网易数读 NetEase Datablog

2023

网易数读 NetEase Datablog

Entry type: Portfolio

Country/area: China

Publishing organisation: 网易数读 NetEase Datablog

Organisation size: Small

Cover letter:

Founded in 2012, NetEase Datablog is one of the forerunners contributing to data journalism in China with tens of millions of subscribers. The column then grew and stood out among peers to be an influencer with high-quality data visualization and unique style and storytelling.

We are committed to mining information in depth and data with enjoyment. The column is featured for creating statistic diagrams. But we keep the soul for exploring more engaging forms like web apps, interactive diagrams, and videos to enhance the reading experience with higher accessibility and readability. And we have made a breakthrough in illustrative storytelling with videos enriched by fascinating motion graphics (MG).

The team has two editors, two designers, and a front-end developer with a clear division of labor with broad coverage, including daily life, healthcare, finance & business, culture and entertainment.

A key value we hold is to always tell stories from the perspective of ordinary people, only with which can we produce strong stories.

To make an entry to this behonored award, we hope to learn from peers worldwide who contribute to data journalism and make better works together.

Description of portfolio:

We selected a collection of works with great importance in public concerns, covering public healthcare, campus life, travel, reflection on life and death, etc. Here is a brief of our work submitted. And we hope it will help you to have a better understanding of our work.

In the field of public health, we made a perspective from the chaotic naming situation of hospitals in China in our story “2,000 Hospitals with Notable Names: Only Three Are Officially Qualified”. Peking Union Medical College Hospital is a top medical institution in the country. But there are only three Union Hospitals that are officially recognized sharing the same origin – Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Union Hospital Tongji Medical College Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Fujian Medical University Union Hospital. In the meanwhile, there are over 2,000 private hospitals trying to cheat patients by including “Union” in their names. The country’s watchdog took measures to clean up the mass, but it then became a cat-and-mouse game. These less qualified hospitals included other well-known names from the country’s top medical institutions like Ruijin, Renji, and Changzheng. While investigating the issue, we scrutinized the status of these hospitals on the Chinese business database Tianyancha to inform readers of the sneaky names. The work we delivered made a great difference to the field.

Another work related to public healthcare is “5,500 Covid Recovery Cases Tell the Things to Do If You’ve Tested Positive”. The story was published in the second week after China lifted most of the Covid countermeasures. For most Chinese, this is the first time they have faced the coronavirus directly since the initial outbreak three years ago. Then came the situation where people are unaware of the proper treatment for Coivd and most information spreading on the internet is less inaccurate and misleading, even those from official agencies.

We gathered and summarized 5,572 social posts recording their experience of fighting against Covid on the Twitter-like platform Weibo and the Chinese lifestyle-sharing social platform Xiaohongshu. By reading, adding tags, and summarizing these posts, we extract the common symptoms and helpful treatments of Covid-19, adding more professional knowledge to benefit our readers.

In the stories “A Rank of Chinese Universities’ Floor Area: an Enormous Gap” and “High-Speed Rail Stations are Far from Central Regions in Chinese Cities, But Why?”, we combine intriguing data with public concerns perfectly.

For example, we obtained the list of national universities from the country’s Ministry of Education and utilized the area of interest (AOI) feature from map service provider AMap to match. As a result, we got the land area data of 1,270 undergraduate universities in China. With the data, we visualized the intriguing data as a rank chart and took our readers a further look into the issue behind the huge gaps between these schools – rampant expansion and crowded dorms. The story drew great resonance from our readers.

We also adopted a similar trick in the other story mentioned above, revealing the issue of the distance between high-speed rail stations and central areas in cities. The article made an approach via data to the concerns people would counter when taking a trip.