Sandra Crucianelli

Argentina: Strengthening Data Journalism Teams

ICFJ Knight Fellow Sandra Crucianelli helped La Naciónone of Argentina’s leading daily newspapers, to become an international powerhouse of data-driven investigative journalism. Through her leadership, La Nación's nascent data team was integrated into the newsroom, enabling the team to tap into more journalists to produce groundbreaking investigations. They learned how to extract and analyze information for investigative stories, including tax revenues earmarked for the country’s crumbling public services, and extract and analyze information for investigative stories. And as part of this effort, she helped La Nación launch Argentina’s first data blog, where journalists post data-driven stories and invite the public to respond and engage.

To expand training of data journalism to the provinces, Crucianelli worked with FOPEA, the national journalists association. FOPEA has offered its facilities for workshops and its website for online training targeting rural media.

Crucianelli also helped the local chapter of Hacks/Hackers create new applications for collecting and visualizing data. Among the planned projects: Mapa76, which helps journalists extract names from documents from the country’s “dirty war,” tracking perpetrators and victims of human rights abuses across hundreds of cases in ways never before possible.