In the making of investigative reports, journalists need to work with different sources, codes, and data of varying formats. Online, there are tools available for creating and manipulating databases, but the question is knowing which are the most useful for investigative journalism. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas asked this question to four Brazilian reporters.
On Sunday, May 27, the Brazilian newspaper Estado de São Paulo launched an exclusive app for tablets that focuses on municipal electoral coverage that will take in October, reported the Portal Imprensa. The app gathers news, videos, and analyses about the elections in the main Brazilian cities.
The Brazilian newspaper O Globo's recently launched iPad app "O Globo a Mais" is an afternoon publication that includes the highlights of the newspaper's printed version plus exclusive digital material. Pedro Doria, O Globo's editor for online, explained in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas the different challenges of transitioning from paper to tablet.
With more than one million followers, the Mexican newspaper El Universal has more Twitter followers than any other newspaper from among the top 100 dailies in Latin America, according to a website that ranks newspapers' popularity.
Pinterest, the social media curating site that allows users to "'pin' (bookmark) things you like -- photos, recipes, crafts, design ideas, photography, art, etc., and silo those items into 'boards,'" as MediaShift described it, might just be the next big thing for journalism, as cliché as that sounds. After all, TechCrunch just reported on Tuesday, Feb. 7, that Pinterest gets 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, having hit the 10-million mark faster than any other standalone site ever. And as Poynter pointed out, "it's time for journalists to pay attention to Pinterest."
As tablets and e-readers become a growing trend for news consumers, the newspaper O Globo launched the first digital edition in Brazil designed for iPad, “O Globo a mais,” on Jan. 30. The initiative is a sign of the news industry’s interest in developing new platforms for its content.
The first time my wife sent me a Facebook IM asking if I wanted to go out for lunch, I realized – with some hesitant nostalgia – that we were about to cross another threshold into the age of digital communication. I was sitting at my computer in my home office and my wife was 20 feet away, sitting on the couch with her laptop. I could have (and perhaps should have) turned to her and nodded “yes, dear, let’s go hunt for sandwiches,” but instead I dutifully took the plunge with her into the next level of cyberdom by typing: “Si amor, vamos.”
Poderopedia, a way to look for and spread information about who has the power in Chile, has received $200,000 as one of the 16 winning projects of the Knight News Challenge 2011. Created by journalist Miguel Paz, assistant editor of El Mostrador, and by web developer Héctor Vergara, Poderopedia aims to be a database that will serve as a map of Chilean elites. The website will investigate and illustrate the connections among people, companies and institutions with the end goal of shedding light on any possible conflicts of interest. The information for the database will be obtained via collective participation, simila
Discussions of innovations in media, technology, languages and platforms were just some of the central themes when journalists from throughout Brazil gathered June 30–July 2 in São Paulo at the 6th International Congress of Investigative Journalism organized by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. The program covered dozens of topics, ranging from the format of news on tablets to the practice of independent journalism on the web.
Tools for managing, visualizing, and distributing data was a recurring theme in the 16 vanguard media projects that will share $4.7 million in funding from the 2011 Knight News Challenge. Since it began in 2006, the initiative, primarily funded by the John S. and James L Knight Foundation, has given out $27 million to 76 projects to promote journalistic innovation.
Inspired by the recent protests in Spain that, since March, have demanded economic and electoral system changes, filmmaker Raquel Diniz, 31, created a collaborative map to pinpoint cases of corruption in Brazil, according to Folha de S. Paulo.
”Crowdfunding”, a term used to describe networking, usually via the Internet, to pool money and resources, is starting to take off in Brazil. An explosion of crowdfunding websites, like Catarse, Multidão, Movere and Benfeitoria, are just some to come on the scene.