Aurora Magazine

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Dawn.com shortlisted for Data Journalism Awards 2016

Published 12 May, 2016 04:38pm
The website has been nominated for its feature, "#144 Stories – Remembering lives lost in the Peshawar school attack".

Dawn.com is among 63 entries shortlisted from 471, in this year’s Data Journalism Awards presented by the Global Editors Network, supported by Google News Lab and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Nominated for #144 Stories – Remembering lives lost in the Peshawar school attack, Dawn.com is contending in the Data Visualisation of the Year (Large Newsroom) category.

According to Jahanzaib Haque, Chief Digital Strategist & Editor, Dawn.com, the virtual memorial was intended to mark the one-year anniversary of the 2014 attack on the Army Public School, Peshawar, during which 144 students, teachers, and staff lost their lives.

Haque explains that two DawnNews reporters spent six months meeting the families of the deceased to collect their stories. The stories and accompanying photographs were then uploaded into an interactive feature which took a month to build. He adds that the feature’s simple, interactive format was intentionally designed to be easy to access, easy to load, and easy to share.

Haque says the team developing the project felt it was necessary to bring the human element of the tragedy to the fore and it was not meant to merely report on the events but rather to enable people to get to know the people whose lives were cut short.

The Data Journalism Awards, now in their fifth year, are divided into 10 categories. Competing in the same category as Dawn.com are nine other websites including The Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed News, AJ+ *and Bloomberg Graphics.*

Winners of each category will be announced at the DAJ 2016 Ceremony in Vienna, Austria, on June 16th 2016.