How Denník Postoj uses Gemini to unlock data journalism
Denník Postoj, a conservative daily from Slovakia, came to the lab represented by Michal Šimonik and Juraj Brezani. Their takeaway from the kickoff was philosophical but practical: "New technologies bring new questions - and new opportunities". One of the biggest opportunities for modern newsrooms is data, but often the technical skills required to access it are missing.
The Challenge: The "Code Barrier" Journalism is increasingly hidden inside spreadsheets and databases. A government might release a dataset on public spending, but it is often messy, formatted incorrectly, or too large for Excel to handle.
The Skill Gap: Most reporters are wordsmiths, not Python programmers.
The Bottleneck: Waiting for a data scientist (if the newsroom even has one) to clean a file can delay a breaking story by days.
The Fear: Journalists often avoid data stories because they are afraid of making a calculation error.
The Solution: Gemini as the "Junior Data Scientist" Denník Postoj is exploring how Gemini can serve as a technical bridge. It allows a reporter with zero coding knowledge to analyze data simply by asking for help in plain Slovak or English.
The Workflow:
The Input: A journalist finds a messy government CSV file where names and addresses are combined in one cell, making it impossible to filter by city.
The Prompt: "I have a dataset with a column 'Full_Info' that looks like 'Name, Address, City'. Write a simple Python script (or an Excel formula) to split this into three separate columns. Explain how to run it like I am 5 years old."
The Analysis: Once the data is clean, they ask Gemini: "Look at this data table. What are the outliers? Which city appears most frequently?"
The Outcome: Data Autonomy This removes the "fear factor" from data journalism. It empowers reporters to interrogate databases with the same confidence they interrogate politicians.
Capability: Transforms text-focused reporters into data-capable investigators.
Speed: Solves formatting headaches in seconds rather than hours of manual copy-pasting.
Insight: Helps the team find the "story" hidden in the numbers, fulfilling their mission to explore the "potential of AI-powered tools".