El Pais | Online Journalism Blog

False colour image of the Paraná River near its mouth at the Rio de La Plata, Argentina. Image: Copernicus Sentinel data [2022] processed by Sentinel Hub.

In a guest post for OJB, first published on ML Satellites, MA Data Journalism student Federico Acosta Rainis explains what can be learned from some examples of the format.

Satellite imagery is increasingly a key asset for journalists. Looking from above often allows us to put a story into context, take a more interesting perspective or show what some power prefers to keep hidden.

But with hundreds of satellites taking thousands of images of the Earth every day, it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. How can we find relevant stories in this ocean of data?

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Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war. Or, as an academic might put it:

“Professional journalism takes the nation as its unit of analysis, which [means] journalists employ ‘‘closed’’ language with respect to international issues when the nation is perceived as threatened, encouraging the citizen to read world events and issues from ‘‘our’’ point of view.”

This is the scene set at the start of Robert L. Handley‘s research into collaborative cross-border journalism. Handley wants to tackle the question of whether “global journalism” can result in the more objective outlook that its proponents hope for.

The partnerships that sprung up around Wikileaks‘s warlogs and cables provide an ideal way to explore that.

Europe vs the US

The overriding finding of Handley’s research is a difference in how European and US newspapers handled the Wikileaks material. European papers, he argues, “behaved as loyal to the nation-as-citizen and, more broadly, to citizens-wherever,” but the reporting of US partner The New York Times “demonstrated a loyalty to nation-as-official.”: Continue reading →