Nexo Jornal

2022 Shortlist

Country/area: Brazil

Organisation: Nexo Jornal

Organisation size: Small

Cover letter:

Nexo Jornal is a Brazilian newspaper, centered in context journalism. It was founded in 2015 and since then has received attention for the quality of its production and, specially, for its data visualizations.

Graphics are essential for Nexo’s coverage: we try to use data visualization for everything, from covid-19 and economics, to music and sports.

Our entire work is collective but our team is also divided in two sub-groups: one dedicated to design, and another to data science. Recently, we had a new addition of a web developer. In total, we are 7 people.

We are a very young team (mean age of 25 years old) but really committed to improve our work every day.

Description of portfolio:

This year our team, as every other newsroom in the planet, strived to maintain the delicate balance of reporting on the covid-19 pandemic with the care and attention the matter requires, while not neglecting other emerging crises, and also, as we call internally, lighter subjects, such as pop culture, music and sports. The selection below aims do showcase just that.

We managed our efforts and successfully covered large events like the Olympics and COP 26, while maintaining two daily charts with national and global covid figures in our newsletter.

Our portfolio is a selection of some of our best weekly work. Every Monday the whole team gets together to brainstorm ideas and decide on the week’s tasks. These meetings are fueled by discussions of themes such as politics, current events, science and culture
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Most of our stories start as a team member putting up a dataset or report for discussion. We then weigh how relevant or interesting the data presented are against how robust is its methodology and how feasible it is to work with.

Once we approve an idea, usually a data scientist starts delving into the data and writing up the text and general structure of the piece. They then pass the text and raw charts on to an information designer that realizes the story on the page, deciding the layout and visual identity of the piece.

The first version is then shared with the rest of the team, who comment and double-check the charts, figures and text before passing the revised version to our editor (who is also one of our data scientists).

The tools used by our data scientists to analyze and plot data are mainly R, via RStudio with special focus on the [tidyverse] packages. Google Sheets and Flourish are used for more straightforward and time sensitive work.

The information designers, in turn, work mostly with Adobe Illustrator to create illustrations and highlight the most important aspect of the visualizations. They also make data visualizations in Flourish when needed.

This process is all made with the mobile version of the piece in mind first, which is the main way readers consume our content.