2020 Shortlist
Key events from past four months of Hong Kong’s anti-government protets
Category: Best visualization (small and large newsrooms)
Country/area: Hong Kong S.A.R., China
Organisation: South China Morning Post
Organisation size: Big
Publication date: 10 Sep 2019
Credit: Pablo Robles
Project description:
For our data visualization “Key events from Hong Kong’s anti-government protests” we analysed the daily coverage of the first six months to show how the protests roiled Hong Kong. We used the live coverage of our frontline reporters and studied photos and videos from trusted news sources as well as the daily police briefs.
Impact reached:
By combining on-the-ground reporting with charts, maps, DataViz, illustrations, videos and photographs we were able to create a visual narrative to bring clarity to a fast evloving series of events and inform a curious international audience about what was happening in Hong Kong. The data also provided an impartial bird’s-eye view of the civil disturbances that captured the world’s imagination.
Journalists and academics in Hong Kong use this story as a go-to source of information on how the protests evloved.
Techniques/technologies used:
To build this project we created a DataViz for each day and separated events into peaceful protests, violent protests and government announcements which included data such as the numbers of arrests, injuries, tear gas rounds and rubber bullets fired and public transport disruptions and train stations vandalised.
We used the scale of the video/photo to indicate the level of violence of that event – the larger the image the greater the level of violence used.
What was the hardest part of this project?
All the data was collected manually and interpreted visually to show readers the key events over the first six months of protests. Reporting the data this way makes it easy for readers to understand the complex series of events at a glance.
What can others learn from this project?
We fiest published this project to mark the fourth month of protests and pdated with fresh information at the end of each month until December. We believe this is a good example of keeping a news story evergreen and fresh
