News 24*7

Ingelmo: "Clients don't want to wait three hours for a graphic." Manuel Benito Ingelmo has blended his knowledge of data, technology, and journalism to establish a news service with some of the biggest media in Spain as his clients. His data-visualization service, Porcentual.es , just finished its most successful year, and Ingelmo continues to innovate and improve his products. He and a team of two programmers have developed software that pulls data from public databases and produces graphics in minutes for media organizations to embed in their web pages. They can also customize the data geographically so that a newspaper in the city of Seville, for example, can get the latest unemployment figures for its area. "We're very fast," Ingelmo says. "Speed matters. Our clients don't want to wait three hours for a graphic. They want it right now," he told me recently in a Skype interview from his home in Vitoria, northern Spain. Read more �

Getting laid off is not always a bad thing for a journalist. In the case of Manuel Benito Ingelmo, it created an opportunity for him to develop something he had been thinking about for a long time. Manuel Benito Ingelmo. Photo by Villanueva.edu He was a business journalist in Salamanca, Spain, with an interest in statistics and data visualization . He felt that print newspapers were definitely on the way out, he told me in an interview via Skype. "I wanted to make the jump to a digital publication but I did not want to do the same thing as we were doing on paper." Versi�n en espa�ol So when he was laid off from a small daily in 2012, he took his severance package and began to experiment with how to take advantage of the strengths of digital media -- interactivity, instantaneous publication, potential massive audience -- to create a journalistic product or service that would build on databases that were already available. He and a handful of partners started out by giving aw...