For the first in our series we will screen The Trap, a film that explores how prisons and jails have become a recruiting ground for human traffickers in the States, taking incarcerated women into pimp-controlled prostitution. The film will serve as a platform to open up to a discussion on the phenomenon in the US as well as sex trafficking testimonies from the UK.
For the past 18 months, The Guardian has been investigating the role of the criminal justice system in feeding vulnerable women into America’s thriving domestic sex trafficking industry. With unique access in Florida, Massachusetts, and Chicago, the film follows the stories of women caught in the trap of criminal exploitation and incarceration and those trying to stop some of America’s most vulnerable women from falling under the control of human traffickers. Including encounters in Texas with convicted human traffickers and correctional officers who expose the fault lines that are allowing women to be released from prison straight into the arms of pimps and sex-buyers.
Directed and produced by: Annie Kelly and Mei-Ling McNamara
Director of photography: Alex Healey
Editor: Agnieszka Liggett
Executive producer Laurence Topham
Run Time: 30 mins
Chair
Juliana Ruhfus is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and interactive producer. She currently works as the the senior reporter for Al Jazeera English’s “People & Power” strand. Juliana joined Al Jazeera English in early 2006 and was part of the team that launched and defined the new channel and the People & Power strand in particular. In November that year her film about Liberian ex-combatants was chosen to introduce the channel’s programming content the day the channel went on air. Nearly 40 films later she has gone undercover in Turkmenistan and in Cambodian orphanages, produced the five part “Corporations on Trial” series, and her two-part investigation into the trafficking of Nigerian women for the Italian sex-trade is one of the most-watched People & Power episodes ever. In 2013 Juliana was named as one of the top 100 journalists covering armed violence by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).
Speakers
Annie Kelly is a journalist, editor and filmmaker reporting on human rights, global development and social affairs for The Guardian and The Observer. She is also the editor of the Guardian’s multi-award winningModern Slavery in Focus series.
Dorcas Erskine was National Coordinator of the Poppy Project and prior to that the Director of Policy, Advocacy and Programmes at ActionAid. Her background is in working as a specialist on preventing and supporting women who have experienced violence, most recently in the Middle East. She started her career in the UK parliament and in corporate firms before joining the non-profit sector. Amongst other organisations, she worked with ActionAid Tanzania, the International Rescue Committee and a charity supporting female victims of trafficking.
Hazel Thompson is an award-winning British photojournalist. In the last decade, she has taken up assignments worldwide in over 40 countries for media organisations such as The New York Times, ABC News, Stern Magazine, Vogue, FIVE News, The Sunday Times, Observer Magazine, Le Monde 2 and Politiken. Her book ‘Taken’ is a photo documentary published in 2014 documenting Hazel’s life’s work, to investigate and expose the disturbing truth around India’s sub-culture of sex trafficking. Hazel immersed herself into Mumbai’s sex trade since 2002, and during this time she spent over 6 months living in Kamathipura, gaining unprecedented access into the second largest sex district in Asia. The result is an extraordinary glimpse into the secrets of Mumbai’s red light that reveals the moving real-life stories of girls tricked, trafficked and sold into 21st century sex slavery.
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Such testimonies come from young girls currently detained in Nauru, a remote island in the Pacific, which serves as one of Australia’s offshore detention centres for asylum seekers.
The testimonies introduce us to the hardships endured by those who survived a dangerous journey at sea, but are dying slowly in a land where the living conditions have been described as cruel and appalling.
A panel of journalists, migration experts and human rights advocates gathered at the Frontline Club on 27 September to discuss the Nauru files leak, published by the Guardian in August. The files showcased evidence of child abuse, sexual assault, self-harm and suicide attempts, as well as poor living conditions inside the camp.
The leak, which involved over 2,000 incident reports and is more than 8,000 pages long, sparked immediate international outrage.
Anna Neistat, Senior Director of Research at Amnesty International, tried to get inside the camp for two years when she succeeded she said:
“I was unprepared for the level of horror that I saw there. And I don’t say these things lightly. I have been covering conflict in the last 15 years, working in places from Syria to Chechnya to Afghanistan.
“I have never seen this in any war zone that I have worked in. Almost every person I spoke to say that they either attempted suicide or self-harm (…) and that includes 9-year-old children.”
Ian Woolverton, deputy editor of Guardian Australia, said some of his journalists could not cope with the horrors they had seen on the island over the course of two years and as a result are now suffering from PTSD.
Neistat said: “They claim they are saving lives because [refugees] are not drowning at sea. But they are dying anyway and in some ways more painfully and more slowly.”
In May, Omid Masoumali, an Iranian living in the Nauru detention centre for 3 years, set himself alight during a UNHCR visit. He stayed unattended for two hours before getting medical care.
“What’s the point of surviving at sea if you die in here?” a refugee girl asked a Guardian journalist.
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
Day in and day out, images of floating life jackets and drowning bodies fill our social media and reports of abuse and institutional negligence make global headlines. However, as the images of human pain and hopelessness have made it to our screens, the panel discussed: Have they really made it into our hearts and minds?
Eiri Ohtani, Project Director of the Detention Forum in the UK, said the overwhelming flow of daily reports may be undermining how much we care.
“I worry that this is becoming too normal,” she said. “When there are so many similar stories out there, how do we then make that story special?”
The panel agreed the Nauru files went largely under reported, especially in Australia. Ohtani said that human rights advocates and particularly journalists have an important role to play by changing the narrative that has formed around refugee-related issues, not only by giving these stories a face, but also by connecting them to a wider political landscape.
Ohtari added that journalists should be very sensitive to the narrative of deserving versus undeserving migrants, which has been forming in the media.
She said: “As an organisation (…) we get quite a lot of requests from journalists (…) that say: ‘Can you find us somebody who has fled from Syria, was in Greece and then has got a wife in Germany and left handed.’ It seems like you have already decided what you are going to say.”
"In prison you count days down. In #detention you count days up and up" @EiriOhtani @frontlineclub #WithoutDetention #ThereAreAlternatives
— Mary Engleheart (@MaryEngleheart) September 28, 2016
Neistat said that since coming back from Nauru only one journalist had asked her the most important question – who are these people?
“I have to say they made an incredible impression on me. They all would be added value to the society and I’m saying it with no hesitation whatsoever,” she said. “None of them would be a burden, they are nurses, teachers, engineers. (…)They could buy their plane ticket and fly either to Australia or some other place, they just cannot.”
It is hard for Western audiences to relate to the horrors they flee from, but Neistat believes that is why it is important to know who they are. “Changing this narrative will affect a lot the public perception, which will in turn define government policies.”
She then concluded: “We need to stop using the term ‘refugee crisis’. It is not a refugee crisis; it is a crisis of refugee protection.”
The Australian government defended their asylum policies by disregarding the documents as false or unverified, and by stating it was an issue for the Nauruan government, despite the Australian government hiring camp employees.
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“Sometimes they don’t even know where here is.”
In the build up to the Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference, on Monday 27 October the Frontline Club hosted a debate on modern day slavery and human trafficking chaired by Prabha Kotiswaran, senior lecturer in Law at King’s College London and advisor to the ILO-DFID Anti-Trafficking Project.
Annie Kelly, a journalist working on The Guardian’s Modern-day Slavery in Focus Project, laid out some of the key drivers and structural causes behind human trafficking and slavery in the 21st century.
“We are very used to reporting on slavery as individual stories . . . but it is a $150 billion industry affecting, conservatively, 21 million people [ILO estimate] in all forms of modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking,” she said.
It is through these chains of exploitation that people are driven into situations of vulnerability. Through very modern forms: debt bondage and forced labour slavery has become “the bedrock of society, which pervades every corner and every aspect of our lives. Every commodity you use, every component in your phone, every place you travel to will have some link to modern slavery”.
“What has affected me,” Kelly said, “is just how effective a business model modern slavery and trafficking is at the moment, [and how it has evolved] from a high-cost, slow recruitment model to a very lost-cost, fast recruitment business. You would struggle to find another business out there that would give you the same return on investment.”
Kelly compared it to the global arms and drugs trade, explaining that whereas those deliver a one-time use product, with human trafficking you can reuse someone over and over again.
Modern-day slavery isn't just an issue of criminal justice, it's about people and what we value @frontlineclub
— WeAreTearfund (@WeAreTearfund) October 27, 2014
Importantly, she stressed that modern exploitation is not just in the buying and selling of people.
“The visible shackles you had 300 years ago have been replaced by far more subtle and invisible forms, such as economic exploitation. . . . Debt is a huge driver of forced labour, trapping millions of people across the world who feel they are unable to leave the work place.”
Monique Villa, CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, marked corruption as “the grease that moves everything” and spoke of the need for banks and NGOs to work together to implement ways of tracking and monitoring financial transactions to combat the internationalisation of the slave trade.
While the abolition of slavery in law was ultimately successful, Klara Skrivankova, from Anti-Slavery International, said that it had failed to solve the root problem – merely driving it underground. “While in most cases it is not the states who are the active organisers of slavery and forced labour . . . its now mainly private actors.”
“It’s a big business”, she said, but one which is able to exploit gaps in policy and corruption.
“In the UK we have laws against trafficking, we have laws against slavery and yet we still see every year thousands becoming victims of exploitation,” Skrivankova said. Yet despite deficiencies in the law the major problem still lies in perception: “People still think slavery is an issue of history.”
It is the daily consumption of goods and services which ensures a market reliant on the victims of modern slavery. “It is not something far away but something that touches our lives everyday.”
While emphasising the need for legislation and for governments to take the lead, Skrivankova also warned that the provisions within, for example, the UK Modern-Day Slavery Bill, failed to adequately protect victims, provide the support they need and would be unlikely to increase prosecutions.
Sam Whyte, head of policy and advocacy at UNICEF UK, was quick to highlight the importance within these draft legal provisions to protect victims and especially children.
What became apparent during the discussion was the enormous gap between the estimated 30 million slaves throughout the world and the 7,000 prosecutions that the US State Department says take place every year against traffickers.
“It is just extraordinary – the gap between problem and response,” said Kotiswaran. On one level is it’s a definitional issue: how these people, be they women who are sex trafficked, migrant domestic workers or children, are met with institutional apathy and states of denial.
Kelly and Villa challenged corporations to take the lead, either through legislative coercion or pressure from consumers, to perform a form of human rights due diligence and investigate supply chain exploitation, corrupt middle men, levels of debt bondage and third-party recruitment:
“Thirty years ago, most companies in the world started to outsource massively to the developing world without any knowledge of who was in the supply chain.”
Yet corporations are beginning to realise that when these supply chains are exposed “it can damage their brand in a matter of seconds”.
While agreeing with the need for corporations to prove that their supply chains are clean, Kelly countered that unless there is someone or some body holding people to account, the money being made by trafficking is just too high for any meaningful change to take place.
'Consumers need to be aware but it ultimately coming down to government and law' @frontlineclub #slavery
— Emma Moseley (@Emmam1507) October 27, 2014
For Skrivankova, the biggest block to change is a lack of political will:
“In the UK modern slavery is now a hot political topic. There are political points being scored on modern slavery but actually if you look in reality what is actually being done, how much money is being spend and how much difference a law will make the effect is minimal.”
Whether it is a lack of political will, an unwillingness of consumers to act, the inability or ineffectiveness of mass organisation or a general unawareness of the problem all agreed that the ultimate goal of eradicating slavery was achievable.
“It is an issue of shedding light . . . of informing,” said Villar. “The thing is – you have to open your eyes. Ultimately it is up to the consumer to ask the question. We can task the government to legislate but you get very quick actions by corporations and your can expect very big decisions by the consumers. Just think – 30 million, maybe 40 million is nothing compared to the dimension of humanity. The abolitionists 150 years ago could do it, so why can’t we?”
The Thomson Reuters Foundation Trust Women Conference takes place between 17th-19th November.
You can watch and listen to the event here:
, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
]]>Interactive reports that hold short-attention spans online are the holy grail for web editors. Loc Dao, an executive producer and creative technologist at the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, has come up with a few recipes for success.
At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 8 October, Dao shared the lessons learned on the road to brilliant projects like the NFB’s Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian in June, and Bear 71, which challenged the nature of the medium with its mash of video, gaming technology and interactive installation at its 2012 Sundance Film Festival debut.
In conversation with his collaborator at The Guardian, Lindsay Poulton, a producer in the paper’s Special Projects, Multimedia division, and Janine Steele, Operations Manager at the NFB, Dao discussed how there’s still much to explore as technology opens up the merger of video, photojournalism, animation and multiple other forms to push the bounds of interactive storytelling.
Good stories transcend platform
Helping produce 630 interactive stories in three years at the Canadian Broadcast Company’s innovative Radio 3 division in the early 2000s, Dao staked out the vanguard of interactive reportage.
“Over those three years we learned a lot of lessons,” he said. “But the three I always remember and still find useful for digital storytelling [are]: Good stories transcend platform. Users will read, listen and watch all at once. And don’t play videos in a small window unless you have too.”
Interactive storytelling @frontlineclub with @locdao "users will read, listen & watch" #digitaljournalism
— Kathleen Prior (@KathleenAPrior) October 8, 2014
Hunting for new mediums
These lessons have held true in the blend of photo essay, soundscape and interactive animation of The Last Hunt, the NFB’s first photo essay created for the iPad’s touch interface and gyroscope.
“We started with photos and text and with this project have now added interactive animation,” said Dao. “You’ll get a sense, especially when you get to the animations, of being a lot closer to the story by actually physically being able to manipulate it. I think we’ve stumbled onto something that’s a nice marriage of the tactile experience with the storytelling experience.”
The interactive documentary
With the launch of Bear 71, which followed the life a grizzly bear and her cubs through motion-sensitive cameras as they came in contact with humans, Dao believes his team struck on a new medium: the “interactive documentary”.
“We wanted to get off the screen . . . and move into the physical environment. When we launched our first StoryWorld at Sundance, we were actually on the street at Sundance and had an interactive installation,” Dao said. “We installed these surveillance units. You would come up to these and it would recognise your face and take a picture of you, and then all of a sudden you would be connected live to someone at another unit.”
The Living Story
“We were really interested in working with the NFB because they’re . . . at the forefront,” said Poulton, of the Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian, which pushed forward the notion of ‘interactive documentary’ when it launched in June.
“The videos pull you into the project,” Dao said of the interplay of seven short segments filmed with characters like Bill Bailey tied to data journalism and first-person narrative writing which document the negative side of behaviour online. With equal experiences on desktop, smartphone or tablet, the project became a living documentary that continues to collect data through its shareable polls. It was spread through short video snippets on Vine and Twitter and has so far attracted 315,000 unique visitors and 30,000 shares from 218 countries.
The reason for its success, said Steele, wasn’t the technology, but the stories it told.
“We try not to let technology lead our project development,” she added. “We really try to be technology agnostic. We really try to start from story and build the best form, the best platform technology to tell that story.”
Do check out NFB's interactive documentaries: https://t.co/Mt4WGgT57Z Thanks for great talk @locdao @frontlineclub yesterday. Inspiration!
— Enable The Great (@annabeltroost) October 9, 2014
]]>With journalism as a profession undergoing an intense period of upheaval and self-reflection, Grapevine Events, in conjunction with the Frontline Club, brought together some of the industry’s most prominent editors on Thursday 11 September to discuss the major issues affecting journalism today.
Bringing out the big guns @amolrajan @AlexGAMiller @emmatimes2 #ftf Ian Hislop's looking for more @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/VHe638Cvgi
— Rebecca Choong Wilkins 钟碧琪 (@RChoongWilkins) September 11, 2014
Asking the panel what preoccupied them each morning, former deputy editor of The Times and chair George Brock remarked that what remained central to an editor seemed as true today as it was 30 years ago.
Emma Tucker, deputy editor of The Times, spoke of her desire to continually come up with the story that would “make a difference” whilst focusing on maintaining and expanding readership.
“In this noise, ultimately what makes people read you is good, original journalism that impacts people.”
For both Amol Rajan, editor of The Independent and Alex Miller, editor-in-chief of VICE, despite the emergence of new news formats, what drives any news organisation remains fundamentally “timeless”, as Brock put it, with the success of any story based primarily on the brilliance and commitment of the journalist who produces it.
With traditional news titles seen as occupying a difficult position inside–outside the establishment, Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, challenged that while journalists are often perceived as part of the old boys’ club, and by extension any way into the profession is one based on patronage, this proximity was ultimately the necessary price paid for access.
“What we try to do is say: we know how this works, we know the people who are there, let’s tell the truth . . . and the more people you know the more people who tell you things.”
“That being said,” commented Miller, “the only reason I am on this panel, is precisely because we [at VICE] have made the most of being entirely outside the establishment. Going and doing stuff that grey guys from BBC and ITV and Channel 4 have been doing for a very long time but changing it and presenting it on new media, in a slightly different tone. It’s made people pay attention – which really is the benefit of being an outsider.”
Elaborating on how the tone of emerging news outlets, such as VICE, had attracted and engaged a new demographic, Miller spoke of challenging “a collective decision that news was the preserve of a certain type of person, who wore certain type of clothes and who spoke in a certain type of way”.
“I think by just presenting news as you would have a conversation with a friend has actually managed to break down more barriers that we ever thought we would and at the same time disprove some bullshit that the establishment had all collectively agreed that young people didn’t give a crap about what happened outside their own lives.”
Moving from journalism as part of the establishment to establishing a community of readers, there was a general agreement amongst the panel that news was a product which should ultimately be paid for in some form (as it has always traditionally been).
While for Tucker and The Times paywall model, the concept of readers has now literally shifted to a point where “we don’t have readers anymore . . . we have members”. For Rajan, the “nostalgia around the history of Fleet Street” and specifically the role of local newspapers in the community belies the changing nature of the way people identify and define themselves as consumers of news.
“In the digital age there is a kind of unbundling. Now people are promiscuous buyers [whereas once you would have people loyal to one title]. The idea behind membership is to try to rebuild that attachment to a particular institution.
“Possibly the most viable future for most newspapers to go down is the model where you pay online, because actually one way of creating membership is to create customers and if you get people to pay for what you do, you create a sense of engagement and commitment.”
Until people restore the link between quality journalism and paying for it, Rajan continued, that sense of community is going to be fractured. If you are a company which is ultimately trying to hit the bottom line you need to establish a bond between customers and product.
Amol Rajan: 'There is no editorial solution to the commercial problems of papers' #ftf @frontlineclub
— Harriet Line (@HarriLine) September 11, 2014
For Hislop, the very act of buying a copy of Private Eye is like belonging to a club.
“Eye readers are a people with a particular attitude and a particular desire and I like the idea of them. I think they form their own club.”
However, while Miller agreed that creating a community was important, the debate within traditional news organisations into how best build this community is ultimately outmoded. “The internet does that on its own.”
Alex Hern of The Guardian commented that these technological advancements, which have so disrupted the practice and organisation of journalism, have also shifted the way in which we communicate.
“It is really important to remember that our generation is the first one ever where writing and the written word has been the primary way of communicating. We are more comfortable than ever before expressing ourselves, not just in considered journalism, but in every register of written language.”
Surely a development which can ultimately only benefit journalism and the industry.
]]>https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/insight-with-nick-davies-hack-attack
In July 2011, revelations that journalists from The News of the World hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler created public outrage. But we were soon to learn this was just the tip of the iceberg. The revelations that followed revealed a scandal that has since engulfed Fleet Street, Scotland Yard and Downing Street.
The man behind that story, and the years of investigative work that came before it, was Nick Davies. In his new book Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch, Davies recounts his painstaking investigation and exposes the inside story of what went on in the newsrooms and the corridors of power.
Nick Davies will be joining us in conversation with Stewart Purvis, to talk about the investigation, the revelations and the future of press regulation. We will be asking how the press have changed in a post-Leveson world and whether they have really reformed.
Nick Davies writes investigative stories for The Guardian, and has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year in British Press Awards. He has written five books: White Lies, Murder on Ward Four, Dark Heart, School Report and Flat Earth News.
Stewart Purvis is professor of television journalism at City University. He is a former editor-in-chief and CEO of ITN, Ofcom’s Partner for Content and Standards, and author of When Reporters Cross The Line: The Heroes, the Villains, the Hackers and the Spies.
]]>At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 16 April illustrator George Butler and features editor for The Guardian and editor of the G2 supplement Malik Meer discussed whether there is room for supposedly more subjective and abstract illustration in hard-news when photography dominates.
Malik Meer and George Butler discuss illustration at the Frontline Club
First, Butler explained what is special about illustration:
“Drawing offers the viewer, the audience, a different perspective. It encapsulates the passing of time in one image, those two or three hours, say, on the street just observing quietly in the corner . . . are invaluable. . . . I didn’t want to go to Aleppo to compete with the photographers, who do a fantastic job capturing the frontline for the front page, . . . I wanted to offer a different angle, a more human fourth dimension . . . to capture a period of time and then distil it into one image.
“ . . . Things move, people come and go, and you pick something that you like to draw and perhaps it’s a figure and they then walk off and come back and they’re in a different position. . . . Sometimes that means highlighting one thing. . . . If there’s a particularly interesting character why shouldn’t he be closer to the foreground? And if there’s something that’s not very interesting . . . I draw it smaller and at the back. It’s a very personal thing; if anyone else was to do it they would probably pick different things.”
Do you think people react differently to an illustrator than to a photographer who just shoots a photo and leaves?
“I see it as a very open and honest process, one where people can see over your shoulder see what you’re doing, they recognise their friends, the places that they work. . . . Importantly, they don’t feel threatened. They’re not made to feel uncomfortable or made to pose. . . . What this means is you’re very often afforded access to places that you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to see.
“. . . [It] shows that you care about them, that you’re willing to sit and spend time with them. . . . There’s something very nice about the . . . handmade creative process that comes across because it’s so personal from start to finish.”
Great lecture at the @frontlineclub with @george_butler last night. Fantastic and inspiring artwork. Well worth the trip.
— Alex Wood (@AJ_Wood15) April 17, 2014
An audience member asked, does the activity of drawing act as a barrier, to put some of the emotions you have towards the scene into something?
“Absolutely, I think people have talked about how they can hide behind their camera when these sorts of things happen and the drawing board is a physical barrier. Certainly during the little lad in hospital [with an amputated leg] it felt like it was a way of distracting myself, just copying exactly what’s in front you rather than thinking about it for too long.”
Can illustrations ever be as powerful as photographs?
“I think the photograph is fantastic at its job . . . engaging a huge audience on the front page. But I think if you know a little bit about the subject or if you’ve seen a lot of photographs of the subject, which you sometimes have now then, illustration can be a great, layered way of capturing attention.”
Meer added on why he choose to run Butler’s illustrations in The Guardian instead of photographs:
“We’d run quite a lot of reports from Syria, insider reports, broader political pieces and you resort to the pictures that are available and they are the ones that everyone sees at the time. They do capture incredible moments but the minute you see something like this [illustration] it just captures something else. . . . I think they’re as haunting as classic conflict images.”
George Butler whilst drawing in Syria
But with illustration being such a subjective art form and Butler himself having admitted he leaves things out of an image or brings scenes to the forefront, where does he think the line between style and story should be drawn?
“For me sometimes when I’m on holiday or in a different part of the world, not in Syria, it’s quite nice just to draw things that you know you can make look good . . . but in terms of Syria it was always any kind of opportunity to draw because there was always a story to draw that was as important. . . . I suppose if you’re really true to reportage you’d have the two offering as much fifty–fifty, story and good-looking picture.”
It could be said that because they are such beautiful pictures that they lend a fairy tale-like quality to what is a very present war?
“Obviously as photographers or anybody creative you’ve always learnt to make things look good and yet the things that are in front of you don’t look in any way good. . . . I think people understand that as an artist . . . that you’re very much giving your interpretation of it. . . . I guess it’s just about being as honest to the subject as possible.”
Watch and listen the full discussion below:
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.”
http://twitter.com/bspeed8/status/426445622871605248
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’.”
http://twitter.com/kathryn42/status/426451235781488640
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
http://twitter.com/MirrenGidda/status/426450151918813184
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:
]]>“That four thousand word report from the Syrian refugee camp…will not be read as much as ‘10 cats that have got thoughts about Syria’,” New Statesman‘s Deputy Editor Helen Lewis said in her opening statement on the second panel of the Grapevine event at the Frontline Club on Thursday 23 January.
Read highlights of the first panel discussion here.
Merope Mills, Luke Lewis and Pete Picton
The chair head of journalism at City University, George Brock, got straight to the point and asked the panel ‘is traditional media actually dying and does it matter?’
Deputy publisher of Mail Online Pete Picton said categorically:
“If journalism is what we’re talking about then no absolutely not, in fact it’s thriving.”
Editor of Buzzfeed UK Luke Lewis:
“It’s an amazing time for journalism, not just for new outlets like Buzzfeed, the traditional ones are thriving. It was only a week or two ago that The Telegraph posted their figures of a £60million profit last year. The Guardian has had their best scoops in their history.
“Media is a really big place and we don’t need anyone else to fail in order to Buzzfeed to succeed.”
All the panelists agreed that, while media isn’t dead, the business model has to change.
http://twitter.com/rebeccacmyers/status/426478712826368002
Editor of the Saturday Guardian Merope Mills:
“The way people approach print media has to change…the traditional media money making model is dead.”
"There is still an appetite for print journalism, but the business model has to change." Merope Mills, @guardian #fbj
— Sarah Biddlecombe (@_sarahstweets) January 23, 2014
http://twitter.com/bspeed8/status/426469810109939713
H Lewis said that there is a real problem with public interest journalism:
“Who is going to be in an online only economy commissioning that four thousand word report from the Syrian refugee camp – I just don’t see that that’s a viable business model for anybody because it won’t be read by enough people. It will not be read as much as ’10 cats that have got thoughts about Syria’ – no offence to Buzzfeed.”
Buzzfeed taking a hit for cats – good retort from luke lewis #fbj
— Tom Witherow (@TomWitherow) January 23, 2014
L Lewis:
“Yes most of it is entertaining lists, you’ll also see some other stuff in there… Max Seddon we’ve got on the ground in Kiev at the moment, he wrote a series of explosive reports on what’s happening in Kiev as good as impact reporting you’ll see anywhere.”
@lukelewis says that he wants Buzzfeed to eventually supply as trusted news as the @nytimes #fbj
— Max Benwell (@Max_Benwell) January 23, 2014
Mills noted the changes she’d recognised in print media:
“There is a theme among the [print publications] that are growing and they do tend to be those longer analytical – the New Statesman is one… Nobody wants to read breaking news anyone, we all know the Victoria Line’s flooded with cement and that will be old by tomorrow.”
Mills echoed the comment made by Mona Chabali in the first panel of the evening:
“All the reporters have to be reporting a more in depth piece, the why’s of the ‘gays in Russia’ rather than the just ‘gays are being beaten up’. That is the piece you want to read at the end of the week.”
In reference to another signifying characteristic of Buzzfeed the idea of a move away from display to native advertising.
L Lewis:
“It’s nothing new, people talk about sponsored posts like it’s a new thing…[in magazines] advertorials have been around for decades. The only thing you have to worry about is that there’s a clear dividing line between what is editorial and what is commercial.”
A question from the audience asked, if you don’t charge for it how can you put a value on it?
Picton said:
“You value it in time. It’s far more competitive to get our readers to read us… time is a big currency now…that’s one of the key metrics for us now, to keep them on the site.”
Time spent engaging with online content is the new form or readers' currency. #fbj
— Hari Sethi (@Hari_Sethi) January 23, 2014
Another audience member asked the panels opinion on maintaining journalistic integrity in the battle for getting as many clicks as possible in light of the recent CNN headline which seemed to go a step too far.
@MartinBelam @jburnmurdoch @alexparsons CNN had a go & got it fairly wrong today #fbj: pic.twitter.com/uwukxg3UrE
— dan barker (@danbarker) January 23, 2014
The panel agreed that the headline missed the mark on the sensitive issue, L Lewis said about the wider topic of click bait:
“You keep hearing this word clickbait and it really annoys me because it suggests there’s another kind of headline you don’t want people to click on. I don’t know who these journalists are who are writing articles that they don’t want people to read.”
http://twitter.com/rebeccacmyers/status/426477918437801985
H Lewis added:
“Isn’t it sad that the art of the pun is now dead? I loved a good/bad pun.”
To which L Lewis replied:
“I think the pun’s had a good 200 years.”
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: