Good perspectives for Data Journalism in Italy
Data Journalism is gaining more and more attention in Italy, but how to translate and use csv files and spreadsheets in a journalism story? To answer similar questions, Ahref and Istat promoted the Data Journalism School – with support from Enel, the first major public corporation that made available its own datasets.
The event gathered in Rome 23 attendees and got started with a presentation by Elisabetta Tola (@elisabetta_tola) and Guido Romeo (@guidoromeo) titled: an overview of best practeces worldwide and Italy.
Ettore di Cesare and Vittorio Alvino, Openpolis "civic hackers", detailed the basic mechanisms and difficulties in the building of OpenParlamento and the upcoming OpenMunicipio. They also discussed the potentialities of open data in the upcoming future and their (not so easy) relationship with traditional media.
Istat’s Vincenzo Patruno explianed that journalism should embrace and re-use open data, taking advantage of ad hoc platforms such as socrata, datamarket and buzzdata, along with a Scraper, an easy-to-use plug-in for Chrome. Francesca Fuxa Sadurny talked about specific laws and procedures (particularly the 196/2003 Act) that relate to such issues in Italy.
Anna Maria Tononi, communication manager at Istat, proposed an in-depth analysis about the need to further increase a collaboration between open data and media outlets. In fact, TV is still the main source of information for most citizens, particularly in Italy (runner up are the press, and far distant, the Internet). How can we improve the overall distribution of data and their re-use by common citizens? «By promoting storytelling», said Tononi: all of us should learn how to tell good stories based on actual data, starting of course with online journalists.
