Dan Knowles, Nicola Hughes and Michael Blastland discuss data journalism

Blastland, along with fellow data journalists Mona Chalabi of The Guardian’s Datablog, Dan Knowles of The Economist and Nicola Hughes of The Times, chaired by Conrad Quilty-Harper of Ampp3d and formerly The Telegraph, had been brought together by Grapevine to give aspiring journalists an insight into the industry. The evening was a follow up on the organisation’s first event in April 2013 which brought together the country’s top student newspapers.

Read highlights of the second panel discussion here.

It's a full house #fbj pic.twitter.com/QeLUOOZdNz

— Max Benwell (@Max_Benwell) January 23, 2014

Quilty-Harper started the discussion by asking Blastland how data journalism had changed since he published his book The Tiger That Isn’t in 2008.

Blastland:

“The origin of the data does get better, we have a lot more people watching it for a start…[but] there’s huge amounts of uncertainty in recording numbers, there’s great difficulty in the interpretation numbers that go up and down all the time…there’s a lot of data.”

Hughes said that part of a data person’s job is trying to find out where problems can arise and to be constantly asking questions.

“A data person would be able to see whether the numbers are telling the truth or has an agenda. It’s about really understanding the integrity.”

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Knowles said that a lot of his job is looking at data, which has already been told, and debunking it:

“Mostly it’s just how do you get past the headline statistic and digging through spread sheets and finding a trend that nobody’s spotted… You have to self police and make sure that something that looks brilliant and gives you a fantastic statistic isn’t actually a blip.”

Quilty-Harper added:

“Interrogating the data is an intrinsically journalistic activity. You’re checking verifying, finding out whether it’s true essentially.”

Chabali said that the key to data journalism is going deeper into the story than just the data and interviewing people on the ground:

“They provide us with the backstory of the ‘why’ because so much of what we do is just describing ‘what’.”

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Knowles added:

“You have to combine it with interviews, it’s not enough to have a spread sheet and go ‘oh this is really interesting’… you have to start with the spread sheet but…then you go visit somewhere and you interview people and then you write the story.”

Oliver Franklin of GQ in the audience asked how has the Internet and social media changed the representation of data?

There are many more ways to tell it Knowles replied:

“The freedom of the internet is that you have an unlimited amount of space. You can have this story told through data visually as well as the text underneath it.”

But with so many ways of representing the data do all journalists need to be able to handle data to some degree?

Hughes:

“What you need is more data journalists to let you deal with the raw ingredients and not wait for the press release or the end result statistics…what they’re [organisations] doing now is they’re releasing the data raw… saying ‘we’ve done what we said we’d do we’re not hiding anything’. The problem previously was access to the data, now it’s too much data.”

The initial problem was that data was inaccessible, now it's that it's overwhelming. #fbj

— Hari Sethi (@Hari_Sethi) January 23, 2014

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Quilty-Harper ended by asking the panel, what are their dos and don’ts for those wanting to get into data journalism?

Chabalis:

Do have an instinct to not merely describe – also analyse why.
Don’t be afraid of being able to master different things, you can’t just be a good writer, you can’t just be familiar with spread sheets, you need to know the basics of coding, you need to know several different tools (or know someone who does).
Do not be arrogant – not only checking other people but check yourself.

Knowles:

Learn to use the ONS (Office for National Statistics) website – that will give you an advantage.
Learn how to find statistics quickly.
Learn how to pick a statistic that’s valid and that can debunk or prove a story.

Hughes:

Do not feel you need to be taught something to be able to do it, do not rely on anyone else to teach you – Google it. There are so many free resources.

Blastland:

“Don’t be seduced by the glamour of exciting flashy stuff, remember that you can produce rubbish very easily and seductively with all those techniques. If you do not have the skills of statistical inference to make sure that you are saying something legitimate, all the rest is rubbish. Exciting rubbish.”

Following the success of their events, Grapevine are launching a data-focused site in the coming months. Get in touch with Harry Lambert (@harrylambert1), Max Benwell (@maxbenwellreal) or Rebecca Choong Wilkins at contact@grapevinevents.co.uk.

Watch and listen back:

For the second PhotoTALK event with the World Photography Organisation the subject was how to gain commercial success. Discussing this topic at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 22 January, chaired by designer Stuart Smith, were the managing director of Balcony Jump Management Tim Paton, Magnum Photos photographer Chien-Chi Chang, director of Panos Profile Francesca Sears and photo editor, advisor and photographers’ coach Monica Suder.

Each of the panel first took the audience through what they do within the photographic industry and Suder was asked to detail the key mistakes that photographers make.

“Procrastination,” she said. “Not wanting to promote yourself and . . .”

“Bad editing,” Sears added.

Suder continued:

Yes, very bad editing. . . . Half the time they don’t really know their strength. They don’t know who they are. . . . What is your vision? What are they about? What do they want to say to the world? Because if you don’t have anything to say, you’re history.

Smith asked Paton what the best way to get attention from an agency is:

It’s a combination of the perfect storm; I get an email from the photographer, I’ve seen some work of theirs in a great piece of editorial, a couple of art buyers are talking about them, a couple of stylists are talking about them and all of a sudden this guy or girl is on the scene and you’re hearing about them quite a lot. So you sort of need a combination of a lot of things – a straight email, unless it’s absolutely exceptional . . . [shrugs].

Paton added later on:

It’s all about your website, absolutely all about your website . . . that’s the first port of call. . . . Work out your website so that you get to the images quickly, you don’t want: “I picked up a camera at the age of eight.” You really don’t need all that. You just want to get the images nice and quickly and give a good description of what you do fairly early on.

On the subject of still photographers diversifying into moving image, because now the cameras they use for stills can do video too, Sears responded:

It’s really, really hard because the general market for that is online and the budgets aren’t there yet. . . . You’re not going to make money back on making a multimedia. And the worst part is that photographers on assignment are often expected to shoot video as well, sometimes during the same period of time and barely getting compensated differently.

To which Chang added:

We are talking about at least six different skill sets at least, we’re talking about still, moving image, sound and then the editing. That’s a complete and utter different skill set. So for me working with the right editor – it’s very important. It takes time to develop that kind of trust and understanding.

Do students get the right training in their colleges before they enter the commercial world?

Paton answered:

A lot of the students I see coming out of college are not commercially minded which I think is a shame because they should be. They need to be.

Suder continued:

It’s a good idea for a student after they’ve finished their studies to work with a photographer they admire or someone in the same direction, in the same type of photography. They can pick up a lot. What to do and what not to do . . . What really is great is to listen to them on the telephone: how they handle a possible assignment, how they talk to their clients, how they present themselves on the phone and negotiate. These are things that take a while to get good at.

Sears added:

If I was looking for a course I would be really vigilant to find the modules that will help you in the real world.

How important is social media for photographers?

Sears:

If you’re on a big project or you’re on a campaign and you’ve got something to say then maybe fine. But for most of them, it’s not yet working because they don’t have their own brand. For those that have their own brand [such as Magnum’s Alec Soth], have a following, are building it, have something to say, have a message to convey, are working with an NGO or it’s an ad campaign, then there’s probably a reason, but otherwise [it’s not really important].

Paton:

As an example, Lara Jade has got 25,000+ followers on Twitter. It doesn’t work out as often as you might think. My theory on this, it’s probably the wrong theory, is that her generation of 23-year-olds, they’re not commissioners yet. So in five years time when they’re 28–29 and they’re starting to commission, they’re picture editors, they will be used to receiving Twitter feeds and seeing work on that. I think the commissioners now are not engaged with that so much.

Sears:

I don’t think you can ignore it but I think it’s a space to watch like it was with multimedia. We’re still working it out. I definitely wouldn’t dismiss it.

One of the final statements from the floor was about the overriding feeling that the old ways of contacting people about your work still stand:

What does come across . . . is that we should probably get off the computer and get back to old fashioned business tools and communication skills. I feel . . . everyone forgets about making the phone call. . . . I don’t think that at university we learn those skills at all and I think that’s a learning curve.

Paton finished by saying:

I think it’s a very important thing to get out and do more face to face.

Watch the full discussion here:

In conversation with Vin Ray, Matt Frei let us into the deepest, darkest and funniest recesses of his journalistic mind. Here is his advice for putting together a good story for television.

1. Pictures

Writing well for TV is quite simple, Frei says. The lesson is just to “get out of the way” of the images or the sound:

“It’s kind of a nerdy thing to say but if you’re doing television writing you’ve got to look at the pictures – they won’t tell you what points to make but they’ll confine what you can say.”

Frei says that former BBC correspondent Martin Bell is the ‘go to’ man on writing:

“Martin would look at [the shots] and pace up and down… then out would come twelve seconds of words followed by the sound of a dog barking or a shell going off.”

2. Immediacy

For Frei, the carefully managed journalism event comes as a distant second to the immediate.

A piece to camera by ITVs John Irvine standing on a road in Baghdad as US army trucks scrape by him at high speed is a good example.

“It’s not a kind of standard piece to camera where I’m standing here for thirty seconds telling you what I think this is all about… [John Irvine] writes simply – it’s the light touch.”

And in carefully orchestrated Washington, where Frei works at the moment as correspondent with Channel 4 News:  

“These unscripted moments, they’re gold dust.”

3. Humour

In the same way that Frei’s chuckling asides gave this discussion momentum, he says that laughter can be great for telling stories:

“There’s a lot of funny stuff out there and if you don’t use it you’re missing a trick.”

4. Detail

Noticing small, hidden things can bring a difficult story to life.

In South Korea, where the economic crisis had a huge impact on the personal lives of people made redundant, was a bridge that people jumped off to commit suicide. But how do you tell the story with no obvious pictures?

The authorities had put grease up the bridge to stop people climbing up, but slip marks showed that not everyone had been put off trying to reach the top:

“You’re not going to get someone jumping off a bridge and going to funerals isn’t going to do it either, so you have to find something that works… in that little scratch signature in the grease you can see the agony, you can imagine what was going through his mind… it’s a little glimpse in that detail into the desperation that makes people do something like this.”

5. Interviews

In America, Frei says that getting people to talk isn’t hard, but he concedes that interviewing well is a tricky business, albeit one with a simple solution:

“My policy is to start off with a big fat smile and just try and disarm the situation by being unthreatening – then go for it afterwards”

Watch the full event here: