23/ Greenland Untapped, Blender GIS, White House Creator Passes
Visual journalism tools and insights from November and December.
Welcome to the 23rd issue of Nuanced,
The media bias in the US and in Europe is making the role of journalists even harder, trust is at an all-time low (and in some cases for good reason) in times where we need independent investigative journalism more than ever.
A majority of people are now getting their news from social media and video platforms, which is why I think the transition of influence to creator-journalists who publish content directly on these platforms in inevitable.
Trump’s promise to create White House credentials for creators underlines the seismic shift. Recognizing the change, I think there are many opportunities for new forms of participative journalism, where audiences interact with their favourite news publishers.
Here’s a short reel of my work for the past two years!
Buried Signals
Why is Trump's Greenland purchase plan back in the headlines? After China’s export ban to the US the West is in a supply crisis for the minerals that power our world. Greenland holds 10% of global rare earth deposits.
The first episode of Buried Signals, Greenland Untapped: Breaking China’s Mineral Monopoly, breaks down:
Why rare earth minerals matter for tech and defense
How China controls the market
What's stopping Greenland from becoming a major supplier
Why Western governments might need to step in
Inspiration
My favourite visual story this month was “We’ve become addicted to explosions” by Bellingcat. Thrilled to see the outfit begin using visuals in their powerful investigations.
And I’ll post it again because the Dataviz project by Ferdio has been a wonderful source of inspiration for my graphics over the past few weeks.
Decoded
Earlier this month I worked with a combination of railway datasets to calculate the proportion of Swiss residents who live within 3km of a train station, and visualised the density in 3D using Blender GIS. Still missing some stations to get to a final answer!
Full thread and behind the scenes here.
I’m looking to interview an expert in satellite image sensing for journalism, if you have recommendations I’d be thrilled to hear them!
Useful tools
These are the tools I’ve been grateful for the past two months:
RYBitten for dataviz colour palettes
Ground News has become my go-to news resource
Blender GIS, or moments where I love the open internet
The history function on Google Earth and Maps…
I'm open for collaborations with investigative journalists, if you need your data visualised and want to work with me on a video please reach out.
Thanks for reading!