Prosecutor Nisman Phone Interceptions Mapped in Playlists

About the Project

The journalism behind this project includes:

• A terrorist attack in the argentine jewish association, AMIA, 1994
• Hidden negotiations between former argentine President, Cristina Kirchner and the Government of Iran, to guarantee the innocence of the iranian accused in exchange of restoring commercial relationships
• Alberto Nisman, a Federal Prosecutor investigating the AMIA attack was found dead 3 days after accusing the President Cristina Kirchner of covering up Iran and hours before sustaining his arguments in the National Congress.
• A 2 year crowdsourcing effort to listen + 40.000 phone interceptions used by Nisman as main evidence of his investigation. The creation of a database from scratch with the 200 most important and relevant audios. The publication of those recordings in a interactive visualization.
• Recently, the judge Claudio Bonadio ordered that Cristina Kirchner should be held with preemptive prison, but her post as a Senator provides her with congressional immunity. It will be up to the senators to vote in favour of stripping her privileges.

The uniqueness and originality of voice

The news application includes 200 audios tapped from the direct suspects and related actors phone conversations. The audience will be able to follow the character’s stories told in first person by them. You don’t nead a transcription, you just need to follow the different plots by listening to their own storytelling and references.

Overall production quality

Design, interactivity and related information of each character, theme and location offers an oustanding user experience for our audience.

Innovative use of storytelling techniques

The app has Spotify style playlists to listen and navigate by person, by subjetc or location. When a new event occurs during the court investigations, the app allows to select a special playlist to embed in lanacion.com’s article. (E.G. One suspect visit courts to defend himself, there is an article referring to that event, and we embed the playlist related to that person)

Creativity being brought to bear to tell stories that are truly of digital and mobile platforms

The main power of the investigative project is digital.

Online interactivity is the king of our project. You can choose your area of interest to explore and listen to the specific playlist. You can turn on speakers, or put on headphones or be running or driving while listening to a selected playlist that will play one audio after the other in a chronological order unless the user decides to skip files or fastfoward to a highlighted audiowave.

We transformed a valuable and extensive journalistic investigation into a interactive audio digital storytelling regarding a subject that created a huge public controversy and disputes in the argentine society.

The main evidence that Nisman collected to support his accusation were 40,354 recordings from a tapped phone owned by an Iranian agent in Buenos Aires.

The investigation involved a closed network of 120 volunteers that helped us with the hearing and classification of the 986 hours of audio.