Trained in various programming languages during my studies and early career (PHP, Flash/ActionScript, JavaScript, object-oriented programming), I’ve spent the past few years putting those skills to work in investigative journalism.
On certain stories, code makes it possible to change scale: collecting thousands — even millions — of data points, sorting them, and drawing out what matters.
These days I mostly write in Python.
Here are a few investigations made possible by automation scripts:
1. The RSF investigation into pluralism on France’s rolling news channels — A tool that captured these channels’ on-screen chyrons around the clock. By analysing hundreds of thousands of them, we proved with data that CNews was straying from pluralism rules.
2. Strava Leaks (Le Monde) — Scripts monitoring thousands of profiles allowed us, among other things, to identify President Emmanuel Macron’s bodyguards and to locate the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.
