new projects appeared. We continued reporting from datasets built from scratch and then transformed, opened and shared by our team in print, online and social media.
VozData is a collaborative tool to convert public documents trapped in closed formats into a structured database. Information proccessed is suitable for general audience understanding and for journalists to analyse and report. The application was inspired by The Guardian “MP´s Expenses” and Propublica´s “Free the files”.
VozData´s first initiative was Senate Expenses (Argentina), divided in 3 different periods. Over the course of a couple of months, LA NACION digitized more than 10000 PDF. Team work was fulfilled by 1000 volunteers. Data obtained was published online in real time in the form of rankings of recipients and type of expense. The platform also includes ranking of users that review and classify documents.
At the end of each data project, LA NACION´s data team reviewed representative samples and published the dataset in open data formats for download (CSV, XLS, etc). The Code driving Vozdata was open sourced by OpenNews Fellows and named Crowdata.
CIVIC OPEN COLLABORATION: Partnering with NGO’s and Universities, and general audience!
Students of Universidad Torcuato di Tella – Masters in Journalism during a civic marathon al LA NACION
During May 2014 we started a campaign to try to finish “the stack of PDFs” of the first set of Senate Expenses during #SemanadeMayo that is a patriotic week and culminates May 25th. This historical day of 1810 is well known with a phrase “El Pueblo Quiere Saber” “People wants to know”. So we decided to organize what we named “Civic Marathons” for opening data using Vozdata.
We made banners for social media and got shared via LA NACION & LNdata twitter and Facebook accounts. Seguir leyendo →
To follow the behavior of legislators in Congress at Argentina is not a simple task, so an interdisciplinary team of journalists, designers and developers at LA NACION, created a news app called Congresoscopio that allows all citizens to explore in detail the parliamentary performance of individual MPs.
Until now, this information was 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 more about the behaviour of those that represent us.
For topical reporting on Congress, we have an aggregated tag to monitor parlamentary action and when each law is passed (often during the night), we report about the particularities regarding the new legislation and make a process to convert a PDF with each vote to an interactive data visualisation that will be embeded in the reporting. An example of how this work can be seen in this example of a law passed recently regarding trains in Argentina.
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1. “START” page
With an interactive graph that simulates a chamber with the current layout in Congress, you can browse position to position in order to access information from each of the MP’s.
