Brazil is going through generalized crises. The political and economic crises are aggravated by collapses in public services, just as the greatest corruption scandals in the history of the country are coming to light. There are so many accusations, involving such enormous sums of money, that readers fail to grasp the magnitude of what they represent. Therefore, we created “From Real to Reality – The Corruption Converter”. The tool allows users to convert the figures reported in news articles involving corruption into public goods and services that people always need but don’t always receive. This established a connection between the news about money that went missing to the news about where it is sorely needed.

The tool would read the news pieces on the online newspaper, storing those articles that had corruptions numbers in its database. On all articles tagged, the monetary figures were highlighted; when the user moused over them, a tooltip would appear onscreen with our converter. The user would then choose a public good or service for the conversion: H1N1 vaccines, ambulances, school lunches, subway miles, etc. By clicking on “convert” the user would then be redirected to a page showing the result of how many of that good or service could be purchased with the amount shown, in addition to data visualization and news related to each of the social issues covered.

Reach (website traffic)

40% increase in number of visitors

68% increase in number of visits

Engagement (content interaction)

352,993 unique visitors/month

1,445,486 interactions/month

Content sharing:

14,455 shares on Facebook

43,356 shares on Twitter

7,227 shares on LinkedIn

Total shares: 65,047/months

The idea seeks to make the website more dynamic and extend the analyses of the news pieces by cross-referencing data from old and recent articles. This way, the news published daily also created traffic for the archive articles, keeping the reader longer on the website and increasing page views.

Estadão, one of Brazil’s most important newspapers, founded 141 years ago, needed to transfer to its digital version the credibility commanded by its print version. At the same time, it needed to incorporate more technology and make the analyses published online more interactive, thereby bringing more readers to its online portal and driving up the number of advertisers.