Raúl Sánchez

2020

Category: Young journalist

Country/area: Spain

Organisation: eldiario.es

Organisation size: Big

Cover letter:

My name is Raúl Sánchez, I’m a data journalist and coordinator of the data unit of eldiario.es, a young digital media outlet in Spain that has been rewarded for its model of memberships. I’m specialized in covering stories about inequality, gender and corruption based on databases to tell news and explain phenomena.

Although I have a Master in Investigative and Data Journalism, I have done data journalism since I was 20 years old, when I created the Map of Power in the Canary Islands, an interactive database that showed the links of political and economic elites in the Canary Islands (where I was born). Since that time, networks of power and inequality have become the topics I have researched the most.

Since 2015 I have been publishing on eldiario.es stories based on data analysis, always starting with a spreadsheet, an R script or hundreds of PDFs to organize. I have tried to use all the technologies at my disposal to improve my work processes but always adapting to what I need: some R script lines, a chart with Datawrapper, a map with Mapbox GL, an interactive D3, some calculations with Excel or an infographic with Illustrator.

I also was the coordinator of the La Tierra Esclava (Unslaved Land), a transnational journalistic project on the dark side of plantation crops in the world that was nominated for the European Press Prize, received an honorable mention from the Inter-American Press Society and was a finalist for the Awards Rele. I was also a member of the investigation of Los Papeles de la Castellana (Castellana Papers), where we reveal how large Spanish fortunes evaded taxes.

In recent years I have managed to integrate data journalism methodology and process in the different sections of the newspaper. Now data journalism is a transversal area in the newspaper work. I almost always work with official sources but sometimes I create my own databases scrapping from websites or creating them from PDF’s or paper documents. I usually include coding with R, D3 and other Javascript libraries in our contents to create more powerful content and deeper analysis.

Description of portfolio:

2019 in Spain has been marked by political reality: we have experienced two general elections, one local, one regional and one European during the year. My work, which includes more than 100 publications throughout the year, has been marked by this electoral phase. The linked projects, however, do not speak only about votes or political parties. They talk about inequality, environment, corruption, tax evasion or city growth.

A third of the income of the richest comes from the income of capital: we analyze the origin of the income of the residents in each of the 34,000 census sections of Spain, where we reveal that one third of the income of the richest 1% does not It comes from work income. For this analysis we did an analysis with an R script to identify the percentage of income in each percentile, we map the data with Mabpox GL
The Office of Conflict of Interest that never sees conflict of interest. I compiled in a database the more than 500 resolutions (in PDF) of the Office that is in charge of supervising the high positions of the Government and we discovered that it had only vetoed 2% of the revolving doors in a decade
How the suburbs of the big cities concentrate the demographic summer in Spain. We compiled in a database all births and deaths in each of the 8,000 municipalities that exist in Spain from 1996 to 2018. A task that involved a crossing of 15 databases with Excel and R to see that the medium-sized municipalities around the big cities were the only ones with more births than deaths.
Graphic guide on how large Spanish companies and multinationals avoid taxes thanks to tax havens and tax engineering. An interactive explanation made with Scrollama, Illustrator and Javascript.
The demography of the general elections: how each social group votes in Spain. For the November general elections we publish a live demographic analysis of the election results with other variables such as average age, income, place of birth or level of studies. An interactive tool based on Flourish code and enhanced with Javascript and other libraries.
How rich neighborhoods were enriched twice as much as the poorest during the economic recovery. We analyze the average income of the neighborhoods of the 31 largest Spanish cities between 2013 and 2017 and see how the richest areas grew more than those with less income. Analysis with Excel and R and visualizations with Javascript, Datawrapper and R.
0.3% of fires burned 40% of the surface in Spain since 1968. When a large fire was the cover of national newspapers, we published this story about how the virulence of fires in Spain had increased and its importance. An analysis of a database with more than 2,000 fires of more than 500 hectares with R.

These stories, which do not include many contents of the elections we publish during the year, have been among the most read of the year in eldiario.es and have occupied a space on the main cover of eldiario.es, with more than 8 million of monthly readers.