Tag Archives: Barbara Maseda

How to search for information in data black holes: Barbara Maseda and the Inventario project

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Barbara Maseda

Image from Knight Center

Ahead of a Global Investigative Journalism Conference panel on reporting in countries without press freedom, Liana Bravo spoke to Cuban data journalist Barbara Maseda about launching a data portal for journalists in an environment where no official data is published.

Bárbara Maseda has dedicated the last four years to publishing data where none exists. “In Cuba we use investigative journalism tools to search for information that elsewhere in the world would be in a press release,” she says. Other journalists’ data problems, such as receiving data in formats that are difficult to analyse, “are my highest aspirations”.

In 2018 she created ‘Inventario’, an open data project for Cuba. “In Cuba data is treated as confidential information. The government does not give data — or when it does, they are not disaggregated,” she says. Continue reading →

Text-as-data journalism? Highlights from a decade of SOTU speech coverage

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January 2012: The National Post’s graphics team analyzes keywords used in State of the Union addresses by presidents Bush and Obama / Image: © Richard Johnson/The National Post

January 2012: The National Post’s graphics team analyzes keywords used in State of the Union addresses by presidents Bush and Obama / Image: © Richard Johnson/The National Post

In a guest post for OJB, Barbara Maseda looks at how the media has used text-as-data to cover State of the Union addresses over the last decade.

State of the Union (SOTU) addresses are amply covered by the media —from traditional news reports and full transcripts, to summaries and highlights. But like other events involving speeches, SOTU addresses are also analyzable using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to identify and extract newsworthy patterns.

Every year, a new speech is added to this small collection of texts, which some newsrooms process to add a fresh angle to the avalanche of coverage.

Continue reading →

What do journalists do with large amounts of text?

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Photo: Pixabay

Barbara Maseda is on a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship project at Stanford University, where she is working on designing text processing solutions for journalists. In a special guest post she explains what she’s found so far — and why she needs your help.

Over the last few months, I have been talking to journalists about their trials and tribulations with textual sources, trying to get as detailed a picture as possible of their processes, namely:

  • how and in what format they obtain the text,
  • how they find newsworthy information in the documents,
  • using what tools,
  • for what kinds of stories,

…among other details.

What I’ve found so far is fascinating: from tech-savvy reporters who write their own code when they need to analyze a text collection, to old-school investigative journalists convinced that printing and highlighting are the most reliable and effective options — and many shades of approaches in between.

What’s your experience?

If you’ve ever dug a story out of a pile of text, please let me know using this questionnaire. It doesn’t matter if you’ve used more or less sophisticated tools to do it.

Here are a few reasons and incentives to contribute: Continue reading →

Snapchat for Journalists now available in Spanish

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Snapchat para periodistas libro

My ebook Snapchat for Journalists is now available in Spanish: Snapchat para periodistas.

The new translation also includes specific examples from Spanish language media and journalists using the platform.

A Spanish language blog post by Barbara Maseda, with more details about the translation, can be found here.

Barbara has also translated two of my other books into Spanish: Periodismo de datos: Un golpe rápido (Data Journalism Heist) and Excel para periodistas (Excel for Journalists)

Snapchat para periodistas: una guía pensada para la redacción

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¿Cómo producir contenido noticioso para Snapchat? ¿Es posible calcular estadísticas de audiencia? ¿Qué sentido tiene invertir recursos y tiempo en producir contenido que va a desaparecer en 24 horas? Estas y otras preguntas aparecen respondidas en “Snapchat para periodistas”, una guía que detalla cada uno de los recursos de esta red social y cómo aprovecharlos en estrategias de publicación.

El libro, escrito por el periodista y profesor británico Paul Bradshaw, incluye muchos ejemplos de las cuentas de Snapchat de medios de Estados Unidos y Reino Unido, como el Huffington Post, la BBC, The New Yorker, CBS, Fusion y Mashable, entre otros.

La traducción al español incluye algunas capturas de pantalla de canales de medios latinoamericanos, además de las del original. Aunque el uso de Snapchat no está tan extendido en redacciones de habla hispana, hay algunos medios que mantienen cuentas, como Perú 21 y Todo Noticias (Argentina).

Además de ilustrar buenas prácticas, los ejemplos también documentan una parte de la historia de los usos de la plataforma –que puede ser útil especialmente para quienes no lleven mucho tiempo usándola.

El texto cubre todas las opciones técnicas (grabación de video y sonido, edición de texto, uso de lápices y filtros, etc.); estrategias de producción y diseño narrativo; almacenamiento de estadísticas de audiencia; algunos consejos útiles para construir una red de amigos; y otras funcionalidades más sofisticadas para usuarios avanzados.

Paul Bradshaw es autor de varios libros sobre periodismo, incluyendo otros dos disponibles en español: “Excel para periodistas” y “Periodismo de datos: un golpe rápido”.

Those Android Trump tweets: David Robinson on using text data to get an election scoop

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Washington Post story tweet

Data scientist David Robinson was behind one of the most striking data stories of this US election season, when his analysis of Donald Trump tweets appeared to confirm that Trump was posting the angriest comments on that account (jointly managed by his campaign staff). Barbara Maseda spoke to Robinson about the story behind that text analysis and what comes next. 

It was August 9 when David Robinson published his analysis of Trump tweets on his blog. Robinson had used a series of libraries in the programming language R to collect, clean, process and visualise the data. The process took just 12 hours, from Saturday night through Tuesday morning.

In the following days, the piece would be re-posted and cited by multiple websites, including The Washington Post and Mashable. The original piece alone had hundreds of thousands of views in just a few days.

The result wasn’t just one election story, but one of the biggest indications yet of the potential of text analysis for journalists, with three takeaways in particular: Continue reading →

Periodismo de datos: Un golpe rápido

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Periodismo de datos… ebookMy ebook Data Journalism Heist is now available in a specially reduced Spanish translation.

Periodismo de datos: Un golpe rápido was translated by Cuban journalist Barbara Maseda, and is available in PDF, iPad and Kindle formats. The recommended price is $5.99 but a special minimum price of $1.19 is available for journalists working in countries where the full price would be too expensive.

The publication follows the release of the Spanish version of my book on Excel for journalists, Excel para periodistas, earlier this year.

Próximamente “Excel para periodistas” en español

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“Excel para periodistas”, la versión en español de mi libro “Finding Stories in Spreadsheets”, estará listo en las próximas semanas.

La traducción está a cargo de Bárbara Maseda. Pueden registrarse en la página del libro digital para recibir un aviso cuando se publique.

Spanish version of ‘Excel for Journalists’ on the way

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A Spanish version of Finding Stories in Spreadsheets – titled ‘Excel para periodistas’ (Excel for Journalists) – should be available in the next few weeks.

The translation is being done by Barbara Maseda. If you want to know when it’s going to be available you can register to be informed on the book page.