Uncharted Waters — Making Panama’s Data Open

September 7, 2017

Welcome back to the second part of our interview with Ana and Alfonso of Nueva Nación. In the first part we spoke about the workings of Nueva Nación, the state of freedom of information and expression in Panama, and the dangers of whistleblowing and journalism. This second part of the interview explores the challenges of promoting open data in Panama, maintaining independence in the face of larger media corporations, and the frustrations of scraping data from non-readable formats.

Harsha: What are the challenges of opening up a data journalism news outlet in a country like Panama, where there is no culture of open data? What were your constraints?

Ana: I think that the biggest constraint was that Alfonso and I are pretty much alone in doing this. It is a huge task for only two people. We have a third partner but he’s never been on this full time like we have. Not being able to have a big pool of human resources is pretty difficult. Aside from that, I think the biggest challenge is trying to break the continuous pace of news cycles that is so common in Panama. Trying to get people to break out of their traditional media consuming habits and see the benefits of something a little more rigorous. And this isn’t just about consumers, but also journalists as a whole. Like I said — we want a collaborative culture. Trying to really make people see why this matters and why taking this new path is important is challenging. Like Alfonso said, you have these really entrenched patterns of behaviour. The Brown Institute at Columbia did give us our seed capital and it’s thanks to them that we have legs to stand on and keep pushing forward.

Harsha: Right now it’s just the two of you, do you have plans to expand the team? How do you plan to make this a sustainable model of journalism?

Ana: Right now, we just launched in May. So, now that we’re just starting to see how receptive to this project people are, despite the challenges. We’re trying to figure out the best way to move forward, and we do hope to establish an internship program and to be able to hire people sooner or later. It’s all in the pipeline. There is a lot of work to do on our end content-wise and keeping the database alive. So we’re juggling it all at once. But we’re pushing and trying.

Harsha: Do you have allies in Panama who help you out or are you guys doing this all by yourself?

Alfonso: Well, talking about the future of the company is hard. Because right now we’re trying to develop all the income channels so that the company has a basic income in order to survive and expand. Right now we’re collaborating with a local university, Santa Maria La Antigua University, one of the better universities in Panama, and we’re coming to a deal with them. They will provide us with interns, to keep sifting through data for news stories. I’m pretty sure that once we start streamlining our news production service, the value that we will be providing will be unique, which will distinguish us from other news outlets in Panama. Right now we’re really flexible and lean. Moving forward, we’re also becoming associated to a media outlet while also retaining some degree of independence to be able to work with them and get content and distribute it.

 

The Launch Event of El Tabulario // Source : Knight Center for Journalism in Americas

Harsha: And this is in the greater context of data journalism still not being feasible in several parts of the world, due to a lack of capital that the larger outlets have access to?

Alfonso: There are two things. Journalism right now as a whole economic system is under threat. Social media has completely eroded the fundamental basis upon which journalism was able to finance its investigations or research activity. No one has a solution. I find it exciting because it means that no-one has invented the steam engine yet as such, and there’s a lot of room for innovation and development given the current crisis big journals are experiencing. These outlets are interested in passing their capital to these new ventures, to see which ones work and which ones don’t. I personally think the answer will come out of social media.

Ana: To go back to your original question of support from open data practitioners. Open data hasn’t really hit Panama in the ways you’d expect and in a lot of ways, not to toot a horn, but in a lot of ways, this project is sort of the pioneer in making data truly accessible and open to all in the country. We know of another project that was gathering contracting data and a few other things, but it has been behind a paywall and that’s not truly open. It doesn’t contribute towards the open data movement. We have support as people think it’s interesting and people are receptive and they are cautiously excited for this — it’s something new for the country. There isn’t the infrastructure you find elsewhere to have a backing or support system within. In a lot of ways, our mission is to cultivate this community, to foster this around open data, so I don’t actually know if it’s fair to say if we’re pioneers or not. I wouldn’t want to take that title from someone else if they deserve it. We’re at least one of the very first. We’re trying to make open data possible in Panama.

Harsha: That is some major responsibility you have on your shoulders. Moving on, what skills do both of you bring to the NN team?

Ana: Alfonso is a lawyer and an economics nerd. So his strong suit is trying to navigate through channels of bureaucracy and trying to level within different institutions. At his core he’s a journalist like I am. I’m trained in investigative journalism and that’s where my focus has been. So when you sort of unitelawyer with an investigative journalist — there are different ways of approaching a problem. Alfonso is a very distinguished journalist in Panama in his own right. We sort of have a mosh posh of interests but at the end of the day, we seek to hold power to account and we seek to make government work. Making things transparent and fighting against corruption is what makes the magic work.

Alfonso: Annie brings to the table a strong sense of ethics, which is very important because when you look at the newspapers in Panama — and you investigate the reasons why they have deteriorated so thoroughly — it is because of ethics. It is this violation of ethics that opened the door to worse practices and careless attitudes towards information and data and so on. If you’re running a journal or a newspaper or an information service, your ethics have to be very well established. That’s the reason the reader will come back. They trust that you are adequately transmitting information to them. If you lose that trust, you have lost your credibility as a news outlet. It has happened to Panama America. And I would say that I also bring in a naive curiosity as to why things are happening. Panamanians are very subservient. As in they would just accept data at face value. If government is the source of data, they would take it, without questioning. I have a sense of questioning; why is it this way and why is not the other way and that opens different avenues of questioning and investigation that leads to stories that other people haven’t seen. I think Annie has a sense of that too. Annie has an interest in understanding the motivations behind the denial of a public officer releasing information — why didn’t the attorney general release the documents when she could have done it? And what usually happens is that you’re doing this as a case study for small study journals. One of the keys to our success is that when a story comes out of the three main journals, they usually guide the story based on their own political interests or leanings, but we do it from the original standpoint of the journalists. We question why things are happening and this usually leads to more profound, thoroughly researched stories.

Harsha: That’s wonderfully put. What is the usual work flow of stories at NN?

Alfonso: Annie is the chief editor. She has the general overview of where we are headed, what sort of issues we want, what sort of topics should interest us. I’m the main drafter of stories. Annie also drafts stories, but I usually do the preliminary drafts. Annie and I go through data and we collect the data. But collecting data is different from organising data. Every single day we spend time with the data, something interesting comes out. Maybe it’s a number that doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s the absence of a number and then we’re just jotting that down constantly. Why isn’t this here, why shouldn’t that be there. Eventually, we go back to our main issues. One of our main topics is education. That’s very important for us. We understand that the future of the nation is dependent on the quality of education. One topic Annie likes a lot is health. How healthy is a country. What are the main diseases in the country? What are people suffering from? What is being done to address that? We will prepare a draft based on the data collected and Annie will edit and revise it for style and give some hints as to what should be included, what was left and what needs to be addressed and this is very important. Annie is a US-trained journalist which in Panama is a very rare jewel, so to speak. So it’s very important that Annie stands in as editor. It is a standard that is currently not being addressed in the country. If Annie’s editorial standards can be met, it means the story is very robust. That is usually what happens, when we publish on these very robust data stories, we get good feedback. On the other side, the data side, the work flow is usually this: Annie and I going through documents and PDFs and spreadsheets that we garnered from governments or other agencies and we sort through them, reorganising them. One of the biggest hassles is that most of the data is contained in PDFs. *laughs*

Alphonso: They have a spreadsheet table, they put it in a PDF. They delete the spreadsheet, or somebody took the computer or they don’t know where it is anymore, and all you are left with is a PDF file. Sometimes it’s a scan of the spreadsheet. Those are the worst. I mean, the Brown Institute not only gave us financial capital, but it also gave us a lot of intellectual capital, about how to extract data from these documents. For some of these documents, I need to sit down with a 8 x 12 sheet and write the numbers down. Although I’ll say this. Despite this being the most tedious of the ways that I and Annie work, I would say it is the most rewarding. Annie and I are slowly but surely gaining a thorough knowledge of Panamanian data because sometimes we have to write it out.

Ana: That’s true. We know some of the data inside out and we can interrogate the data on the spot. There have been datasets that we’ve been reviewing and when we look at the numbers, we know this doesn’t look right because we go cell by cell, trying to figure out if things make sense and sometimes we take a hard look and realise it’s wrong, and we have to go back and talk to the agencies. It’s a huge thing. It’s an important part of our workflow that can sometimes be overlooked. It’s just having a really good sense of the news cycle and having to be able to take a pulse of what’s happening in the country and staying ahead of that. We have covered things and people don’t make a big deal out of it. And then in a couple of weeks or a month or two later, it is the big topic and it’s just because we’re really on top of what’s going on — what trends we’re seeing — and some of that has to do with us being so constantly on top of numbers. Beside that it’s just doing regular journalism. It’s asking questions and monitoring social media and that sort of stuff. Not a component that should be readily dismissed.

So that concludes the second part of this 3-part interview with Ana and Alfonso from Nueva Nación. We hope you are enjoying it so far! Tune in tomorrow for the final stage of the interview, where Ana and Alfonso talk about the data tools they use, their favourite success stories of bringing data to the masses in Panama, and their advice to budding open data advocates making their first steps into the world of transparency.