After victories in 2017 and 2018, Brazil was the third country with the highest number of projects submitted to the 2019 Data Journalism Awards, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom.
The country of these works that have been recognized internationally now has a prize to call its own: the Cláudio Weber Abramo Award for Data Journalism, whose entries were opened on June 27 during the 14th Congress of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) in São Paulo.
The prize, organized by Open Knowledge Brasil and the Data School, was announced at the third edition of Coda.Br, the Brazilian Conference on Data Journalism and Digital Methods, held in São Paulo in November 2018.
"We realize that there is already an ecosystem of data journalists in Brazil, an increasingly robust community, producing more and more interesting works," Natália Mazotte, director of Open Knowledge Brasil, told the Knight Center. "We thought it would be very interesting to have a prize focused on data journalists, in this ecosystem that is increasingly flourishing, to encourage and even to map the work that has been done."
Several initiatives, in large and small newsrooms, have raised the status and quality of Brazilian data journalism in recent years, Mazzote commented. Among them are the investment in data centers by large outlets such as Estadão, Folha de S. Paulo and G1 and the emergence of smaller media such as Gênero e Número, digital magazine of which Mazotte is a co-founder, DataLabe, a data laboratory located in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, and Marco Zero, media outlet based in Recife, she cited.
"With the award receiving many entries, we will have a panorama of what has been published, things that are not always on the radar, from outlets that are not so well known. And also more local things, from regions like the Northeast and North, works that we do not always have contact with here in our bubble in the Southeast," she commented.
The award is divided into four categories: Data-Driven Investigation, Visualization, Innovation in Data Journalism, and Journalism and Open Data. Eligible works will have been published in digital, print, TV or radio between July 1, 2018 and Sept. 8, 2019, the day the entries close.
The jury will select three finalists per category, and the 12 finalists will receive free registration for the next edition of Coda.Br, which this year will take place on Nov. 23 and 24, in São Paulo. The winners of each category will be announced there and each will take a cash prize in the amount of R $2,500 (about US $650), plus registration at the 15th Abraji Congress, to be held in 2020.
Abraji is an institutional supporter of the award, Daniel Bramatti, president of the organization and editor of Estadão Dados, the newspaper's data journalism center, told the Knight Center.
"While this initiative recognizes the quality of work done annually, it promotes and disseminates data journalism and its techniques," Bramatti said. "It's a way of giving visibility to an 'arm' of journalism that still has a lot of room to grow."
Tribute to the pioneer of data journalism in Brazil
Journalist Cláudio Weber Abramo, who died on Aug. 12, 2018, is the namesake of this first edition of the award. He worked in several media outlets and co-founded Transparência Brasil, an organization dedicated to access of information and fighting corruption. He was responsible for several projects that sought to use public data to monitor the performance of authorities of the Executive, Judiciary and Legislative branches, and was also celebrated for his role in the campaign for the approval of the Law on Access to Information, sanctioned in 2011.
In June 2018, Weber Abramo was one of the instructors for the Knight Center online course "How to Cover Elections Without Error: Data and Polls to Understand Voters." In the course, students had access to databases created by him, like Datascópio, a public data repository.
"Cláudio was the pioneer of data journalism in Brazil," Bramatti said. "He created the first tools that made it easy to read and extract tools from large databases. And he has always associated this work with the search for a deepening of democracy and the improvement of our institutions."
"Any professional interested in analyzing and exposing the functioning of the public machine, and possible deviations and irregularities, nowadays needs to master at least some techniques of data journalism," the president of Abraji added. "The flags that Cláudio raised continue to be totally relevant to those who put the public interest among the fundamental reasons for doing journalism."
Mazotte also highlighted the role of data journalism in informing the public debate.
“Journalism based on more evidence, with a multiplicity of sources and working the data or the available information in a more palatable way, helps to reduce polarization, because it leaves the spectrum of opinion, from one side to the other, and shows the data and the context for the debate to be held,” she said. “We believe that it is very important at this time in Brazil to qualify this debate and bring, through the press, this higher quality information.”
*Note: Natália Mazotte is also a collaborator of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
