TwentyTen Daily is celebrating its first anniversary, a milestone marked by many exciting moments with its own fair share of highs and lows. Over the past one year, with its team made up of journalists, data visualization experts and media innovators.
It has extensively published in-depth data driven stories and reports under a wide range of verticals including such as Featured Reports, Black box, Investigations, Health, Criminal Justice, Business, Economy, politics and more.
TwentyTen Daily is an independent news media organization and data platform improving access to data for actionable decisions through the promotion of African data journalism, augmented reporting, and the development of digital products powered by data, all with an end goal of spurring real world impact, setting the pace for media innovation in Africa.
‘TwentyTen Daily’ as the name signifies was founded after the EndSars protests of October 10, 2020 which was marred by gross misinformation and proliferation of fake news, to draw more attention to actuality and credibility.
The protests inspired the founders to research media innovations that can mitigate the detrimental effect of media manipulation around the #EndSARS protests and then Twenty Ten daily was born. TwentyTen Daily is not your regular news publication, it delves below headlines to explore hard numbers, using research, and statistical analysis to tell compelling and factual stories.
It also features outputs such as beautiful, interactive data visualizations that present key data points that embolden a hard-hitting story.
TwentyTen Daily produces special reports which feature hard hitting investigations, storytelling, fact checking and data visualisations. It also has a bias for investigative stories, a vertical created to support community driven journalism. In March 2021, the publication sponsored the Orodata Science Micro Grants for Data Driven Investigative Journalism to support community reporters to cover issues in underserved communities, issues that are important to them.
TwentyTen Daily committed funds in form of grants to support journalists to report solution stories on issues in their communities and is planning to double down on this effort in 2022.
Some of the stories supported by the grants are ‘Living On The Fringe: Sad, Sorry world Of Sokoto’s Almajirai’, ‘How Poor Funding For Research, Low Technology Contributed To Lack Of Local Covid-19 Vaccine Production’, ‘Levelling The Field: Improving Opportunities For Women Farmers In Nigeria’, and more.‘Black Box’ is the interactive vertical of the website for multimedia storytelling, it covers explainer videos and reports highlighting under-reported issues such as ‘Nigeria’s Second Class Athletes’ which features the continual challenges Nigerian Olympians face as a result of government’s incompetence.
Under the Health and COVAC vertical, TwentyTen Daily covered the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic without leaving any stone unturned, to mitigate misinformation against the coronavirus.
It focused on shoring up misinformation about the Covid19 Vaccine while providing updates on the vaccine administration efforts in Africa to ensure that resources are properly appropriated and accounted for.
It also tracked donations and contributions by international organisations towards the provision of vaccines to hold governments accountable.
To increase access to informed decisions through access to key information and data on Africa, TwentyTen Daily developed a Dashboard Repository where citizens, private corporations, third sector organizations, policymakers, media, education and research institutions can access data from across Africa via interactive data dashboards. The dashboards cover different sectors including business, economy, politics, education, gender and health amongst others. The dashboards also provide a special spotlight on gender and issues relating to income disparity, women empowerment and more.
Blaise Aboh, the founder of TwentyTen Daily reiterates that; “the platform is all about improving media innovation. It is driven towards transforming the data and news media landscape in Africa.”
“I understand that building a long term value-driven relationship is key, and will do this through more innovation especially on frontier technologies and through beneficial partnerships. Over time, the plan is to create high impact innovative products with a user experience worth engaging and an end-to-end experience of easily accessible high-quality information,” he adds.
TwentyTen Daily has created more ways of breaking down data stories for its audience and sparking conversations around policies, including “Here Is What You Don’t Know This Week,” a weekly newsletter that shares important figures from latest news and provides an incisive data angle to issues arising globally.
The newsletter features data visualisations and infographics that share crucial statistics with its readers.