A tree map created for Business Daily by Daniel Cheseret.

This post is cross-posted from the Internews Kenya blog

Business Daily’s NSSF deduction calculator.

To call it a wind of change would probably be puffery, but a slow breeze is blowing through newsrooms in Kenya, increasing the interest in data journalism and the demand for news applications.

Kenyan media houses have in the past couple of years enjoyed several collaborative project aimed at promoting data journalism and encouraging innovative use of online platforms such as Code for Kenya and data journalism trainings and fellowships offered by Internews in Kenya

But up until now however, only a few journalists have shown interest in data journalism and the media houses themselves have not developed news applications of their own – on their own.

But lately Business Daily, a weekly magazine published by the Nation Media Group, has moved into the new frontier – publishing both a news application and an interactive chart on their website within a week.

In preparation of the 2014-15 budget reading, Business Daily commissioned developer Daniel Cheseret to make them an interactive chart showing the breakdown of the budget. Cheseret was a 2013 Internews data journalism fellow, wasted no time and as the budget went public the magazine could showcase a beautiful tree map on their website.

“The online desk’s interest in data journalism is growing, I’m currently working on another project for them that will be published soon” says Cheseret.

Recently he also built a news application for the magazine, where the readers can calculate how much of their monthly salary will go to The National Social Security Fund as the scheme for the deductions will change in the upcoming four years.

Kenyan journalists and developers at large are also showing more enthusiasm for data journalism. When Data Driven Journalism recently offered an MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in data journalism more than a hundred Kenyans signed up for the class. Internews in Kenya was one of the local learning groups during the course.