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Empowering Caribbean Journalists: A Data-Driven Hackathon for Disaster Preparedness
Over three days, the Public Media Alliance hosted a hackathon in Barbados, bringing together a dozen media professionals from Barbados, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago. A hackathon is an intensive and collaborative event where participants work creatively over a short time frame to develop or refine products and services.
Held from 19 to 21 May, this hackathon aimed to enhance data journalism skills while fostering the development of community-centered data projects. Journalists worked collaboratively to design a variety of data-driven initiatives focused on disaster risk reduction, with a strong emphasis on addressing local needs.
This initiative forms part of a broader, multi-phase effort aimed at reinforcing the role of public interest journalism in disaster risk reduction and climate resilience. The overall project is supported by the UNESCO Office for the Caribbean and the UNESCO International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC).
The work of the media professionals during the hackathon addressed the increasing and recurring threat of natural disasters in the Caribbean, the disproportionate impact such events have on critical livelihoods and vulnerable populations, and the crucial role the media has or can have in informing, engaging, and safeguarding communities.
There is a recognition of the urgent need to equip journalists with the skills to contribute meaningfully to disaster risk reduction. Data journalism offers powerful tools to translate complex information into accessible formats, strengthening public understanding and even promoting proactive engagement with preparedness strategies.
In this spirit, the hackathon program included design-thinking bootcamps, structured brainstorming sessions, collaborative mapping exercises, methods for measuring impact stories, project development and visualization techniques, and case studies of successful projects from both large and small newsrooms in different countries.
Participants also explored the identification and use of open datasets, storytelling techniques, data analysis using AI tools, legal considerations and freedom of information, and the development of project pitches. Emphasis was placed on fostering collaboration and building practical skills to support impactful, data-driven journalism.
The Caribbean is facing increasing threats from climate-related disasters and we want to emphasize that the need for accessible, accurate, and data-informed journalism is more urgent than ever. Seeing the participants, who represent different countries, backgrounds, and levels of experience, come together to co-create data-driven solutions was a powerful reminder of what is possible when we work collectively.
