An interview with Ioannis Antypas, FT Longitude’s new data journalist
Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2024 11:00 am
Ioannis recently joined FT Longitude to help us serve the growing demand for alternative research techniques that can help our clients to create more engaging stories and original thought leadership campaigns.
An experienced data journalist, Ioannis joined FT Longitude after spending several years in Brussels working as a data journalist and correspondent for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and Greek newspaper Proto Thema. Before that, Ioannis completed his Fellowship in data journalism at Columbia University, New York.
Good morning Ioannis. A good place to start would be answering the question: What is data journalism? And how is it changing the way professionals in media and comms research their stories?
So data journalism is a very broad profession. It starts with the traditional journalist’s desire to find interesting stories and truths about the world and opens up a whole new set of tools and techniques to help us uncover new stories and insights that previously would have been difficult – or impossible – to research.
As a profession, data journalism is sometimes closer to list of chile cell phone numbers computer science than traditional journalism. Based on exhaustive research, a data journalist can collect huge volumes of data, use coding skills to automate its manipulation and then drive insight. The most interesting human stories of our times – about the way business, the global economy and our societies are evolving – can be explored and illuminated by these new approaches research.
We’re a rich, data-driven society – and journalism needs to follow suit to remain relevant.
How does computing power boost your ability to find more interesting stories?
Data science is effectively digitising the pen and paper and changing the way in which stories are researched and constructed, but it is shifting the scale as well. Being able to scrape and construct these new datasets means that we can now scale up the process and multiply the effectiveness of what one person can do, tenfold. In simple words, with the help of computer programming, we now analyse far more data than before, allowing us to handle much bigger investigations and extract more resounding insights. Programming in journalism works in a similar fashion to other fields; It takes care of the time-consuming, repetitive process, allowing us to become exponentially more creative.
An experienced data journalist, Ioannis joined FT Longitude after spending several years in Brussels working as a data journalist and correspondent for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and Greek newspaper Proto Thema. Before that, Ioannis completed his Fellowship in data journalism at Columbia University, New York.
Good morning Ioannis. A good place to start would be answering the question: What is data journalism? And how is it changing the way professionals in media and comms research their stories?
So data journalism is a very broad profession. It starts with the traditional journalist’s desire to find interesting stories and truths about the world and opens up a whole new set of tools and techniques to help us uncover new stories and insights that previously would have been difficult – or impossible – to research.
As a profession, data journalism is sometimes closer to list of chile cell phone numbers computer science than traditional journalism. Based on exhaustive research, a data journalist can collect huge volumes of data, use coding skills to automate its manipulation and then drive insight. The most interesting human stories of our times – about the way business, the global economy and our societies are evolving – can be explored and illuminated by these new approaches research.
We’re a rich, data-driven society – and journalism needs to follow suit to remain relevant.
How does computing power boost your ability to find more interesting stories?
Data science is effectively digitising the pen and paper and changing the way in which stories are researched and constructed, but it is shifting the scale as well. Being able to scrape and construct these new datasets means that we can now scale up the process and multiply the effectiveness of what one person can do, tenfold. In simple words, with the help of computer programming, we now analyse far more data than before, allowing us to handle much bigger investigations and extract more resounding insights. Programming in journalism works in a similar fashion to other fields; It takes care of the time-consuming, repetitive process, allowing us to become exponentially more creative.