Data Journalism in the Connected Age [GraphConnect Europe Preview]

Long before the publication of the Panama Papers investigation in April last year – which was mostly recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades – data journalism had had to deal with vast amounts of highly connected information.

Traditionally investigative journalism was a very focused, single-person operation. But with the recent increase of data leaks, organizations like the ICIJ have had to increase collaboration between journalists because the most important facet of these datasets are the relationships and connections within them.

Neo4j was core to some of these data journalism investigations, like the Panama Papers, Brexit or the Munich attacks Twitter analytics, and it will continue to be so.

Data Journalism Speakers and Activities at GraphConnect Europe

That’s why during this year’s GraphConnect Europe in London, we chose to make data journalism one of our major themes.

The evening before the conference we will host a Data Journalism Hackathon, with challenging datasets to answer pressing questions and a group of judges with long-time experience in data journalism.

During the conference, we’ll host a number of data journalism demos in our developer zone and have several data journalists answering questions from the audience. Two students from Columbia University’s journalism department will present a lightning talk about how they used Neo4j in their data investigations, and how graph database enabled them to find insights in the data.

Panel Discussion: Data Journalism in the Connected Age

The high point of our data journalism activities will be the panel discussion in the afternoon entitled “Data Journalism in the Connected Age.” Participants from major news and investigative journalism organizations will discuss the challenges of modern data journalism. Moderated by Helena Bengtsson – a senior data journalist and currently editor for data projects at the Guardian – we will see many controversial questions answered.

Meredith Broussard, a journalism professor at NYU; Leila Haddou, Investigative Journalist at the Financial Times; and Friedrich Lindenberg, data wrangler at the OCCRP, will all discuss issues of trust in and public perception of journalism. They’ll also cover the challenges of large data leaks, and the hidden connections they contain.

Other topics in the panel discussion will cover collaboration between journalists and the handling of leaks and whistleblowers. We will also learn about tools and approaches to deal with the kinds of connected data journalists face and how they integrate disparate information from different sources into a sensible whole. In addition, they’ll tackle the issue of when not to trust tools and algorithms in the age of fake news.

We are very excited about the opportunity to get first-hand insight into the thought processes and arguments of data journalists when confronted with these kinds of challenges and questions.

We hope you find these questions and answers as engaging as we do. Please be prepared to bring your own tough questions for our panel of experts.

Looking forward to seeing you in London in just two weeks!

–Michael Hunger