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)
  • 🔗 @basilesimon on 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.

Read all about it

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.

Read all about it

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.

Read all about it

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.

Read all about it

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:

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