Trained in web development during my studies and early career (PHP, MySQL, ActionScript, JavaScript, OOP…), I’ve spent the past few years putting those skills to use 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.
