If there is one thing Sigma Award for Data Journalism winner, Mansir Muhammad would love to change in Nigerian newsrooms and journalism work in Nigeria, it is their ability to infuse data in their work.
“I want to go to news reports and see data bridging the gap,” the GIS/OSINT specialist at HumAngle said in an interview with our website.
Beyond using storytelling to provide the context, he believes using data in news reports improves the extent to which a reader feels the intensity and weight of the narrative being pushed in the report.
Doing this isn’t impossible, but it is currently challenging for many journalists and newsrooms to do. The challenges include the lack of required data journalism skills, the absence of the needed resources and infrastructure, the inability to get or access the data in a useful format, and the lack of adequate investment in data journalism by newsrooms.
There are indeed newsrooms that have scaled through these challenges and journalists who are using data journalism skills to do brilliant and impactful work in Nigeria already. However, the number is still too few, compared to how large Nigeria’s media space is.
Enter Dataphyte, a media, research, and data analytics organisation with the mission to deploy data tools and technology for Nigeria’s socio-economic development.
Dataphyte touches on all the challenges of data journalism in Nigeria and provides innovative solutions to each of them. From the most popular challenge of data journalism skill acquisition to the bane of actual data-infused reporting, which is a lack of data or useful data or data in a useful format, to the investments in technology and infrastructure for data journalism projects, the organisation, which is just a few weeks shy of its fifth anniversary, has made giant strides in tackling these challenges.
In previous editions of our Nigeria Media Capacity Development Nigeria Media Capacity Development Reports, we have documented the numbers of journalists and newsrooms that have benefitted from the training and data journalism capacity development programmes of Dataphyte. With the now structured Dataphyte Academy, Fellowships, and partnership programmes with other organisations, Dataphyte trained over 250 professionals in 2024 adding to the significant number of Nigerian journalists it has trained and supported in doing impactful journalistic works with data.
Dataphyte’s Gender Mainstreaming Fellowship, which targets broadcast journalists for training in using data to mainstream gender issues in their coverage of socio-economic issues, is an important and timely intervention. It solves the dual problems of broadcast journalism’s lack of data journalism capabilities and the underreporting of gender-related issues.
The different publications of the Dataphyte, from the interactive Data stories and visualisation, Investigative Data journalism Stories, and Heavy-data-infused and brilliant storytelling newsletter publications like Data Dives, Pocket Science, Senorita and Marina and Maitama are good examples of how best data journalism can be done.
Highlights of 2024 Achievements
- Published over 473 exclusive data-driven stories, comprising 141 informative data cards, 23 investigations, and 309 in-depth reports uncovering insights and driving transparency across governance, public finance, and development. (Read reports here)
- Published 158 branded data-driven reports as weekly newsletters to our mailing list. (Subscribe to get the latest edition)
- We created #FAACFacts dashboard and 7 interactive visualizations to analyse the “Federal account allocation committee (FAAC) allocation to local government areas (LGAs) in Nigeria”, providing users with data-driven insights to better understand government allocation trends at the local government level. (View the dashboard here)
Goloka and ANFANI are two popular products among the many databases, data dashboards and platforms that the organisation has created to solve the problem of sourcing, processing and accessing relevant data for journalists, researchers and other stakeholders.
From the onset, Dataphyte, led by its brilliant founder Joshua Olufemi, has always premised its problem-solving interventions on the innovative use of technology, harnessing the offerings of technology coupled with the creative use of available resources to solve pertinent problems in the media industry is what has led the organisation to where it is today. One such innovative use of technology is the Nubia AI tool helping journalists source and produce data reports easily with the power of artificial intelligence and the creative input of journalists. This tool which can be used by any journalist and newsrooms of different sizes can help bridge the gap of skills, resources and infrastructure in data journalism.
In the second half of 2024, the organisation opened the doors of its state-of-the-art Innovation Hub and the Dapo Olorunyomi Theatre for journalists, media entrepreneurs, social innovators and development practitioners to utilize the facility’s technology, training and development resources to do impactful works while networking and collaborating for more impact.
While other organizations are exploring the application of technology in the data journalism sector, Dataphyte’s approach of opening up its products to the media sector, and its partnership and collaboration with journalists and media organisations indeed makes it poised to be the pioneer house of data in Nigeria media space and beyond.
