El Comercio wins SIP award for data project mapping Peru’s congressional hopefuls
Cartoon · AI-generated
The award-winning interactive project profiles 89 candidates seeking re-election and uses automated workflows to connect fragmented public records.
El Comercio has been honoured with the Inter-American Press Association’s 2026 Journalism Excellence Award in the data journalism category for "Radiografía del poder", an interactive project designed to help readers understand Peru’s 2026 election landscape. The award was presented in Bogotá, Colombia, during the SIP’s 82nd General Assembly, with Ángela Peña, coordinator of the Media Lab’s New Narratives area, accepting the recognition on behalf of the team.
According to the SIP’s awards committee, the project stood out for its meticulous use of sources and its detailed profile of 89 congressional candidates seeking re-election. Beyond political careers, the coverage brought together information on family background, income, spending, debts, assets and education, creating a broader portrait of the people competing for seats in Congress.
The work also drew attention for the way it applied automated workflows to investigative reporting and accountability journalism, a method still relatively uncommon in Latin American newsrooms. Developed from an early prototype supported by AI Catalyst, a programme backed by WAN-IFRA and OpenAI, the project was designed to save time on routine tasks and free journalists to focus more heavily on analysis, cross-checking and verification. Its interactive format allows readers to trace links across public databases that are otherwise scattered and difficult to navigate.
El Comercio said the team behind the project included Gisella Salmón, Lorena Obregón, Mayté Ciriaco, Héctor Villalobos, Armando Scargglioni, Ángela Peña, Marcelo Hidalgo and Kiomy Kanashiro. The recognition also extends a run of success for the newspaper at the SIP awards, after it was similarly honoured in 2025 for "Muerte en la plaza San Martín", a chronicle by editorial director Juan Aurelio Arévalo Miró Quesada that revisited the 1935 killing of Antonio Miró Quesada de la Guerra and his wife, María Laos.
Inspired by headline at: [1]
Sources by paragraph: - Paragraph 1: [2], [3], [5] - Paragraph 2: [2], [3] - Paragraph 3: [2], [5] - Paragraph 4: [2], [4]
Source: Noah Wire Services · Original