Tag Archives: World Cup

Investigating the World Cup: tips on making FOIA requests to create a data-driven news story

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Image by Ambernectar 13

Beatriz Farrugia used Brazil’s freedom of information laws to investigate the country’s hosting of the World Cup. In a special guest post for OJB, the Brazilian journalist and former MA Data Journalism student passes on some of her tips for using FOIA.

I am from Brazil, a country well-known for football and FIFA World Cup titles — and the host of the World Cup in 2014. Being a sceptical journalist, in 2019 I tried to discover the real impacts of that 2014 World Cup on the 213 million residents of Brazil: tracking the 121 infrastructure projects that the Brazilian government carried out for the competition and which were considered the “major social legacy” of the tournament.  

In 2018 the Brazilian government had taken the website and official database on the 2014 FIFA World Cup infrastructure projects offline — so I had to make Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to get data.

The investigation took 3 months and more than 230 FOIA requests to 33 different public bodies in Brazil. On August 23, my story was published.

Here is everything that I have learned from making those hundreds of FOIA requests:

Continue reading →

Panini sticker albums – a great way to learn programming and statistics

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1970 sticker album - image by John Cooper

1970 sticker album – image by John Cooper

When should you stop buying football stickers? I don’t mean how old should you be – but rather, at what point does the law of diminishing returns mean that it no longer makes sense to buy yet another packet of five stickers?

This was the question that struck me after seeing James Offer‘s ‘How much could it cost to fill a World Cup Sticker Album?‘ Continue reading →

This simple piece of visualisation will have you rethinking what you know about impact and mobile

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deadworkers

It’s not often I encounter a piece of data journalism which solves a common problem in the field – and it’s even rarer to find a piece of work which tackles two.

But that’s just what lean data journalism Ampp3d did last week when it published a piece of visualisation on the deaths of construction workers in Qatar.

The two problems? Creating impact on mobile – and making big numbers meaningful. Continue reading →