A Data Journalist’s Holiday Wish List
If you were able to wish for ANYTHING to help journalists around the world do even greater data journalism in 2022, what would it be?
As the year 2021 is coming to an end, it is time to reminisce about what a great work you’ve done battling through another 12 months of covid-19 data coverage, as well as pulling off some amazing projects on various subjects from climate change, to politics, or sports.
Data journalists around the world have come together and collaborated on some of the most impressive investigative and data-driven projects of all time (the Pandora Papers, the Pegasus Project, or the Big Local News project, to name a few).
It is also a time of the year prone to dreaming and getting into the holiday spirit. This is why we came up with this idea of compiling the wishes of data journalists from our community.
We asked them what their wish would be if they could ask for one thing to help journalists around the world do even greater data journalism in 2022.
Any tools that don’t exist yet? Any challenges that would deserve a magic wand trick?
The results came from all parts of the world, some witty, some funny, some drop-dead serious, but all very relevant and representative of how it feels like being a data journalist today.
Our main takeaway from this is that, for 2022, data journalists wish for:
- Access to more open data of better quality
- Capacity to do better training
- Kickass front-end developers willing to work in the media industry
- Easy access to AI tools that help journalists do their investigations
- Super-powered machines that understand complicated and badly formatted data from officials (and others)
- Easy access to real-time high-resolution satellite images
- Better focus on specific issues
- Better data security architectures
- The ability to socialise with other journalists at conferences without feeling lives are at risk
If you also want to contribute to this list, do so by sending your wish, as well as your full name, organization name, and country to Marianne Bouchart, the Sigma Awards executive director, at marianne@sigmaawards.org. We’ll make sure to update this list regularly, as contributions get sent.
Here is the full unedited wish list we received from our contributors:
“I’d love a kickass front-end developer for Christmas! Our team is hiring and unfortunately the pool of devs with the skills and desire to work in news and storytelling is small (and the ABC finds it very hard to compete in terms of salary). And I always want more training … in coding, viz, data analysis tools, etc. I am constantly plagued by the feeling that I don’t know enough!”
Inga Ting, ABC (Australia)“In regions riven by corruption and wrongdoings and without access to data and information, I hope to see a day when we have free and open access to valuable and reliable data. Our journalists in the MENA region are doing an excellent job without real access to data, but they require it in order to advance and improve their work.”
Saja Mortada, data journalist, ARIJ (Lebanon)“I wish small newsrooms were given regular training in data journalism. Because they have neither the budget nor the time.”
Pınar Dağ, data journalism expert (Turkey)“And not just small newsrooms, capacity to do training often and fast enough is a huge blocker to progress in large newsrooms with lots of churn in roles as well.”
Martin Stabe, Financial Times (UK)“Access to updated-around-the-clock super high-resolution satellite images for any locations on the planet”
Kuek Ser Kuang Keng, Sigmas competition officer (Malaysia)“I wish I could go to a journalism conference and play hooky from sessions and take an uber with old friends and some people I just met to the good taco place that isn’t near the hotel and gossip and complain and conspire and not feel like I’m doing something potentially lethal.”
Scott Klein, ProPublica (USA)“I’d like us to focus more and to better explain supply-chain related issues and their impact over lives. On the newsroom side, better data security architectures and better risk-mitigation so that people trust us more with their data.”
Paul Radu, OCCRP (Romania)“Having more data to feed our machine learning in Arabic and Arabic dialects and a machine with superpowers who can understand the tricky ways (torture tools) with which our officials share data”
Monia Ben Hamadi, Inkyfada (Tunisia)“I wish for access to AI tools that help us investigate tons of documents processing unstructured text, extracting relevant entities and building connections crossing borders. I also wish for standards and completeness to make public contracting datasets accessible and useful.”
Momi Peralta — LA NACIÓN (Argentina)
Now, how about adding “winning an international award for the hard work I’ve put in my data journalism stories” to this list?
Because we have something that could help you with that…
We’ve launched the third edition of the Sigma Awards for data journalism in November. We are on the lookout for the best data journalism of 2021. So if you’ve done a data-driven project, or ten, that you are very proud of, go to sigmaawards.org and apply by 7 January 2022. It couldn’t be easier, we scrapped categories last year.
“The Sigmas is unique in that we completely eliminated award categories and now simply give awards to the best work… period. This approach worked really well last year when we trialed it for the first time, and we believe it will, again, allow the Sigmas to recognize great work produced by news organizations of all sizes around the world.”
Aron Pilhofer, co-chair of the Sigma Awards“We’ve seen such great work from across the world, from big newsrooms and small, from legacy organizations and start-ups, and it’s wonderful to honor it and the great journalists behind it. Even better, the Sigmas have helped foster a global community of data journalists and helped lift everyone’s game.”
Gina Chua, co-chair of the Sigma Awards
If you’re looking for inspiration and a good capture of the past three years of data journalism history, let us tell you that our database of projects is up-to-date and includes all entries ever submitted to the Sigma Awards competition. That’s over 1100 projects, from all over the world, representing the best data-driven work from 2019 and 2020. Soon, it will also include projects from 2021 sent for this year’s competition.
“Besides celebrating outstanding data journalism and supporting data journalists, the Sigma Awards is documenting the history and evolution of data journalism globally. Each entry submitted is a part of this collective effort. I hope by the 10th year of this event, someone can study all the entries together with their data and tell us how the work of our community has transformed, diversified and progressed. I also hope that this year we will continue to receive entries from all over the world, from both big and small newsrooms in both developed and developing areas. The world of data journalism should be diverse and inclusive, and we want Sigma Awards to reflect that.”
Kuek Ser Kuang Keng, competition officer
Some tips from the Sigmas team
“The best tip I can give is simply to enter — especially for smaller newsrooms. I see so much great work happening in the world that never comes up for an award, and I have to believe, in part, this is because people self-censor. They see what the Times or Post or Guardian are doing and think they can’t compete with that. They are wrong. The jury pays attention to work submitted by smaller newsrooms with limited resources, and we will continue to do so. So my advice is to enter early, enter often. But enter.”
Aron Pilhofer, co-chair of the Sigma Awards“Just send your best work — whether it’s what you’re most proud of, what you put the most effort into, what you got the most praise for, what your audience engaged with the most, or what your competitors copied the most. Don’t worry about what others may be entering or compare your work to others’; the goal is really to highlight the amazing work you’ve done and get it in front of the jury and the community.”
Gina Chua, co-chair of the Sigma Awards
The Sigma Awards competition was created by Aron Pilhofer (Temple University) and Gina Chua (Reuters), with support from Simon Rogers(Google), Marianne Bouchart (HEI-DA), and Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (HEI-DA). It is supported by the Google News Initiative.
The last edition of The Sigma Awards received 545 entries from 68 countries/areas. You will find all the details about the competition (including the rules, list of jury members, and prizes) on our website.
