Idea Lab

At the International Journalism Festival: Can Data Journalism Save Newsrooms?

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

PERUGIA, Italy -- Here at the International Journalism Festival the launch of three large initiatives have generated a lot of the buzz around the topic of data journalism. The School of Data Journalism, organized by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, is composed of three panels and five workshops and dives into some of the key issues that media organizations are currently considering: "Is it worth my while starting out trying to do data journalism?", "Will data journalism make us money?", "How do you get data that you can search, filter and analyze with a computer?" and...

• April 27, 2012
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Spending Stories to Dive Into Data at the International Journalism Festival

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Spending Stories team's experience in leading data journalism workshops, such as the one last year on EU spending in Utrecht and EuroHack in Warsaw, has shown that there are still a lot of barriers hindering data journalists from reporting on spending. This month, April 25-29, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, we'll continue our mission to help journalists find, decipher, remix and report on spending data. In the Spending Stories workshop, Friedrich Lindenberg and I will be aiming to focus the participants on "following the money" by taking a closer look at EU spending data. In past workshops,...

• April 4, 2012
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How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers' Ball

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This piece was co-written with Eric King, human rights and technology adviser at Privacy International, and comes as Privacy International launches a new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies are selling? Which governments are buying? And why should we care? The OpenSpending platform can be used to speed up fact checking, showing which of these companies have government contracts, and, most interestingly, with which departments. Behind the scenes Big Brother is now indisputably big business, yet until recently the international trade in surveillance...

• February 24, 2012
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How Spending Stories Spots Errors in Public Spending

by Lucy Chambers
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

This article was co-written by Martin Keegan, project lead for Spending Stories. How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at all. People arguing about the future will care about the present, and if data about past or present public spending is available, many will certainly look at it. When they do, occasionally they will find errors, or believe themselves to have found errors. OpenSpending, which aims to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world, encourages users to: augment the existing spending...

• December 2, 2011
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