Journalism meets data, una conferenza

Domani ad Amsterdam l’European Journalism Centre organizza una conferenza internazionale data driven journalism, il giornalismo che fa i conti e trae ispirazione dalle ingenti quantità di dati oggi disponibili e aggregabili attraverso le piattaforme digitali. Si tratta soprattutto di un’opportunità per lo scambio di esperienze a cui partecipano, tra gli altri, rappresentanti di New York Times, Financial Times, The Times, University of Amsterdam, Open University e Open Knowledge Foundation.

Today there is a notable change. Collections of data are becoming available online, often for free. There is a whole stack of tools to dig into ‘big data‘. Open source tools allow navigation and analysis of large amounts of data rather quickly. There are online applications that allow us to share and visualise data.

Developing the know-how to use the available data more effectively, to understand it, communicate and generate stories based on it, could be a huge opportunity to breathe new life into journalism. Journalists can find new roles as ’sense-makers’ digging deep into data, thus making reporting more socially relevant. If done well, delivering credible information and advice could even generate revenues, opening up new perspectives on business models, aside from subscriptions and advertising.

In this context, the European Journalism Centre in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam organises the first round table on data-driven journalism. The one day event brings together specialists in fields which intersect with data-driven journalism: data mining, data visualisation and multimedia storytelling to discuss the possibilities of this emerging field, examine and understand the needed tools and workflows, and spread the know-how for data-driven journalism. What can we learn from the existing projects? How can we integrate the existing tools in the journalistic workflows? What skills are needed to enter this field? These are just a few of the issues which will be addressed in this event.

Ad Amsterdam c’è anche Mario Tedeschini Lalli, che più di chiunque altro in Italia si sta confrontando con l’argomento, dunque vale la pena tenere d’occhio il suo blog e il suo profilo Twitter nelle prossime ore. Se saranno disponibili dei video, saranno probabilmente messi a disposizione sul canale Vimeo dell’Ejc.