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.
Selected projects/stories
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.
General election 2019 results
Conception and design of the page and of the back-end interfacing with the results' provider. The whole page is modular and can be re-built in various ways by the clients.
Global Witness' "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. One of my largest Svelte.js projects.
The Brexit challenge of the next PM
A data-driven experiment looking at how Brexit splits the Tories. Don't miss the even-nerdier, machine learning-driven complement.
Iran's commitments under threat
Long-term monitoring of Iran's nuclear commitments, including their often misunderstood space race efforts. Automation of the parsing of the nuclear agency's reports.
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.
Brexit's Super Saturday
Quick turnaround (one afternoon) of a summary ahead of an extraordinary parliamentary session, building on visualisation templates we established.
Poorer constituencies favoured Five Star
An election results analysis of socio-economic factors that may have swung the Italian vote in 2018. Modelled in R, prepared ahead of time, and published the following day, on deadline.
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
- noaastorms, an R package to download, parse and clean historical storms data from the NOAA
- twitter-tools, a Python toolkit to monitor deleted tweets, automate screenshoting, and archiving
- d3-grid, a fork in d3v4 of the beloved d3-grid
- The Times' dataviz catalogue, a public resource of data viz code and designs
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**
Talks & awards
Society for News Design, Awards of Excellence 2019
Kantar Information is Beautiful 2019, long list for:
- The Brexit Rift Splitting the Conservative Party, which you’ve read about above
- Not Far Ahead, a funny viz of the Tour de France’s finishing times
- Reading the Brexit Tea Leaves, a project for which I did some exploratory data analysis and modelling
Talks, books
- “Working with data in the newsroom”, 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 London
- “Airwars - strike by strike” - Dataharvest 2016, Brussels and 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 Journalisme 2014, France
Hackathons
- “Greatest Impact and Distruption” and “Best Diffusion” awards for tinyfm - Al Jazeera Canvas Media in Context, Doha, Qatar
- Winner with Le 6 Mai 2012 and Pancarte.js - Popathon, Mozilla Paris, France
- Participated in Tribeca Hacks Story Matter - CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
- Failed to do something worth mentioning at many others