Investigating Air Pollution with Sensor Journalism
HowYouBreathe, an experimental prototype from a Romanian regional newspaper
Air pollution kills 7 million people each year worldwide by some estimates. HowYouBreathe is a site that allows journalists and citizens to visually explore air quality and lung disease data, to tell stories about how air pollution affects the health of Romanians. The team from Gazeta de Sud, one of the largest and most respected regional daily newspapers in the country, created this prototype at the Bucharest Editors Lab in April 2016.
The project aims to create a distributed air quality measurement network by using data from both publicly and privately owned sensors in Romania. Using low-cost air quality sensors, HowYouBreathe fills this knowledge gap about the immediate environment. “The issue in our region of Dolj County is that there are quite a lot of air pollution-related diseases, and the government, as we see it, trying to hide the problem,” said Stefan Voinea Director of Gazeta de Sud, “So our plan is to create a network of distributed community-owned air quality sensors, which are low-cost in order to show what the air quality is really like.” The data collected will be freely available to journalists, concerned citizens, public authorities and environmental non-profits.
We caught up with Stefan following the hackathon to talk about his experience. We’ve since learned that the project is currently on hold due to lack of financing but Stefan has been working on a mission with the Romanian health ministry and plans to organise hackathons there based on the Editors Lab model.
What are your general thoughts and takeaways from the Editors Lab event?
I hadn’t taken part in any other hackathons before. It was very exciting to have to work fast to get from an idea to a prototype in so little time. When it’s you and your own ideas in your head it’s a bit narrow so it’s nice to be in the same room with people in the same field and see what they are thinking, what their approach to similar problems is.
What did you do afterwards? Did you immediately say “we want to do this”?
Of course we got right down to it. We organised a Google doc with a plan of the stages of the implementation process and I talked to our IT staff. We have two people in the IT department who are more hardware inclined, about the sensors. So there are two directions here: one is to get the data from the official website and also add data from these sensors, the Raspberry Pi sensors. And we ordered the Raspberry Pi sensors. My colleague the hardware guy is testing stuff. We didn’t move as fast as I expected; it’s working but it didn’t work as it would have if we had a programmer back at Gazeta.
Speaking more generally, do you see hackathons as a model for newsroom innovation?
I don’t see it as the way forward. You can’t just do this to move the company forward. I see it as one of the ways to innovate, but the idea is to try to — this has been said so many times and it’s silly — foster innovation in your own newsroom. And it’s very difficult because I was in the Republic of Moldova two weeks ago to deliver some trainings to the local newspapers there. Most of them have websites, almost all of them. But some of the websites have like 100 visitors per day. There are like three to seven people in the whole newsroom and telling them that they need someone to be in charge of innovation in their own company when they are the ones that write and they sell advertising, they’re like the goalie and the shooter and the line of defense, you know, they do everything on the field. So we are somewhat stuck as a traditional media, you know the whole story. I feel like this is therapy now!
It’s very difficult to talk about innovation in digital when digital doesn’t bring you money. We as small producers of content with a narrow audience set by our area of distribution, because we are in five counties in Romania and that’s it, it’s resource starvation.
In that case, how would you measure the success of something like a hackathon?
It brings this sort of feeling of urgency. We have to get this done by tomorrow. We stay together at one table and work. For example, the first day I had no feeling that we were competitors in any way. I knew why we were there, of course, but I didn’t have any kind of competitive spirit in me at all. Then in the second day, as they day progressed you started to realise that just one team will win this and we are battling it out even if we are smiling at each other. It was nice to compete in such a small environment where you don’t know most of the people and to wonder what they’re thinking and it pushes you. You hear some people with their ideas on the first day, and then you say is my idea good enough? It’s really a catalyst for thinking about stuff. I’m also sure that we will do hackathons at the ministry of health for open data. I’m 100% positive. And this is a direct effect of my participation at the Editors Lab.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
