Editors of SPIEGEL ONLINE have won three prizes for their interactive and visual journalism. Two of the award-winning articles critically question how mobility is developing in Germany - and show what that means for the readers personally.
Thus, the dpa news agency honors the project "The Commuter Republic" with the first place of the dpa infographics award 2018 in the category of informative infographics : Never before have there been so many commuters in Germany as today. Data journalists from SPIEGEL ONLINE took this as an opportunity to make the phenomenon of commuting visually and personally tangible: How many people commute the same route as me? Where do other professionals from my town commute?
Such questions were answered by the editors Christina Elmer, Marcel Pauly, Patrick Stotz and Achim Tack in a personalized article that responds individually to the input of the users and plays tailor-made graphic elements.
Petra Sammer, member of the jury, called the article "a great demonstration of what an online graphic can do". The team of SPIEGEL ONLINE had worked up the "story behind the graphics" so individually that it developed a high relevance for the viewer.
The dpa awards another prize for a data-journalistic evaluation of SPIEGEL ONLINE on the composition of the Bundestag elected last year. Marcel Pauly and Caroline Wiemann showed in several graphs how Parliament differs from the population in demographic terms. The two journalists thus occupy third place in the special category Demographic Change .
Also awarded was an interactive article about the planned move of the long-distance railway station Altona in Hamburg. The project "Do you need more time to train soon?" The Technology Foundation Berlin and the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam awarded first prize in the Journalism category of the "CityVis 2018" competition . SPIEGEL ONLINE editor Philipp Seibt had analyzed there together with the traffic experts of Targomo, which means the installation of the station for the citizens - and shown that hundreds of thousands of inhabitants afterwards look worse than before.
The CityVis competition honors projects on an international level that visualize developments in cities particularly well. For example, contributions were filed on fatal traffic accidents in Washington DC or cell phone thefts in Sao Paulo.