Carmen Aguilar García on how she became a journalist at Sky News
By: Niels De Hoog
Tags: Birmingham, Data Driven Journalism, Journalism, Data Journalism, Sky News

Carmen Aguilar García on how she became a journalist at Sky News

Carmen Aguilar García

As the first data journalist at Sky News, Carmen had her work cut out for her — trying to teach her colleagues about the value of data-driven storytelling.

“Many people across the newsroom wanted to work with me from the start, but few really knew how to,” she says.

Carmen ended up making long hours, trying to meet the demands of a newsroom hungry for someone who knew how to crunch the numbers and tell a good story about them.

It’s not like she wasn’t prepared at all. She had spent the previous year learning about data journalism from Paul Bradshaw, a man she describes as “An expert in the field”.

During the course, she says, students were encouraged to follow their own paths. The course provided a broad base of knowledge and tools, which the students could then apply to their own area of interest.

“I chose to focus on data gathering and analysis, but others went deeper into data visualisation.”

Rather than learning about a specific tool or programming language, she said the course is more about learning how to approach a data story. “It’s about the concept and the structure of the data story, and then the ability to look for the tools that you need to complete your story.”

She explains that critical thinking is an important part of this. As is the concept of decomposition, which is best known from computer science. “You tackle a complex problem by breaking it up into smaller chunks and solving each piece individually.”

A dream come true

As part of the course, Carmen applied for a work placement at The Guardian, a place that she admired a lot. She didn’t think that she stood much of a chance when she applied, as English was not her native language.

Her father encouraged her to give it a try anyway, providing some classic parental advice along the way: “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.”

Much to her surprise, she ended up being selected for the placement. The only catch was that she would have to do it in August, right when she was scheduled to finish her major project. Nothing could stop her from going at this point though.

“I slept on a friend’s sofa during those two weeks. I was like: ‘I don’t care. I just have to go there.’”

The good thing about doing the work placement in August, she said, was that she had already acquired a lot of the skills that she would need as a data journalist. She knew how to work with Excel, OpenRefine, R, and Python for example.

At The Guardian, they had just the right project for her. They were doing a survey of about 30 different countries from around the world, and the results would need be processed, cleaned, and analysed. “It was a project for which those skills were super useful,” she said.

Having learned about automation, Carmen quickly realised that there was a structure to the work they were doing. When they received the first samples of the data they would be working with, she got to work setting up a process and writing scripts that would make handling the rest of the data a breeze.

“We would clean the data in OpenRefine, click a button in RStudio — and our analysis would be done.”

Her editor was so happy with her that Carmen was offered an additional four weeks of work — this time as a freelancer instead of an intern. “To be clear, I did switch from my friend’s sofa to an Airbnb,” she said.

A stroke of luck

After her stint at The Guardian, Carmen wasn’t quite sure what to do. Nevertheless, she didn’t sound too concerned when recounting this part of her story:

“This is a very funny story. I was at a friend’s wedding in Spain, and I met this British journalist. He told me he lived in London, and I explained that I lived in Birmingham.”

This journalist, as it turned out, worked for Sky News, and he told Carmen that they were discussing hiring a data journalist.

She didn’t take it too seriously at first: “You know — we’re at a wedding, with wine, beer, and all that”. When he offered to send her the link to the job listing, she accepted, thinking that she would probably never hear from him again.

He did get back to her though, and he also put her in touch with the people responsible for the recruiting process. “It was a bit awkward to be honest,” she said about having to call them and discuss the position.

Just like before, she had low expectations: “This was the first position for a data journalist that Sky was creating, and again, I’m Spanish — not an English native speaker.”

Of course she did end up being hired — which brings us back to the beginning of the story.

“The first six months were horrible. I’m not going to lie about that.”

The challenge

At first she wasn’t sure if she would survive at the job. Because she was the first data journalist at Sky News, she had to arrange all the basics herself. Access to Datawrapper, Flourish — none of it was there yet.

From the beginning, she set out to collaborate with other journalists working in the newsroom. “The good part is that many people wanted to work with me”, she said.

The downside was that she was quickly overloaded with work.

After the European elections she realised that if she was going to survive working for Sky News, she would have to come up with a different strategy: “I didn’t know if I was going to be there for one year, or ten years; so I had to make a change.”

Her goal at that point became teaching the organisation what data journalism really was, and how it could add value to their reporting.

To make this happen, she decided that she would be more selective in the work she would take on. “I needed to be clever in the kind of projects I worked on, because I needed to make an impact,” she said.

“I understood that what the company was looking for mostly, was what they called original journalism”, she added.

Rather than just reporting on some new dataset the government had published, which she said is valuable as well, she needed to find a story which wasn’t being told.

A turning point

A few years ago, there was a resurgence in measles cases in the US. Carmen, together with some of her colleagues, was tasked with reporting this story.

During a meeting, they discussed that they needed to take a wider angle on the story.

“When you enter a room, and you’re just looking for people with red t-shirts, then you don’t see that half of the people in the room is wearing a yellow t-shirt.”

“This is what happened in this story,” she explains. Because they decided to focus on preventable diseases, rather than only measles, she says, they were able to tell a more impactful story.

“We found that one of the big killers was pneumonia — no one was talking about pneumonia.”

Finding the right data to tell this story turned out to be difficult, and it taught her about the importance of being persistent when chasing a story.

The first place she went to look for the data was the World Health Organization (WHO). Initially, she was able to find the data, but it prompted more questions than it answered. She quickly understood that in order to get a grasp on the issue, she would need help from an expert.

She tried contacting WHO staff, but after about a month of trying to get in touch with the right person, she started to despair: “The clock was ticking, and I wasn’t making any progress.”

The much needed breakthrough came when she contacted someone at the GAVI Alliance, a global public health partnership focused on immunisation, who pointed her to the right person to talk to at the WHO.

Eventually, with help from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, she was able to tell a story about the large number of preventable deaths that occur each day.

Publishing this story was a turning point for Carmen in her career at Sky News. The article garnered at lot of attention, and it helped her assert that data journalism was a specialism that needed to be taken seriously within the organisation. As a result, she is no longer the only person at Sky who works on data stories.

What’s next?

Drawing from experiences like writing the story about preventable diseases, Carmen says that she would like to spend more time doing investigative journalism: “I think data journalism gives you very good skills and techniques for developing investigative stories.”

“At some point I would like to go back to Spain — you know, there’s sun there,” she adds.

For students doing the MA Data Journalism course that she once did, she offers a piece of advice: “Take on challenges. Go outside your comfort zone. When you’re in the industry, you won’t have the time.”