Contribution from DR Data Team III

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The toxic soilDatajournalism award 2014

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One of our first projects was to map and illus-

trate poisoned soil in Denmark. It is not news

that some of our soil is contaminated with dirt

and chemicals from – among other sources –

old industry, dry cleaning and gas stations.

But few of us really know the extent of the pol-

lution. And few know the exact places in the

landscape with poisoned soil. The challenge

was to show the exact location and extent of

the pollution. Is it near your house? Is it at the

playground at the kindergarten? Or the forest

where you walk your dog every day? That was

a few of the questions, we wanted to answer

not only by writing stories, but also by show-

ing it in a map, where the readers were able

to click and study the polluted areas of the soil

in Denmark.

Even though a huge part of Denmark is classi-

fied as toxic, the subject has never big given

much awareness in media or politics. As a result

of this the public spending on cleaning polluted

soil is very low (55 million euro annually). With

the current budgets it will take more than 50

The Data Team at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) was launched at the 1st of Octo-ber this year. The team consists of an editor, two journalists, a graphic designer and a devel-oper. We work close together with all aspects of a project. Both in research and illustration all members of the team contribute.

About the

Data team years to clean the known pollutions that have

been assessed a threat to drinking water depots

or a direct health hazard to people.

Whit that perspective in mind, the Data Team

regarded this subject interesting for further re-

search. Another factor was the election for local

government (municipalities). The election were

held the 19th of November 2013, and we pub-

lished our stories and map two weeks before

with a small hope of giving this subject an tim-

ing fit for a political debate.

What did we do


We decided to create a map of the poisoned soil.

But instead of overloading our readers with all information at

once, we dripped different layers of information in the map with

days delay.

What was especially important to the team was in addition, that all the

data had an angle that made it newsworthy. Some layers that was ac-

tually possible to add to our map of poisoned soil, was dropped when

research revealed, that data had no news to offer.

For example did we map all Danish Schools and kindergartens.

Lots of them were situated at ground which was classified by author-

ities as toxic. But when calling the schools or researching by getting

further information from authorities it became obvious that they all

knew about the toxic area and had taken precautions in order to pre-

vent the soil from doing harm to the health of the pupils.

To our Data Team it is – as the example illustrates – not an independent

objective to give the reader as much data as it is possible to show.

Rather we try to achieve relevant and important news via data. If the

data is then found interesting enough to illustrate in maps/graphs/info

graphics, we decide on the best way to communicate data to our read-

ers.

We decided to run three different layers of the map with a pile of dif-

ferent stories to accompany the map. We used many different sourc-

es to collect the necessary data for the map. Most of the material we

collected needed manual and non-manual refining, analyses and fur-

ther research to ensure the quality of data. We worked intensively for

two weeks with this process, and the developer and graphic design-

er worked one more week with visualizing data at the map, while two

journalists simultaneously worked with additional research for articles.

All in all the team worked approximately three weeks with the project

“the soil is toxic”.

All articles, map and graphic elements is gathered at the theme-site:

http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/tema/jordforurening/forside.htm

What did we do

Expensive poison grounds Nature grounds V1 & V2 Google map


The first iteration of the map included all reg-

istered areas that are classified by the author-

ities as either contaminated or ‘likely contam-

inated’. The areas are shared to the public in

the form of shapefiles; a mostly open file-for-

mat for storing geo-information.

The files were converted to KML, another

file-format used by Google products, and

imported into both a database for further da-

ta-analysis and into Google Fusion Tables for

visualization. We had to write our own pro-

gram for the import into the database. In the

database we could do queries with other ar-

eas and points like positions of schools, day-

care-centers etcetera.

Within Google Fusion Tables we merged the

areas with additional information for each

area: We had gotten extended information on

First map: The 29.000 toxic areas in DKthe contaminated areas by the use of several

requests to the authorities using the Freedom

of Information Act.

Finally we added all the information on an

interactive google-map, where users could

zoom, pan and click on areas to get the extra

information. We made a big effort to make the

map work on mobile devices and altered sev-

eral UI-elements to accomplish this.

Second iteration was focused on the most contaminated and expensive areas. Data was

gathered from multiple sources and enriched by several more requests to the authorities.

The extra data was put on the map as icons using the Google Map API. To find the center

of each area we had to construct a query in the database that could give us the exact point.

Each of these icons reveals detailed information of plans and costs in the past and future.

Second map: The largest toxic areas in DK


The last iteration was adding Natura 2000

areas. Natura 2000 is a collection of several

special nature types that are designated as

needing special conservation and protection.

A shapefile from the European Environment

Agency holding all Natura 2000 areas in Eu-

rope was converted to KML and parsed by

another program we created to hold only the

Danish areas: this shrank the KML file from

1.800MB to 6MB. These were imported into

both database and Google Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables could then display the

Natura 2000 areas on our map, but we want-

ed to do more: In the database we construct-

ed a query that returned all contaminated and

“likely contaminated” areas that overlapped

the Natura 2000 areas.

We marked the 1.309 overlapping areas with

an icon on the map for users to easily see the

scope of the problem.

Third map: The nature and the toxic soil

OutputThe web-page dr.dk is a news-site, which

up until recently depended a lot on tele-

vision and radio to feed the web. The site

dr.dk is now under transformation. The

news are now also written by dedicated

journalists, that love breaking news and

make a huge effort every day to bring the

latest news first to our many readers.

The Data Team has another goal. The team

is tasked to do investigative journalism and

daily datajournalism, where our articles bring

forward new insight and/or facts that was un-

known.

Our own output: 20 articles, a theme-web-

page, info graphics and the map (in three dif-

ferent levels).

The toxic soil-project ended up being a small

showcase for DR. During the week the theme

was published we cooperated with editors

and journalists from other divisions of DR,

breaking stories in the nationwide evening

news several times as well as in local news,

morning news and the radio every morning

all week. Other Medias also picked up on the

map and the stories. But the best result was

that the readers apparently found the stories

and the map very interesting.

More than 120.000 readers checked the map

out in the first days after it was published,

making it the third most read story on DR.dk

this fall.

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Contact:Katrine Birkedal Frich

Undersøgende Databaseredaktør, DR Nyheder

DR

DR Byen

Emil Holms Kanal 20, opg. 6-2

DK-0999 København C

T +45 3520 3040

D +45 2167 8557

[email protected]

www.dr.dk

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Contribution from DR Data Team III