Cover letter:

Data desk, the digital journalism team in Finnish Helsingin Sanomat, has been doing cutting edge data journalism for years. The desk includes developers, data journalists and producers, and motion and graphic designers.

The team does data journalism using large variety of sources and analysis tools. The team has broken countless news, developed innovative tools for the newsroom, pushed the limits of online narration. The team’s embrace of open data has lead, for example, to a position as a major COVID-19 data source to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

The team, established ten years ago, has been a frontrunner of digital journalism in Finland.

Description of portfolio:

A major part of data desk’s work is to create immersive and impactful stories online. They are created with all different departments of the newspaper. Helsingin Sanomat is a partially paywalled media, and a sizable share of new subscriptions for the newspaper come through data desk’s online stories.

The portfolio represents different aspects of the team’s skillset. During 2021 much effort went into daily COVID-19 reporting, but there was time to also do an analysis on forest cuttings in Finland (“Metsä puilla paljailla”), do an interactive study on wildly varying housing prices in Finland (“Mihin rahasi riittävät?”), visualize the story of ice man Ötzi (“Ötzin tarina”), local election results and so on.

The stories can be translated to English with Google Translate.

Project links:

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/vuosi-koronaa/

dynamic.hs.fi/a/2021/hakkuut/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/elamasi-saa/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/otzin-tarina/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/mihin-rahasi-riittavat/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/helsingin-paras-paikka/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/humalan-kaava/

dynamic.hs.fi/2021/kuntavaalitulokset/