Interhacktives Newsletter #2: Schrödinger’s Bellingcat
Welcome back to our second newsletter of the year, and a warm welcome to our new subscribers! We’ve been working hard to bring you some new #content, so without further ado…
Exciting news
Our podcast, “Data Day”, is officially on iTunes! Click here to subscribe and listen, and if you really love us, leave us a review and five stars. Here’s what we’ve had on the podcast recently:
Jasper Pickering, video extraordinaire and creator of the egg video we attached in our last newsletter, spoke to Luke Barratt about the growing importance of Facebook Live and what that might mean for the future of live news broadcasting. They also crack some really cringey jokes. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a fan of email newsletters. Alexandra Ma chatted to Luke about the art and ethics of newslettering: if getting access to a reader’s email inbox is like gaining a private audience, to what extent can publications use it for marketing or political purposes and when does this become an abuse of big data and reader’s trust?
(And, yes, we realise how meta that self-promotion was. It’s OK, our head hurts too.)
Last, but certainly not least: Matteo Moschella, a former sports reporter and self-styled “jock/joke of Interhacktives”, spoke about the role of data in sport journalism. If athletes are increasingly relying on data to optimise their performance, sports journalists train smarter too.
We chatted to an investigative legend
“Verifying missile launchers, tracking down ISIS supporters and holding worldwide governments to account is just a day’s work for 36-year-old Eliot Higgins,” the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative search network that tracked down the Russian-owned missile launcher that took down the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014. Check out Ella Wilks-Harper’s profile of Higgins here.
#CityFakeNews
Our very own Ryan Watts made this cartoon at a panel discussion on fake news problem earlier this week, featuring media superstars Megan Lucero from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (who we interviewed last month), James Ball from BuzzFeed, and Alastair Reid, formerly of First Draft News. The event was chaired by our course director Jonathan Hewett, who said Ryan’s depiction of the speakers was “uncanny”.
Seriously, though, the term “fake news” doesn’t seem to be going away. In fact, it’s being increasingly used by politicians — including one of our own — as a weapon against use, Lucero said at the event. Follow #CityFakeNews for more coverage of last night.
‘VR is laid bare, you can’t hide’
The BBC World Service are experimenting with VR, and released their first piece ‘Trafficked’ last year. The short film shows us the world through the eyes of Maria: a victim of sex trafficking in Mexico. Ryan Watts spoke to creators Charlie Newland and Owain Rich.
Speaking of video, Facebook Live is determined to show us a giraffe being born, despite the animal’s apparent shyness. Would this kind of stream be improved if users could vote on two potential baby names? We’ve made a handy guide for adding this interactivity to your facebook lives, and discussed the merits of doing so.
News we liked around the world
Some of us attended and blogged for the news:rewired conference a few weeks ago and heard some really cool, smart people talk about their work, including: the state of automated fact-checking, whether we should fear robot journalists, Al Jazeera’s awesome newsgame and how journalists can protect themselves against government surveillance, among others.
The New York Times Upshot created a matrix rating 20 big events of the barely one-month-old Trump presidency on a scale of “normal” and “important”. Spoiler alert: it found a lot of the Trump administration’s actions abnormal.
The Atlantic published a beautiful interactive feature that maps out how the world has changed during your lifetime.
The data journalist and the pie chart: less a love story, more a harrowing campside yarn spun to frighten the young ones with warnings of bad dataviz. Or not? Storytelling with Data blogger Cole Nussbaumer says why she has shifted her stance. [Storytelling with Data]
Polling is useless: bring back tarot cards and ouija boards, right? Not so fast: according to a new study that examined over 650 executive elections in 85 countries, polls are 80 to 90% accurate in predicting election outcomes. Who’d have thunk. [Quartz]
Derek Watkins, graphics editor at The New York Times, explains how he created the epic interactive story, “Greenland is Melting Away”.
And that’s all from us today!
Comments? Tips? Love letters? Please email us at interhacktives@gmail.com. We’re also active on Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Medium — be our friend, please?
This newsletter was written by Alexandra Ma, and designed by Ryan Watts.
