EIJC18 & Dataharvest

Pitching your journalism project is a necessary skill: Editors, donors, publishers all need good pitches. Journalists are well aware of the target groups of their media, but what if your target group is a jury? In this session you can meet Trine Smistrup, coordinator of Journalismfund.eu's peer-review jury and Ides Debruyne, the founder and yearlong coordinator of the Fonds Pascal Decroos working grants and get a step-by-step introduction on what to remember when pitching to a blind peer review jury.

Pitching your journalism project is a necessary skill: Editors, donors, publishers all need good pitches. Yet donors sometimes sigh deeply about badly crafted applications. How come? In this session we do not ponder the puzzle - instead we've asked four very different donors dealing with applications from journalists to help us understand, what exactly they need to know - and what they want journalists to consider when looking for funding for their work.

Many data teams take their place between two poles: Not only do they work on their own data-driven stories, they also collaborate with the newsroom in order to make each and every article better from a "storytelling" perspective, i.e., to enhance it with adequate – often visual – elements or a particular structure. Therefore, on the one hand, they are reacting to the news and creating quick visually-driven content; on the other hand they work on mid- or long-term research for and the conceptualization and implementation of larger data-driven stories. In this session, several datajournalists shows how their teams try to bridge the gap between the two requirements. We are keen to discuss how each newsroom tackles these sometimes contradicting demands.

The European garbage companies are transnational, makes billions of euroes each year and is vital to any city´s daily life. But how can we analyse them? What data do they have? And how can we get our hands on it? All the methods perspectives presented can be used for stories in other Europan countries. Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet revealed how and why Oslo’s renovation company "Veireno” failed at collecting garbage, while also violating the working environment act systematically.
Among 180 employees, mostly of eastern European origin, the team identified more than 2000 violations of the Working Environment Act in four months. The findings caused a political uproar, in a city ruled by a centre/left coalition priding itself of supporting worker’s rights.
In total Dagbladet analyzed more than 2 million excel-cells. It was the use of and knowledge about spreadsheets and Excel that led to the most important findings in the project. Using VBA-codes, filter-functions and different queries. While claiming the collection of garbage was getting better, Dagbladet revealed the chaos dominating both inside the company and the city administration, analyzing data handed out via Freedom of information acts.
In 2017 the project won the national contest for data journalism, Data-Skup.

CAR training: Free data from PDFs and pictures - tools to scrape data locked in analysis-unfriendly file formats.