In the past The Costa Rica Star has reported on how La Nacion is getting better at information visualization.

Last year, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, who served as president from 1998-2002, was sentenced to five years in prison for accepting bribes from French telecom giant Alcatel; two years before Rafael Angel Calderon was jailed for embezzling funds from a Finnish loan intended for medical equipment for public hospitals.

These are just two of many criminal cases brought following probes by the investigative unit at La Nación, Giannina Segnini, who heads the unit told Journalism.co.uk, with past and present criminal cases relating not only to Costa Rica, but also to the UK, the US, France, Finland and “many other countries”.

Segnini has been leading the investigative unit since 1994. “At the beginning it was literally a unit, composed of only me,” she said, later expanding to a team of three journalists focusing purely on in-depth investigations.

Investigating corruption is not the purpose of the unit, Segnini pointed out. “We are not a prosecutor’s office,” she said, but what her team does do is uncover hard evidence, such as bank transfers and documents.

“We have been doing these types of investigation on a regular basis. Two years ago we started an experiment that combined the investigative methods that we have been using for years with the power of data and and database analysis.”

The team started scraping websites and collating databases of public data, adding two developers to work with the three journalists.

“The good thing about this is that if you combine those two worlds, the outcome is very powerful. Not only can you actually prove facts, but also … you are not relying on a source,” Segnini added. “When you work with data you can also have access to the whole universe of information; if you are dependent on a source that’s difficult to achieve.”

Please go to Journalism.co.uk to continue reading this very detailed and thought provoking article.