Empowering women in media and data journalism

The deadline to apply to the Data Journalism Awards 2018 is fast approaching. As data journalists from around the world have just one week to gather their best data-driven work, we met with Mariana Santos, founder and co-director of Chicas Poderosas, also member of the competition jury. Her vision inspires women in Latin America and around the world. In this interview, she tells us how she wants to share her accomplishments as an innovator in digital media with other women, and to help them succeed as new media leaders.

 

 

Chicas Poderosas has been “changing the face of media, one woman at a time” since 2013. What specific skills do you think are most important for women who work in the media industry?

 

Depending very much in what community women work in, they need specific skills.

If we talk about Bolivia, for example, the women with whom we are working there are mainly radio communicators. They have very basic access to the internet. That is why we first trained them on the basics of how to use Facebook and Twitter, such as creating groups, using hashtags, replying and doing reports with video, audio and text. Then, we organised a 3-day hackathon to show them how to make their own audio podcast.

In other countries like Colombia, for instance, we put the emphasis on fact-checking training to show how to track social media networks, and also how to understand trends. Especially in times of elections, fact-checking is important there, as fake news have been especially spread all around social networks, and it is essential in journalism generally. 

An other skill we train women on is data-scraping, to understand how to work with data. We also organise data visualisation workshops, which are more about design and conceptualization of user journeys, as well as work on interfaces.

So, from technology, arts and journalism – everything comes together. Depending on the community we work in, we change the technology that we are using.

 

 

Why is there a difference between women and men in the media industry?

 

When you look at the development departments within newsrooms, most of them are made of men. I worked at the Guardian from 2010 to 2013, and in a group of 200 people working on development, we were only three women. You can find the same situation in Latin America, only it’s even worse. 

We want to change this! We want women to grab their future with their own hands, and understand that technology is not only the future but also the present.

In most training programmes, as soon as it is about technology, there will be way more men than women. Creating Chicas Poderosas, which has “women” (chicas) in its name, automatically attracted more women. We’ve created a space where they feel comfortable, where it’s ok to fail, where they are not being judged, and where they can share their doubts, questions and insecurities. A space where they can grow together and be better together.

 

 

One thing you are focusing on is the situation of women in politics and how to use data journalism to improve gender inequality in Central American governments. As you are mainly working in Brazil, can you give us an insight on what the situation is like for women over there?

 

From what I know, and what I’ve been feeling, the political situation is very poor. Right now you have extremely corrupted candidates who run for president. Even the former president tries to get into office again, even though he is about to be put in jail.

The situation for women is worse. They have quotas for the number of women to represent congress, parliament, and the government. But in most cases, they are actually either daughters, wifes, sisters or cousins of male presidents or males who are somehow connected to the political scheme. Therefore, they do whatever they are told to do.

That’s not what we need! With Chicas Poderosas we start a discussion in politics, asking questions such as “what does it take for women to be taken seriously in politics?”

 

 

What are you looking for when voting for projects from the Data Journalism Awards competition? 

 

Data journalism for me is the core of journalism and that is what I began with. What I look for are proposals that are varied, not laid back safe, not copying the great examples that are already there, projects that come up with something new. Engage me in the story! That’s the main thing.

Regardless of the story, I want to see variety. See out of the box, go out of your comfort zone and show me what you can do!

 

Besides teaching digital and new media skills, Chicas Poderosas offers leadership training. Why is it especially important for women?

 

In Latin America I see that women have a tendency to block themselves, to not believe that they can do the things they want to do, and therefore, there is a lack of women leaders. Why does a woman has to become more man-like in order to be seen as a leader? This is something we really want to change!

Women have so many skills and qualities that they often don’t use. This is really sad because they have characteristics that are really useful and needed for leadership. 

 

What are your main pieces of advice for women in media leadership positions? 

 

I’ve been meeting amazing women leaders in the media and we are trying to bring them to the New Ventures Lab that we have started a few weeks ago in St. Paulo, Brazil. We need more women role models in Latin America! We bring them to share their stories and insecurities, and we are trying to teach them to be very goal-driven.

As an entrepreneur you need to not only want but also to be able to do it. To run the extra mile and give a little bit more. Because you may have a full-time job, or a family to take care of. 

In order to strive within new media you have to think outside of the box, because journalism has changed – print is dying, digital is here to stay. We cannot think the same way as we did in print days. The same thing goes for leadership. Whether you are a man or a woman, use all your strengths and your skills in your execution of leadership.

 

 

What upcoming projects do you have at Chicas Poderosas?

 

The next big goal is to finish our New Ventures Lab initiative on 25 May 2018, in St Paulo, Brazil, at Google’s offices. There, ten teams will have to reach their full potential, launch and run their own businesses.

What we want to do is to have a very solid structure in terms of investigative media training. This is our main core and it will always be.

We created a network that gathers people from 11 countries in Latin America, and supports women. 

 

Finally, what are your favourite programmes to create graphics with?

 

I love making illustrations with Illustrator and animating everything in After Effects. Sometimes I like using stop-motion as well but that’s a little bit more crafty and handmade: you draw, you keep the paper, you lay it on any surface you have and take a picture of every movement you want to create. That makes a really crafty animation. It’s very time consuming but, when you don’t give me any time limitation, that’s what I love doing the most.

 



Michaela Gruber is a journalism and media management student, based in Vienna, Austria. During her studies she spent a semester abroad in France, where she started working for HEI-DA.

As the company’s communication officer, she is in charge of the Data Journalism Blog and several social media activities. This year, Michaela will also be HEI-DA’s editor covering the Data Journalism Awards in Lisbon, Portugal.

How three women are influencing data journalism and what you can learn from them

This article was originally published on the Data Journalism Awards Medium Publication managed by the Global Editors Network. You can find the original version right here.

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Stephanie Sy of Thinking Machines (Philippines), Yolanda Ma of Data Journalism China and Esra Dogramaci of Deutsche Welle, formerly Al Jazeera (Germany), new members of the Data Journalism Awards jury, talk innovation, data journalism in Asia and the Middle East, and women in news.

left to right: Yolanda Ma (Data Journalism China), Esra Dogramaci (Deutsche Welle, formerly BBC and Al Jazeera), and Stephanie Sy (Thinking Machines) join DJA Jury

 

We welcomed three new members to the Data Journalism Awards jury last year (pictured above). They are all women, strong-willed and inspiring women, and they represent two regions that are often overlooked in the world of data journalism: Asia and the Middle East.

What was your first project in data journalism or interactive news and what memory do you keep from it?

Esra Dogramaci: In 2012, Invisible Children launched a campaign to seek out Lord’s Resistance Army(LRA) leader Joseph Kony and highlight the exploitation of child soldiers. Then, at Al Jazeera, we wanted to see what people in North Uganda, who lived in one of the areas who were affected by the LRA actually had to say about it. They would ‘speak to tweet’ and we would map their reactions on Ushahidi using a Google Fusion table in the background.

 
Uganda Speaks by Al Jazeera

 

Although Al Jazeera had started doing this kind of projects back in 2009 during the war on Gaza (the experiment’s page of the Al Jazeera Lab website has now disappeared but can be viewed through WebArchive.org), it picked up steam during Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring where, due to lack of broadcast media coverage, protesters were using social media to bring attention to what was happening.

Interactive story by Thinking Machines

 

Stephanie Sy: Our first data journalism project as a team at Thinking Machines was a series of interactive stories on traffic accidents in Metro Manila. We cleaned and analysed a set of Excel sheets of 90,000 road accidents spanning 10 years.

It was the first project we worked on as a mixed team of journalists, designers, and data scientists, and the first time we tried to build something from scratch with d3.js! I worked on the d3 charts, and remember being in utter despair at how hard it was to get the interactive transitions to render nicely across different browser types. It was surprisingly well received by the local civic community, and that positive feedback emboldened us to keep working.

 
Connected China, Thomson Reuters

 

Yolanda Ma: One of my first projects was Connected China for Thomson Reuters, which tracked and visualised the people, institutions and relationships that form China’s elite power structure (learn more about it here).

This project taught me the importance of facts and every piece of data in it (thousands, if not millions in total) went through a rigid fact-checking process (by human beings, not machines, unfortunately). I learned by doing that facts are the bones of data journalism, not fancy visualisations, even though this project turned out to be fancy and cool, which is good too.

 

Now, what was the latest project you worked on and how do the two compare?

 

ED: Towards the end of last year, I taught a data journalism module to City University London Master’s students who were able to pull together their own data visualisation projects in the space of an hour. The biggest difference is how vastly the interfaces have improved and how quick and intuitive the designs and interactive softwares are now. There are a lot more companies switched on to storytelling beyond TV or text and that knowledge combined, how do you stand out in the world of online news?

Complementary to that Al Jazeera was always a front runner because they were willing to take risks and try something new when no one else was. In the newsrooms I’ve worked at or see since, there is still a general aversion to risk taking in preference of safety — though everyone knows that to survive and thrive in this digital media landscape, its risk taking, innovation that is going push those boundaries and really get you places.

SS: Our latest related data story is a piece we put together visualising traffic jams across Metro Manila during the holiday rush season. This time we were looking at gigabytes of Waze jams data that we accessed through the Waze API. It definitely grew out of our early work in transit data stories, but reflects a huge amount on growth in our ability to handle complex data, and understanding of what appeals to our audience.

One big piece of learning we got from this is that our audience in the Philippines mainly interacts with the news through mobile phones and via Facebook, so complex d3 interactives don’t work for them. What we do now is to build gifs on top of the interactives, which we then share on Facebook. You can see an example of that in the linked story. That gets us a tremendous amount of reach, as we’re able to communicate complex results in a format that’s friendly for our audience.

YM: I’ve been doing data journalism training mostly in the past few years and helping others do their data projects, so nothing comparable really. The latest project I worked on is this Data Journalism MOOC with HKU in partnership with Google News Lab. It is tailored-made for practitioners in Asia, and it’s re-starting again soon (begins March 6), so go on and register before it’s too late!

 

What excites you about the future of data journalism and interactive news?

 

ED: The ability to tell stories in a cleaner, more engaging way. Literally everything can be turned into a story just by interrogating the data, being curious and asking questions. The digital news world has always been driven by data and it’s exciting to see how “traditional” journalism is embracing this more. I love this example from Berliner Morgenpost where they charted this bus line in Berlin, combined with a dash cam comparing various data such as demographics, voting. Its an ingenious way of taking complex data and breaking it into a meaningful, engaging way rather than pie charts.

M29 from Berliner Morgenpost

 

SS: There are tremendous amounts of data being generated in this digital age, and I think data journalism is a very natural evolution of the field. Investigative journalists should be able to use computer science skills to find their way through messy datasets and big data. It’s absolutely reasonable to expect that a news organization might get a 1 terabyte dump of files from a source.

YM: It excites me because it is the future. We live in the age of data, and the inevitable increasing amount of data available means there is growingly huge potential for data journalism. People’s news consumption is also changing and I believe personalisation is one of the key characteristics for the new generation of consumers, which means interactive news — interactive in many different ways — will thrive.

 

How are Asian and Middle Eastern media organisations (depending on your experience) doing in terms of data journalism and interactive news compared to the rest of the world?

 

ED: I think Al Jazeera has always been a pioneer in this. They have a great interactive team that drew together people from various disciplines within the organisation — coders, video people, designers, journalists — before everyone else was doing it and they’ve been able to shed light on stories that wouldn’t usually be picked up on by mainstream media radars.

Example that illustrates my point: The project “Broken homes, a record year of home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem” by Al Jazeera

“Broken homes, a record year of home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem” by Al Jazeera

 

SS: We have a few media organisations like the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Rappler, and Inquirer who have been integrating data analysis into their reporting, but there isn’t anyone regularly producing complex data journalism pieces.

Our key problem is the lack of useful datasets. A huge amount of work goes into acquiring, cleaning, and triple checking the raw data. Analysis is “garbage in, garbage out” and we can’t create good data journalism without the presence of good data. This is where the European and North American media organisations have an edge. Their governments and civic society organisations follow open data standards, and citizens can request data [via FOIA]! The Philippine government has been making serious progress towards more open data sharing, and I hope they’re able to sustain that commitment.

Example that illustrates my point: PCIJ’s Money Politics project is a great example of an organisation doing the data janitorial work of acquiring and validating hard-to-find data. During our last presidential elections in 2015, GMA News Network and Rappler both created hugely popular election tracking live data stories.

PCIJ’s Money Politics

 

YM: Media organisations in Asia are catching up on data journalism and interactive news. There are some challenges of course, for example, lack of data in less developped countries, lack of skills and talents (and limited training opportunities), and even poor infrastructure or unstable internet especially in rural areas that would limit the presentation of news stories. Despite the difficulties, we do see good works emerging, though not necessarily in English. Check out some of the stories from the last GIJN’s Investigative Journalism Conference held in Nepal and you’ll get an idea.

Example that illustrates my point: This Caixin Media data story analysed and visualised the property market in China for the past few years.

 

Another New Normal, Caixin Media

 

What view do you have on the role of women in the world of news today? How is it being a woman in your respective work environment? Do you feel it makes a difference? If so, which one and why?

 

ED: Women are underrepresented not just in news coverage but in leadership positions too. I have to admit though that being at Deutsche Welle, I see a lot more women in senior management and it feels like a much more egalitarian working environment. However looking at my overall experience as a woman in news, you do face a lot of sexism and prejudice. Every woman I know has a story to tell and when the latest story about Uber came out a lot of my female colleagues around me were nodding their heads.

What got me through challenging times is having a fantastic network of female role models and mentors who are there to support you. That was one piece of advice I gave to prior teams, get a mentor. A lot of women feel isolated or feel the way they are treated is normal but it’s not. Women should also be aware that there is a real risk you will be punished if you speak up, challenge the status quo and tow the party line. If this happens, it’s an environment or team you probably shouldn’t be in anyway.

SS: It’s alarming to see parties around the world trying to stifle the voices of anyone who doesn’t belong and calling any news that doesn’t flatter them as “fake news.”. It’s important for us to speak up as women, and to practice intersectionality when it comes to other marginalised communities. As people who work with data, we can see past the aggregates and look at the complex messy truth. We must be able to communicate that complexity in order for our work to make a difference.

YM: Most of the data journalism teams in China are led by woman, and I think they are doing really well 🙂

 

What do you think makes a great data journalism project? What will you be looking for when marking projects for the Data Journalism Awards this year?

 

ED: Simplicity. It’s easy to get lost in data and try to do too much, but it’s often about taking something complex and making it accessible for a wider audience, getting them to think about something they haven’t or perhaps consider in a different way. I’ll be looking for the why — why does this matter, does this story or project make a dent in the universe?

After all, isn’t that what telling stories is about? The obvious thing that comes through is passion. It’s also something obvious but you can tell when a person or team has cared and really invested into the work versus projects being rolled off a conveyor belt.

SS: A great data journalism project involves three things: novel data, clever analytical methods, and great communication through the project’s medium of choice. I’m hoping to see a wide variety of mediums this year!

Will someone be submitting an audio data journalism project? With all the very exciting advances in the field of artificial intelligence this year, I’m also hoping to see projects that incorporate machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

YM: I believe data journalism is after all journalism — it has to reveal truth and tell stories, based or driven by data. I’ll be looking for stories that do make an impact in one way or another.

 

If you had one piece of advice for people applying for the Data Journalism Awards competition, what would it be?

 

ED: Don’t be intimidated by the competition or past award winners. Focus on what you do best. I say this especially for those applying for the first time, I see a lot of hesitation and negative self talk of ‘I’m not good enough’ etc. In every experience there’s something to learn, so don’t hesitate.

SS: Don’t forget to tell a story! With data science methods, it’s easy to get lost in fancy math and lose track of the narrative.

YM: Tell us a bit about the story behind your story — say, we may not know how hard it might be to get certain data in your country.

 

What was the best piece of advice you were ever given in your years of experience in the media industry?

 

ED: Take every opportunity. That’s related to a quote that has been coming up over and over again for the past week or so, “success is when preparation meets opportunity.”

SS: One of my best former bosses told me to imagine that a hungover, unhappy man with a million meetings that day was the only reader of my work. He haunts me to this day.

YM: I started my career with the ambition (like many idealistic young people) to change China. My first (and second) boss Reg Chua once said to me, don’t worry about changing China but focus on making small changes and work with a long-term vision. Sounds cliche.

He said that to me in 2012. The next year, together with two other friends I started DJChina.org, which started in 2013 as a small blog and now grown to be one of the best educational platforms for data journalism practitioners in China. The year after, in 2014, Open Data China was launched (using the domain name I registered a few years back), and indicated a bottom-up movement to push for more open data, which was incorporated into national policy within a year. So I guess all these proved that Reg was right, and it could be applied to anywhere, or anything. Think big, act small, one story (or project) at a time, and changes will happen.

 


left to right: Yolanda Ma (Data Journalism China), Esra Dogramaci (Deutsche Welle, formerly BBC and Al Jazeera), and Stephanie Sy (Thinking Machines)

 

Stephanie Sy is the founder of Thinking Machines, a data science and data engineering team based in the Philippines. She brings to the jury her expertise in data science, engineering and storytelling.

Yolanda Ma is the co-founder of Data Journalism China, one of the best educational platforms for data journalism practitioners in China. Not only representing the biggest country in Asia, she also has experience teaching data skills to journalists and a great knowledge of data journalism from her region.

Esra Dogramaci has now joined Deutsche Welle and formerly worked with the BBC, Al Jazeera in Qatar and Turkey, as well as the UN Headquarters and UNICEF. She brings to the DJA jury significant experience in digital transformation across news and current affairs, particularly in social video and off platform growth and development.

 


The Data Journalism Awards are the first international awards recognising outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide. Started in 2012, the competition is organised by the Global Editors Network, with support from the Google News Lab, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and in partnership with Chartbeat. More info about cash prizes, categories and more, can be found on the DJA 2017 website.


marianne-bouchart

Marianne Bouchart is the founder and director of HEI-DA, a nonprofit organisation promoting news innovation, the future of data journalism and open data. She runs data journalism programmes in various regions around the world as well as HEI-DA’s Sensor Journalism Toolkit project and manages the Data Journalism Awards competition.

Before launching HEI-DA, Marianne spent 10 years in London where she worked as a web producer, data journalism and graphics editor for Bloomberg News, amongst others. She created the Data Journalism Blog in 2011 and gives lectures at journalism schools, in the UK and in France.