Designing a data management and visualisation tool for dummies
Among the many projects in which Voxeurop is involved with its European partners, the Data Management System, developed with El Confidencial and Datasketch as part of the EU-funded Stars 4 Media programme, takes on the challenge of making it as easy as possible for journalists to use data and infographics, even if they are not experts in the field.
On 20 September 2022, we learned that our project had been selected for the Stars4Media journalism innovation programme. After an intense summer in which 90 media and technology companies submitted 48 journalistic innovation projects, the programme announced that the team made up of El Confidencial, Voxeurop and Datasketch was one of the winners.
They were joined by other media such as Tagesspiegel (Germany), Suomen Tietotoimisto (Finland), Ukrayinska Pravda (Ukraine), POLITYKA (Poland), Mediahuis (Belgium) and France Télévisions (France). This day marked the start of the ‘Exploration’ phase of this programme, for which we are developing the ‘Data Management System for Newsrooms’ (DMS).
This project is about transforming the newsroom and one of its main objectives is to facilitate the visualisation of data in news articles. "We want to create a single tool in which the different processes of working with data, from searching to visualisation, can be carried out in the most intuitive way," says Marta Ley, coordinator of El Confidencial’s data department.
Workshop in Madrid
After five months of work, the media partners met in Madrid for a two-day workshop to define the needs that the DMS would have to meet. During the previous months, much of the work consisted of interviewing all the potential users of the tool in the newsrooms involved in the project.
"Business transformation happens when everyone is part of the process. It starts with knowing what the real needs are. Our goal is to create a data tool specifically designed for newsrooms, based on joint research and implementation," said Laura Ortiz, Director of Marketing and Communications at Datasketch. "El Confidencial and Voxeurop know the daily needs of newsrooms from their different perspectives," she adds.
Since this tool has to live beyond our newsrooms, meetings were also held during this phase with the heads of the data departments of other media, such as El País and RTVE.es, among others. In addition, a survey was carried out among the members of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet), of which El Confidencial and Voxeurop are members, in order to publicise the project and find out what other organisations think.
The workshop in Madrid was also used as a first contact to make a brief presentation to the community of journalists specialising in data in the region, with the presence of the aforementioned media and others such as Eldiario.es, Civio, Maldita.es or Newtral, among others.
For this alliance of companies, it is important that the tool is integrated with each organisation’s content management system (CMS). This is a challenge because the level of customisation is different for each medium and depends on the technology. But over the past few months we have learned that one of the problems many journalists complain about is the number of intermediate steps in the process of working with data. "The media needs simple solutions to big problems," warns Ortiz.