SVT Datajournalistik

2021

Country/area: Sweden

Organisation: SVT Swedish Television

Organisation size: Big

Cover letter:

We are a team of five people, journalists and developers, that work togehter with data journalism. This year has been a special one – for the whole world and for us. I want to nominate our portfolio of the best articles we have done on corona during 2020. Our mission has been to make avalible as much data as possible, giving our audience facts in a time of distress and worry. Our audience come to us to get the facts, not opinions och “news with an angle”. Our team has worked together for about three years in this constellation, with little to non steering from above. We are and strive for continuing to be a “free”, experimental team that find our own path – with the ambition to set data free and visualize it in a way so that our readers can decide for themselves what they want to kno more about, and how much they want to learn. In a pandemic era, the need for information has never big bigger. Our goal is to continune (as we have up until now) to develop our articles as new data gets out, and in cooperation with our audience. They ask – and we give, when possible. This year we have been depentent on our authorities and the data they release. Data has been released in many different forms och shapes, only to change next week. To keep our biggest articles up to date every day has been a challange and a new way for us to work. We have a number of scripts that run many times a day to find new data to fill our articles with. But the most special thing about this year, and the portfolio I am presenting, is the collaboration with our audience. Some of the ideas, and many of the detalis of our articles has been made because of ideas och wishes from our audience. Several of our articles are like living materia, that continues to change and develop as times goes along. Apart from thoose articles that we update every day, we have also done several others, “one offs” on the topic. And of course we covered the US election and a lot of other stuff. But this portfolio is concenrtrated on corona.

Description of portfolio:

This portfolio belongs to the whole team: SVT Datajournalistik. We work closely together and we are equals in this so there is no principal creator. I am the editor or the team and has therefor taken on this role as the one who nominates us. One of the biggest challenges this year has been the constant change of data. We have two articles that updates several times a day, three or four that updates once a week. We prefer it when ours scripts just get it and pushes it to our pages, but the authoreties often change the data formats in different ways that brakes our scripts. So we rewrite them – and fast. We built a warningbot that emails us when one of sthe scripts fale, this has worked fine both for us but as a plus also for our sources since our bot also sees when there’s something fishy going on on their sites. Several times we have been able to tell our sources that their data is wrong so they can correct it, by letting our bot to simple calculations of what is a resonable number to get and so on. In that way we have been a part of contributing to make sure that the data that every mediahouse in sweden uses is correct. As a Public Service companie, we have also built an iframe version of one of our most popular articles (intensive care in corona) that we share (for free of course) with every lokal media that wants to embedd it. It has been a tough year – we are only five people and we work weekends and hollidays if new data arrives or if one of the scripts brake. We are always on call, since our audience demands (and deserves) to know how the situation is every single day. Okej so some english explination of our articles (even thow I think google translate will work okey). – “Här sprider sig coronaviruset” = The spread of the corona virus. This is also avalible in english – BUT is not up to speed with the development of the swedish one (for example it still shows number of recovered witch we don’t whos in the swedish anymore and will take our of the english). You can however read the english version as a translation – but look at the graphs of the swedish one. This article shows the development of corona in sweden (regions and municipalities) and the rest of the worlds countries – “Corona i intensivvården och slutenvården”: Corona in intensivecare and hospitals. Show the numbers of people, both new per day and in total, that has been given intensive care (and other) for covid. Also shows riskgropups, mortality, age groups and more. – “Corona så ser det ut i din kommun”: Corona in your municipality, development of cases and deaths. – “Social distansering” : we have an english version of this so I give you that link. – “Corona – de senaste tio veckorna”. Corona, the last ten weeks. Shows whatever contry you want – both the hole period but with extra focus on the last ten weeks. Has an “explore your self” at the bottom. – “Överdödlighet under coronakrisen”: Exsess mortality during corona. Show deaths compared to earlier years. – “Så påverka corona möjligheten att opereras” = This is how corona affects your possibility to get your scheduled operation. We compare the number of operations tat is usually done with how many are being done now. Per region, updated once a week. I am out of words but try g translate okej id