Who makes it
Unmapped News is made by Unmapped Dataworks, an independent Cape Town business that collects South Africa’s official numbers (fuel prices in every zone, municipal electricity tariffs, minimum wages, dam levels, tap water quality, toll fees and more), each one checked against the official document it comes from, and open satellite and weather data for rain, drought and the land, marked as such.
A lot of the work is automated. Code builds and checks the datasets and works out every number in a story. AI helps draft the scripts and articles, and voices the films. Every story is checked against the data and approved before anything is published. Because the slow, error-prone parts, like retyping figures from PDFs and doing the sums, are done by code and checked against the source page, we can cover elections, water and electricity quickly.
When the data shows something people should know, the story goes out as a short film on TikTok and here, with the full numbers and sources.
How a story is made
- The data. A dataset is built from official sources (the IEC, NERSA, the Department of Water and Sanitation, the Reserve Bank, the Government Gazette), and every figure in it is checked against the page it’s printed on.
- The numbers. A story’s numbers are worked out by code from that data, never typed in. Checks in the code stop a story if the data no longer supports a sentence.
- The film and the story. Scripts and articles are drafted with the help of AI from those numbers, then read, checked and approved by a person before anything is published.
- The record. A published story is frozen with the exact data releases it used, so it never changes quietly when the data updates. Changes are made as dated corrections.
Get in touch
Tips, questions and corrections: hello@unmapped.co.za. Follow the films on TikTok, or the stories by RSS. Or get them by email: the Unmapped News newsletter.