How data could change African newsrooms
— By Lily Kuo and Jackie Bischof
Last year, the Quartz Africa team applied for the Innovate Africa fund to take Quartz’s chart-building platform, Atlas, to newsrooms, journalism schools, and other organizations in African countries. We got the grant (hurray!) and will soon be traveling to Botswana, Swaziland, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, and Egypt to hold workshops on how to use Atlas’s open source charts.
Before starting, we wanted to get a feel for what exactly newsrooms and journalists are looking for when it comes to data visualization. We surveyed news organizations on the continent and found two main issues:
1) Reporters want t0 visualize Africa-focused data sets …
Out of 12 newsrooms that responded to our survey, four said that their journalists regularly use chart building tools, including Excel, Tableau, or Chartbuilder (Quartz’s old chart building platform), Data Wrapper, and Piktochart. More than half of news organizations responding to our survey (58%) said that they didn’t have access to Africa-related charts to use in their work. The rest of respondents said they had access to data visualizations but would like more.
2) … but they don’t have the tools, training, or support to do so
Several respondents said that a lack of tools or resources was the biggest challenge they faced to creating data visualizations. Reporters often can’t make or publish their own charts: only 16% of respondents said that reporters in their organization could easily publish charts on their own, while 58% said sometimes, and 25% said no. Quartz’s chart-building tool allows reporters to quickly and easily build and publish their own graphics.
When asked if reporters and editors collaborate on data visualization projects, five out of 11 said yes, but several respondents noted limitations. In these cases, editors lacked data journalism skills, did not believe it was a priority, or didn’t have access to web systems to embed charts. Several respondents said that getting their editors to understand the importance of data journalism and the need for basic training in data visualization tools has been a challenge. “So far, it’s been difficult convincing many of them of the value of this investment on the whole,” one respondent said.
Most organizations surveyed had specific departments for creating graphics, a process that creates bottlenecks. “Time is the biggest challenge. Always looking for a quick, simple, clean and elegant way to visualize [data],” one respondent said.
Over the next few months we’ll be visiting newsrooms and working with journalists to identify data sets of interest to their users and create customized charts for their newsrooms. We’ll be blogging about each training session, taking feedback, and looking for ways to improve.
Interested in a training session or learning more about Atlas?
Email us at atlasforafrica@qz.com.
All of the charts generated from the Atlas for Africa initiative will be available on Atlas, and on Code for Africa’s website, where they can be downloaded or embedded by anyone. Our global Atlas team will be available on Slack to answer questions. We’ll also be hosting the journalist who makes the best use of Atlas at one of our newsrooms in London or New York.
Beyond providing a tool and training, we’ll be talking with newsrooms about how to make data journalism easier and a bigger part of their processes. Our goal isn’t just to introduce Atlas to organizations, but to leave journalists and editors with the tools to train others in their newsrooms.
This blog post is part of a series written for Atlas for Africa, an initiative to bring Quartz’s chart-building platform, Atlas, to newsrooms and organizations across Africa for free, in support of greater access to Africa-focused data sources and visualization. Interested in a training session with the Atlas for Africa team? Email atlasforafrica@qz.com. Atlas for Africa is supported by Code for Africa’s innovateAFRICA fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
