2022 Shortlist
Alesya Marokhovskaya
Country/area: Russia
Organisation: Important Stories
Organisation size: Small

Cover letter:
My name is Alesya Marokhovskaya, I am 26 years old. I have been doing data journalism and investigative journalism in Russia since I was 20 years old. I used to work in the data department of Novaya Gazeta, now I run the data department in Important Stories. This is a young media created by investigative journalists (Roman Anin, Olesya Shmagun). I’ve been working in Important stories since the beginning. And I see a special approach to data stories: they should always be about people, no matter how much data you have studied for this. You can see this approach in my stories. In addition, I know several programming languages. I especially like Python, and JavaScript for visualizations.
Now it is difficult to engage in investigative journalism and data journalism in Russia. The Russian government invented the status of a “foreign agent” to silence independent media. Important stories and I am personally recognized as a foreign agent, but I want to believe that people in Russia and in the world can still see and appreciate our work.
Description of portfolio:
In this portfolio, I tried to collect the most important works for me, where you can see interesting work with data (by the way, if we see that we can share our skills and tell how we did this project, then we are shooting a lesson for our Workshop — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZy5a_8sMo4ncI6XBb5iMQ ), interesting data visualizations (for example scrollytelling technique and, of course, an interesting story about people. Especially for Sigma Award, we translated several stories into English so that you could fully get acquainted with them, unfortunately, the video materials remained in Russian. Please note that some materials have a factcheck button right above the authors’ names. Please click on it and additional hyperlinks will appear in the text and additional parts of the text with explanations will open.
Project links:
istories.media/en/investigations/2021/03/31/expendables-of-the-quota-system/
istories.media/en/investigations/2021/06/08/how-authorities-stripped-russians-of-choice/
istories.media/en/investigations/2021/07/01/while-deputy-sleeps-net-takes/
istories.media/en/reportages/2021/09/21/electronic-ballots-of-pamfilova-sharpened-churovs-saw/
istories.media/en/reportages/2021/10/19/warm-arctic-hot-siberia/