Pro Intelligence

A novel digital platform for customizable analysis of political, policy and legislative data

Dr James Randerson Karl Bjelland Karl Roos Managing editor Product Lead Director Technology POLITICO POLITICO Development , Belgium Brussels, Belgium POLITICO [email protected] [email protected] Brussels, Belgium [email protected]

ABSTRACT 1 Introduction to POLITICO POLITICO Europe has created a powerful POLITICO Europe (a joint venture established platform at the intersection of technology and in 2015 between POLITICO in the US and journalism which allows subscribers to search, German publisher Axel Springer) is a primarily track and understand legislative developments digital news organization, focusing on across different EU institutions. From pre- European politics. It has a significant legislative and consultation phase to critical emphasis on the policy-making and regulatory votes, amendments and more, the Pro activity of the institutions of the European Intelligence platform provides subscribers with Union. Headquartered in Brussels, it has bespoke information that is integrated with offices in London, Berlin and Paris, and a POLITICO’s specialist policy journalism. It network of stringers across Europe. The does this by offering editorial content, data and company’s more than 160 staff includes 70 digital tools integrated in one place. That journalists of 22 different nationalities. allows the user to create a customizable window into the topic or policy area they are POLITICO’s business model relies heavily on engaged with. Pro Intelligence is also useful its high-end Pro subscription services which for POLITICO’s journalists as a tool for provide specialist policy news in a handful of researching stories, visualizing trends and niche verticals including technology, financial gaining insights on legislators and legislation. services, trade and health care. Subscribers — often but not exclusively working in CCS CONCEPTS government affairs — rely on our coverage to Information systems → Information retrieval provide them with actionable intelligence on → Document representation; Human- EU legislative and policy developments, as centered computing → Visualization → well as at the level of national Visualization techniques; governments/legislatures. Information systems → World Wide Web → Web mining → Data extraction and integration 2 Pro Intelligence → Surfacing In 2018, POLITICO Europe began developing Pro Intelligence, an online platform to KEYWORDS complement our specialist Pro news offering, Legislative tracking; data visualization; politics; that combines journalistic content with data in policy; ; audience engagement; a single platform. It allows subscribers to subscription. search, track and analyze legislative developments across EU institutions as well ACM Reference Format: James Randerson, as national legislatures in the U.K., U.S., Karl Bjelland and Karl Roos 2020. POLITICO France and Germany. By combining data, Pro Intelligence: A novel digital platform for editorial content and digital tools in one place, customizable analysis of political, policy and the platform provides a powerful, customizable legislative data. Computation + Journalism experience that allows users to extract 2020. bespoke information on relevant policy developments in real time.

We scrape more than 1 million pages on sites Intelligence flips the traditional “legislative connected with the EU and national tracking” model. The platform gives users the legislatures each day, programmatically tools to work in the way they want to, reading, extracting, and organizing relevant circumventing traditional means of intelligence information in the Pro Intelligence platform. gathering and providing slices of exactly what they want to receive. We think the greatest value for the user is in being able to combine smooth access to It also rethinks the received idea that political relevant data with journalistic analysis. And data is confined to election time and ongoing though the concept of integrated news and polling of voters’ attitudes. Approaching data is not new (think Bloomberg, WSJ, etc.), legislation and legislators as individual entities it has not been done at this scale in the field of producing information opens vast opportunities political/policy journalism. to interpret legislative data in new ways (through aggregation, natural language Other services (Dods, Issue tracker, processing etc.) and provide new insights to consultancies etc.) provide clients with a feed users. of relevant policy information, but Pro

The aim is to provide value to users that is more than the sum of the editorial content and • People — currently serving (and legislative data combined. Automatically historic where available) legislators, surfacing the right data, directly within editorial MEPs, and MPs from legislatures content at the right moments, keeps users included within Pro Intelligence, engaged longer and deeper in one place — scraping EU Who is Who. making POLITICO their one-stop-shop for policy insight. • Committees — legislative committees, including membership, schedule, and In addition, automatically connecting editorial current business from legislatures with other content types (like legislation, included within Pro Intelligence. cases, and people profiles) extends the “shelf life” of our news and analysis. • Activities — parliamentary questions and speeches from MEPs, translated and fully searchable. 2.1 Information types Pro Intelligence combines and organizes many • Transcripts — transcripts from the UK sources. Users can access and search across Parliament House of Commons and ten distinct, but connected information types, House of Lords, fully searchable. all in the same interface. • Press Releases — press releases • Procedures/Bills — proposed issued by the , legislation from legislatures included , Council of the within Pro Intelligence. , select EU Agencies, as well as press releases from U.K. • Initiatives/Consultations — pre- government departments and legislative stakeholder consultations agencies. for feedback from the European Commission. • Tweets — tweets and retweets from legislators included within Pro • Cases — European Court of Justice Intelligence, supplemented by a and European General Court cases, selection of Twitter accounts ranging as well as European Commission from agencies, journalists, institutions, Competition cases, including access and other stakeholders. to all related case documents, events, and press releases. • News — POLITICO Pro news within The platform also provides a convenient way Pro policy areas and free news. to track and quantify the rise in importance of key topics in legislative discussions as well as 3 Journalistic use cases to analyze and understand the links between POLITICO’s journalists use Pro Intelligence to parties and individual legislators. follow newsworthy legislative files, cases, keywords, companies and people. Pro Intelligence also offers tools to visualize Automatically alerting the newsroom to the result of votes in the European Parliament changes in job status among high-ranking and other legislatures. By cutting the vote officials within the EU institutions, for example, results using different criteria, the platform can has provided personnel information useful to show at a glance how different national subscribers. cohorts of MEPs and different party grouping cast their ballots.

Visualization of the voting patterns of the Greens-European Free Alliance political group on copyright legislation in 2018.

Comparison of two votes in the UK parliament: the first in 2017 on whether to begin the process. The second in 2019 on the deal struck with Prime Minister Theresa may with the European Union.

4 Future plans ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Following a recently-completed redesign of Pro Intelligence is a collaboration between Pro Intelligence to improve the user many people in POLITICO’s product, business experience and better integrate POLITICO’s and editorial departments. Particular thanks to editorial content, we are working to add more Etienne Bauvir, Gilhean Slater, Lucie sources and to improve connections between Volquartz, Dhanashri Dehadraya, Nemos content types. We also hope to add more tools Thorpe, Stephen Brown and Shéhérazade to help users interpret and understand the Semsar-de Boisséson. data.