Nicolas Kayser-Bril is the co-founder and CEO of Journalism ++, an agency for data-driven story-telling. At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, he spoke at the panel “Pan-European Approaches to Data Journalism”, together with Daniele Grasso from El Confidencial and the freelance journalists Sara Moreira, Jacopo Ottaviani and Katerina Stavroula.
Kayser-Bril is a French freelance journalist who has been working with data for the past seven years. His project The Migrants files – an investigation that aims at assessing the number of people who died trying to reach Europe – has recently received the European Press Prize Innovation award.
With a team of independent journalists from different European countries, Kayser-Bril developed innovative data investigation projects such as The Migrants files or Generation E. The latter is a cross-border data journalism project that tells the stories of young men and women leaving their southern European countries.
According to Kayser-Bril, journalists don’t need to wait for data to be published in a report, as they can create their own databases researching different sources about the topic they are interested in. After presenting his projects, Kayser-Bril explained how his team organised, summarised and presented the information collected.
During the panel, Kayser-Bril and the other speakers also underlined how difficult is to get funds and continue working in investigative projects such as The Migrants files and Generation E .
In an interview with the Ijf15 Web magazine, Kayser-Bril described how an investigation completely based on data needs to be and spoke about the power of a data investigation. He also gave some tips on how to engage effectively with data.
Check here the full interview with Kayser-Bril: