TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - On July 2nd, Tempo.co’s submission for the Covid-19 APAC Data Challenge 2020 entitled the “Half-hearted Social Restriction” managed to go head-to-head against Singapore’s Stratis Times, and eventually won the challenge.

Prior to the finals, both teams defeated 30 participants of 14 mass-media from six Asia Pacific countries that took part in the Covid-19 Data Training & Challenge 2020 held by WAN-IFRA or the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers on April 27 - May 13.

The team from Tempo.co was represented by Firdhy Esterina (reporter), Syailendra Persada (editor), Krisna Pradipta as the project’s digital producer, Ginanjar Pamungkas (programmer), Ricky Mohammad Nugraha (translator), and Philip Parera (senior editor).

Supported by fact-based data, Tempo’s interactive project provides a general description of the Indonesian government's large-scale social restriction or PSBB to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, which was lauded by the trainer Kuek Ser Kuang Keng, a data journalist and Data-N founder based in Malaysia.

"We are attempting to tell a story through data, coinciding with the training program that I participated with WAN-IFRA," said Firdhy. "The PSBB sits in a unique position between normality and a lockdown."

The 'Half-hearted social restriction' interactive article attempts to reveal the number of cases that have emerged despite the PSBB implementation and the rather acceptable conformity by Indonesian residents. However, the same data also clearly shows that regional governments had decided to relax the social restrictions even though cases have yet dropped.

Read the article here.

FIRDHY ESTERINA CHRISTY