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📮In this week’s newsletter, we bring you the main learnings from the Virtual Newsroom Visit to CLIP – the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism.

CLIP weaves the ecosystem of investigative journalism in Latin America while fostering collaborative cross-border investigations in the public interest. Since its foundation, CLIP has led or participated in 45 cross-border collaborative investigations in the region, partnering with more than 140 media and civil society organizations.

 CLIP’s team hosting IPI Media Innovation Visit: 

  • Emiliana García, General Manager
  • Rigoberto Carvajal, Information Architect and Tech Lead
  • José Luis Peñarredonda, Community Editor
  • Angela Cantador, Journalist
Watch full recording

The challenge: delivering costly investigative reporting

Computer-assisted reporting has been a global practice. Yet, for many media organizations, the task of data collection comes at a high cost to time, money and human resources, in addition to often limited access and lack of cybersecurity measures to keep the investigative process safe.

CLIP has been pioneering innovation in the region and with their own technological and data team, developing tools by and for journalists, to facilitate collaboration and journalistic research. In 2020 CLIP’s team developed NINA, a data community for Latin America, which was the focus of the newsroom visit.

The solution: a decentralised data commons

NINA is a data commons that connects 40 databases, including CLIP’s own databases in more than 21 countries. It currently has 412 users across the region and has had a transformative effect on delivering large-scale cross-border investigations, like lithium-related conflicts in Chile and Argentina, and election abuses in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Ecuador.

 What does NINA do? To put it simply, it optimises work times. It is a research tool that allows journalists to:

  1. To quickly search public procurement databases and other public and private databases from various countries in the region, all in one search result
  2. To cross-reference information between countries; speeding up their investigations and uncovering new stories
  3. To learn how to use tech tools for their investigations

Originally conceived in 2019, NINA was finally created with a grant from Google News Initiatives. In line with the mission of CLIP, collaboration was at the heart of the product, highlighted Emiliana García, CLIP’s General Manager.

The methodology behind uploading data to NINA followed several principles:

  •  Potential for stories:  whether coming from CLIP’s investigations or current events
  •  Potential closure or block of public data in certain countries:  to avoid losing valuable data
  •  No local hub: for example, in certain countries, like Nicaragua
  •  Easy API access: in countries like Costa Rica, where is it easy to navigate public databases

💡Try it for yourself

Watch the full event to see a demo by Angela Cantador –  CLIP’s journalist to find out how you can start using the tool.

Since launching NINA, CLIP has hosted 12 workshops on using the tool and showcased it in over 25 webinars and conferences. These opportunities are used to receive feedback and continuously improve the UX experience. In one of such workshops, the idea of allowing journalists to add their own databases has been brought up and has since become a feature of NINA called DAPIS. In 2023 – NINA connected to more databases, like Aleph (OCCRP), and Bolivia Social Tech Lab.

“The real magic of NINA is that all the APIs speak different languages, have different parameters and responses, so NINA makes this translation and has the ability to map all these APIs to convert all the responses and requests in a standard structure”, said Rigoberto Carvajal, CLIP’s Information Architect and Tech Lead.

NINA keeps evolving, in 2024 they developed an AI chatbot – that allows “knowledge data search” that allows to simultaneously search both structured and unstructured databases, providing precise references for the query results. A user can provide a query in English for a search in Spanish-language documents, as well as request data to be provided in CSV format. Moreover, each user can restrict access to the data and ensure the privacy of the data sources. “This is as good as gets, as a solution for using chatbots in journalism”, said José Luis Peñarredonda, CLIP’s Community Editor.

🚀 Watch the event & demo for new users

Innovation Deck

Voices, the European Festival of Journalism and Media Literacy

Voices Festival is back for a second edition, this time in Zagreb, Croatia! Get your free ticket to attend from 28 February to 1 March a unique event designed to reflect on themes shaping our relationship with information and media today. Featuring high-level debates and workshops on pressing issues such as AI, disinformation and climate journalism, as well as a captivating play and film screenings.

Other opportunities

Share your thoughts, reach out to the Media Innovation team and help us shape our media support programmes! Say hi – innovation@ipi.media.