The Detail in public service journalism and data partnership

Investigative journalism site The Detail has partnered with the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA) to better serve local communities through data journalism projects and training.

Detail Data, supported by £500,000 from the Big Lottery Fund, will see The Detail produce over 30 major data-driven projects over the next three years while working with NICVA to give communities the skills and information to access data themselves.

"We'll be talking and working together to decide what topics we're going to look at in depth," Kathryn Torney, deputy editor of The Detail, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We have to keep the journalism in mind but the groups we'll be working with will be very conscious of what the issues are at ground level and what potential problems or gaps in data there are which they think would be good for us to look into."

We want to create really compelling packages and really interesting layered journalismKathryn Torney, The Detail

The majority of the training will be carried out by NICVA, a membership organisation for the voluntary and community sector, who will also create a 'data store' for people to access any and all public data in Northern Ireland.

"It would probably be a mix of freely accessible data people could pick up now, mixed with us doing very specialised requests around the way we want to cover an issue," Torney added.

NICVA will work with journalists at The Detail to identify topics in need of investigation and areas identified in initial meetings include health inequalities, educational disadvantage, criminal justice, and deprivation.

Torney said The Detail would be looking to take advantage of all the digital storytelling possibilities now available to best portray the issues being investigated and make the information more relevant and useful to different audiences.

"We want to create really compelling packages and really interesting layered journalism where people can read written articles, they can look at video interviews, they can get involved with interactive graphics and maps," she said.

A lot of the social issues... it's not just something that happens to someone elseKathryn Torney, The Detail

Data sets with a geographic or demographic breakdown would be particularly useful in these 'layered' stories, she said, in having both a "top news line right down to what's important to people in their own area".

"It can be really useful to get a breakdown by geography to show people these problems and issues are happening right across Northern Ireland," she said.

"They are happening around the corner from you, it's not just something that happens to other people... Certainly a lot of the social issues of what we looked at today, it makes it very relevant to each reader and it's not just something that people think happens to someone else."

Since its launch in 2011, The Detail has been one of the foremost publications in Northern Ireland for data journalism, investigating suicide deaths in the region, domestic abuse, ambulance response times, welfare reform, dementia diagnosis, youth crime, and educational achievement.

The Lottery funding will go towards staffing costs at The Detail and NICVA, additional costs of the training courses and publishing costs of the larger data projects.



The Detail Data project from Steven McCaffery on Vimeo

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