Data Storytelling: The Future of Journalism

Austere budget cuts have led to a reduction in original investigative journalism. CARTO’s holistic approach to location intelligence, however, enabled Le Télégramme to surmount budgetary limitations without compromising journalistic integrity, all the while spearheading a new genre of journalism.

CARTO’s location intelligence platform allowed Le Télégramme to begin recalibrating the field of investigative journalism through innovative data storytelling. Le Télégramme, a French language daily newspaper with a print circulation of over 220,000 in the regions of Brittany, Finistère, les Côtes-d’Armor, and whose digital traffic typically exceeds two million visits each month, navigated big data on a global scale with deep insights at the local level in a widely-celebrated April 2016 article, titled Immigration. Le Centre-Bretagne à contresens.

Le Télégramme translated national census data into interactive maps, charting immigration trends in each canton and region of France. “Interactive maps provide real value to our digital offerings,” explains Vincent Lastennet, the newspaper’s lead data journalist, “It allows different employees of Le Télégramme to work simultaneously on the same project, which allowed us to reach our tight deadlines while producing an impressive product”.

CARTO’s APIs can process big data to trace the migration not only of people, but of resources as well. In a June 2016 article, titled Baisse des dotations. Comment s’en sort votre commune?, Le Télégramme reported on the allocation of state resources that visually displayed the amount received by each canton’s with an interactive map. The newspaper’s dataset was processed within twenty-four hours using CARTO’s high-powered APIs.

Each of CARTO’s data-driven visualizations that Le Télégramme published garnered between 5,000 and 10,000 digital visits, and our map displaying state funding allocations, pictured above, attracted more than 30,000 visits.

We are excited to see more strategic innovations, such as data storytelling, from our users.

Happy data mapping!