Building the first global hub for data journalism starts with your input

First of all, Happy New Year to all our readers! 2017 is bound to be an intriguing year for journalists and editors, whose main duty is traditionally to report facts and inform, but 2016 and the recent US presidential election have made it clear they must also debunk fake news! This is quite a disturbing shift for news professionals. Navigating social networks used to be challenging enough, now the risk is to get marginalised by them or even by the personal Twitter account of the US president-elect and its 17 million followers.

Evidently this issue of a post-truth new world and how news media can still defend democratic values will be at the heart of the upcoming GEN Summit to be held in Vienna from 21 to 23 June 2017. Nevertheless this is not the topic I wanted to develop today.

After the success of the Data Journalism Awards, GEN will be building, by the end of 2017, the first global hub for data-driven journalism with the support of Open Society Foundations and Google DNI.

Click here to take the survey

The hub will revolve around three main components:

1. a data store for monetising data journalism products and services,
2. a project match-making space for developing cooperation between data journalists,
3. a news and community section for gathering all resources related to data journalism.

To help us better identify your needs and challenges for such an endeavour, we need your input. To do so, we have prepared a quick survey.

I would be very grateful if you would take 5 minutes to answer it!

You can read more about the data journalism hub’s prototype in this press release we’ve published recently.

As an editor, publisher, manager or service provider, this hub will help you find, sell, donate or buy datasets, visualisation and coding tools, specific skills, training resources, grants, etc. It will also allow you and your teams to stay informed about the use of data in general, which has been more and more important in the past few years, whether in reporting, storytelling, pure visualisation or to help facts and democracy.

Thanks for your feedback and your participation to our first 2017 survey and see you hopefully next June at the seventh GEN Summit.

Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO, Global Editors Network

Read more:

Pushing data journalism forward — the DJA 2017 roadmap

We brought a bunch of data journalists together into a room and this is what happened

Panama Papers, the journalism story behind the scandal