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What's fascinating in the world of data journalism today in Europe
is that anything is possible.
We're a team of six, seven people
and we're able in just a few weeks, or days even,
to set up a network of people from different newsrooms
throughout Europe and to build something
much bigger than what we could do
just by ourselves,
and there is really this feeling that anything is possible.
There is a lot of enthusiasm everywhere,
and it lets us imagine and do amazing projects.
The people who had the most influence on me
were in the mid 2000's, Rob Curley at Lawrence, Texas,
and his team, including Adrian Holovaty
and what he wrote at the time.
I'd say that today the one person
who has the best vision about data journalism
is Reginald Chua at Reuters
and on his blog, Structuring Journalism.
The tools you need to do data journalism
are mostly Google
and a lot of knowing how to learn new tools.
The tools I was using five years ago don't exist today,
and you always have to find ways to use what's best at the given time,
so that the one thing that you need, really,
is an ability to learn, to search and to know a bit of programming
because it helps a lot.
The data journalism project that I'm most proud of
is the Afghan War Logs that we did in 2010.
What happened was that in July 2010
WikiLeaks published War Logs from Afghanistan
together with the New York Times, Guardian, and der Spiegel,
and at the time WikiLeaks was not known
and we just saw that. We were working in a very small team at OWNI, in Paris.
We just saw that on Sunday night
and we thought, well, there is something to do here
so just with three people we spent the whole night
and the next day working on a small app that lets French users go through the logs
because nobody in France saw it
and it was really popular and had a real impact.
People who were interested in the Afghan war
were able to look at data and documents
that they could not have accessed otherwise,
so we're really proud of this.
It was really the first time that we, a small team of nobodys
could really prove that data journalism
had a real utility for the journalistic ecosystem.
My advice to young journalists would be to learn code.
It's really the one skill that's going to be the most useful,
not only because it lets you do stories that people who do not code cannot do,
but also because from a financial perspective
it's the one thing that's going to let you earn enough money to do journalism.
That's what I did at some point when I was younger
and I wasn't that successful. I survived by doing basic
development jobs that you can do with very little skills
and with this money I was able to keep doing journalism
and I couldn't have done that otherwise.
I would just have taken any job that I could.
So really, the most important thing is to learn a bit of coding.
There is no way around it.
It's going to be two-pronged, I'd say.
On the one hand, most of the techniques
that we use today will become mainstream
and we will just call them journalism,
I hope in a few years.
On the other hand, some of the approaches that we take
looking at information as purely data
and how storytelling is really the end product of these big databases,
this is going to lead, I think, to new companies
that look at journalism not as a collection of articles or videos,
but as one big database on a vertical that they know inside out
that they are the only ones to own,
who actually curated and built it,
and who are able to make stories out of this.
So, I see really these two different apertures
for the future of journalism.
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