I am a graphics-, coder- and data-journalist based in Berlin.
Update Aug 2021: I am looking for freelance/contract work from January 2022 onwards!
📬 Contact
- ✉️
basile-at-basilesimon-dot-fr🔐 PGP - 📞
+49 172 253 9671(Signal/Telegram) - 🔗
@basilesimonon some social platforms
👔 Past employment
My journalism career started in the UK, where I worked for large broadcasters, newspapers, and agencies.
- Graphics editor, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Reuters
- Senior interactive journalist, The Times and The Sunday Times
- Newsroom developer, The Times and the Sunday Times
- Coder-journalist, BBC News Labs
I also co-founded Airwars, a non-profit monitoring organisation exposing the harm done to civilians by air conflicts.
Portfolio
For Prototype Fund:
The Digital Evidence Toolkit
Public/private 50,000€ grant for the research and development of proof-of-concept techniques highlighting the uncertain legal framework of digital evidence admissibility.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Typescript
Svelte
Grant
For Global Witness:
The “Pipedown” map
A short contract bringing to life the dataset on which GW’s campaign was based, modular once again, and published both from the CMS and as a standalone.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Visualisation
Cartography
D3
Svelte
NGO
For Reuters:
Brexit through machine learning
A data-driven experiment looking at how Brexit splits the Tories. Don’t miss the even-nerdier, machine learning-driven complement.
🔗 See the piece
👉 Read all about it
Visualisation
R
Data modelling
Scraping
For The Times & Sunday Times:
90% of all British crimes are unsolved
Collaboration with the Data team to bring this multi-week exclusive analysis of police data to life in just over two days.
Visualisation
D3
React
For Christmas:
Pen plotter maps
Pen-plotted bicycle journeys on postcards, from a minimal implementation of GPX in R.
Visualisation
R
Pen plotter
Open source work
Fortunately I was able to open-source some of the work I have done:
deptoolkit
An archiving software demonstrating chain of custody based on an immutable ledger
on github
twitter-tools
A Python toolkit to monitor deleted tweets, automate screenshoting, and archiving
on github
The Times' Dataviz catalogue
A public resource of data viz code and designs, a la Storybook/ FT Visual Vocabulary
on github🎓 Academic work
I had the privilege of teaching the Advanced Data and Coding module on the MA in Interactive Journalism course at City University. We ran through an introduction to programming, statistical methods, R data analysis and modelling with ggplot.
All my teaching notes are available on Github.
I have done some studying myself:
- Master of Arts in Multimedia Journalism - Univ. of Westminster (UK)
- Masters in Political Science and Sociology - High European Studies Institute (France)
- BA Private Law, minor Political Science - Univ. Lyon III (France)
🏅 Awards
Award of Excellence, 2019, Society of News Design
- The Brexit Rift Splitting the Conservative Party
- Not Far Ahead
Long list, 2019, Kantar Information is Beautiful
- Reading the Brexit Tea Leaves
- The Brexit Rift Splitting the Conservative Party
- Not Far Ahead
🎙 Talks and publications
- “Working with data in the newsroom”
in The Data Journalism Handbook (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) - “Career paths for news nerds (or lack of them)”
International Journalism Festival 2018, Perugia - “Airwars.org: a field report,two years on”
Hacks/Hackers Berlin 2017 - “Airwars: strike by strike”
Dataharvest 2016, Brussels + Hacks/Hackers Berlin - “Hackers trying to stay relevant: linked data and structured journalism at the BBC”
csv,conf,v2 2016, Berlin - “Passion > compensation”
Sud Web 2016, France - “Hacking the newsroom”
International Journalism Festival 2016, Perugia - “BBC News Labs, Linked Data, Datastringer: the Hacks and Hackers paradigm”
Computation + Journalism Symposium 2014, New York City - “Algorithms in Journalism: danger or opportunity?”
Assises du Journalism 2014, France