The post was originally published on DW Innovation blog.

When we as a data team finally publish a long-term data-driven investigation, we are super happy we made it across the finish line, but exhausted at the same time.

A few weeks ago, we asked Lindsay Green-Barber to animate a webinar for EDJNet’s members and partners. She helped us think about the impact of our work and possible ways to increase it — both for EDJNet itself and for European data journalism more in general. Here Lindsay shares some of her thoughts.

Journalists across the world agree that their work is crucial for engaged citizens, government and corporate accountability, and successful democracy. However, there is still little agreement about how to define, measure, and communicate the impact of journalism. …

Almost one million Romanian citizens cast their ballot for the second turn of the Romanian presidential elections in November 2019 from abroad, largely thanks to the fact that more than 800 polling stations around the world remained opened from Friday through Sunday over the election week-end. In some parts of Europe, polling stations were available not only in capital cities or major urban centers, but also in relatively remote locations.

Indeed, it took me about 25 minutes on a rainy Sunday to drive my wife to a polling station from the small village in the Italian Alps where I live.

It has been two years since the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) started making collaborative data journalism in Europe. It is high time to take stock of what has been achieved and what can be improved.

After a few consultations with our 28 media partners, we launched a survey which aims to:

• gather information on the practices of newsrooms, data-teams and individual journalists with regard to the use of data techniques in their reporting, in particular when covering European and cross-border issues;
• understand the challenges they face, in terms of type of skills, of tools, of content and formats for…

di Giorgio Comai e Gina Pavone (OBC Transeuropa)

Nel pomeriggio del 27 maggio, il giorno successivo alle elezioni europee in Italia, i risultati degli scrutini sono praticamente definitivi. La comunità dei data journalist freme in attesa dei file con i dati. Sul gruppo facebook Daninja qualcuno domanda come ottenere i file con i dati diffusi tramite il sito ufficiale del Ministero dell’interno e con cui vengono alimentati i grafici pubblicati sullo stesso portale. Come mai non è lo stesso ministero a diffondere dei file, ci si chiede. Già, come mai?

Un dettaglio è importante: finché i dati definitivi non vengono…

by Giorgio Comai (OBC Transeuropa)

Among the many debates that follow elections, there is one that usually gets most attention among data journalists and people with an interest in data visualisation: electoral maps. This is not a purely aesthetic debate, as both newsreaders and political pundits make sense of election results through these maps, reaching often debatable conclusions.

A common one, for example, is the idea of a “country divided” as highlighted by Giuseppe Sollazzo in a post focused on maps published after the 2018 election in Italy. Maps with the north of Italy completely green have been common after…

Disinformation campaigns, dubious practices on social media, murkey financing of political campaigns and lobby groups, timed hacked and leaks: new structural vulnerabilities to our democracies are there for anyone to exploit. It’s time to focus our public conversation on new policies and practices that can mitigate these risks

15/02/2019 — Giorgio Comai

Recent electoral contests in established Western democracies have been followed by media reports, research efforts, and inquiries suggesting that Russian political actors may have interfered with the integrity of democratic processes through various means (including through non-transparent funding of political forces, disinformation campaigns, computational propaganda, as well as targeted hacking).

There has been a highly polarised public conversation about alleged or confirmed interference from Russia, which has however been of little consequence. …

A few weeks ago, the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) released a new dataset including yearly average temperatures between the year 1900 and 2017 for over 500 cities across Europe, and made it possible to find key data on each of them through an interactive web interface. Since these are lenghty and meaningful time series, I decided to use them to test-drive data animation with R with ggplot2+gganimate.[1]

About the data

Through the analysis of data made available by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and by harmonising historical time series with recent data obtained from a variety of sources (satellite…