Four different perspectives that I heard from journalists in Spain,
Italy, Argentina, and South Africa highlighted some of the challenges of
practicing data-driven journalism in countries without strong right to
information laws, noting it’s difficult but not impossible. “Spain is a
country lacking a Freedom of Information Act and an accountability
culture,” wrote Javier de Vega, communications director for Fundación
Ciudadana Civio, a Spanish foundation that supports open data and data
journalism in Spain, in an email. “We are the last big country in Europe
to pass a freedom of information law, though a very unambitious text is
being studied by the Congress.”Long before data journalism entered the
mainstream discourse, La Nación was pushing the boundaries of what was
possible in Argentina, reporting on a country without a Freedom of
Information Act Law. If you start exploring La Nación’s efforts to go
online and treat data as a source, you’ll find Angélica “Momi” Peralta
Ramos, the multimedia development manager who originally launched
LaNacion.com in the 1990s and now manages its data journalism
efforts.191an antidote to budget crises in newsrooms.192perspective is grounded in experience: Peralta’s team at La Nación is
using data journalism to challenge a FOIA-free culture in Argentina,
opening up data for reporting and reuse to holding government
accountable.193data-driven stories to date, including:
- Argentina’s Official Advertising Funds Distribution 2009”2013:
Friends, Politicians, and a Stylist.194
- Public Officials’ Salaries and Assets for Reporting and
Accountability.195
- Monitoring the New Media Law in Argentina
2009”2013.196
- VozData: The Senate Expenses (II).197
- 2013: Legislative Elections in Argentina.198
- Argentina’s Senate Expenses 2004”2013.199
Peralta has seen the context for La Nación’s work change in recent
years:To take just one example, consider the inflation scandal in
Argentina. Even The Economist removed our [national] figures from their
indicators page. Media that reported private indicators were considered
as opposition by the government, which took away most official
advertising from these media, fined private consultants who calculate
consumer price indices different than the official, pressed private
associations of consumers to stop measuring price, and releasing price
indexes, and so on.Regarding official advertising, between 2009 and
2013, we managed to build a data set. We found out that 50 percent went
to 10 media groups, the ones closer to the government. In the last
period, a hairdresser (stylist) received more advertising money than the
largest newspapers in Argentina. Last year, independent media suffered
an ad ban, as reported in the Wall Street Journal: “Argentina imposes ad
ban, businesses said.”200Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. We still are
without a freedom of information law.Journalists in Italy face a similar
information landscape. Elisabetta Tola, an Italian data journalist,
wrote in to share her work on a series of Wired Italy articles that
featured data on seismic risk assessment201schools.202for schools, a feature that embodies service journalism and offers more
value than a static map.203Risk for Schools]Guido Romero, the science editor at Wired Italy who
published the work, shared more of the backstory behind the project via
email.“In Italy there are some 50,000said Romero. “Protezione Civile, the Italian FEMA, estimates about
22,500overall Italian school population is about eight million (students +
teachers + personnel) so you can do the math of how relevant this
problem is.”The backstory behind the Wired Italy project highlighted a
key challenge in Italy that exists in many other places around the
world: How can data journalism be practiced in countries that do not
have a Freedom of Information Act or a tradition of transparency on
government actions and spending?The Italian government, while well
behind the pace set by the United Kingdom, has made more open data
available2042011.205Italian Ministry of Education released was a list of school buildings
published online.As I recounted earlier, Tola and her team aggregated or
created the rest of the data used in the project, from scraping and
processing PDFs of spending data from regional government websites, then
adding geolocation in cooperation with a local developer.Romero said in
our interview:When we started looking into this last June [2012], the
first door we knocked on was the Ministry of Education, notably their
Office for School Buildings and Safety, as our sources inside the
Ministry had told us they did have the data. Their non-response turned
into a bitter attack to the magazine when we wrote that the very same
ministry advertising itself as a groundbreaking pioneer of open data did
not release information relevant for millions of families. Mario Di
Costanzo, the Director of the Office for School Safety, did give us an
interview.206but would personally oppose any release of parts or all of them as
“revealing which schools are at risk would be dangerous.”As is the case
around the world, culture and freedom of information laws matter,
particularly with respect to access to data needed to hold governments
accountable and audit their programs. Proactive, selective open data
initiatives by government focused on services that are not balanced by
support for press freedoms and improved access can fairly be criticized
as “openwashing” or “fauxpen government.” Data journalists who are
frequently faced with heavily redacted document releases or reams of
blurry PDFs are particularly well placed to make those critiques. That
currently appears to be the case in Italy.Romero said, “Data journalism
is not impossible over here”in fact, Elisabetta and myself believe there
are great opportunities, but having a very poor access law and, even
worse, a deep rooted culture of non-disclosure in the public
administration makes data journalists’ work pretty hard.” He continued,
“That said, there is a growing movement for reforming our access law
(I’m personally engaged in that with www.dirittodisapere.it) but ópen
data' is a word very much frowned upon by reporters, as it’s led to
little relevant work.”