Philipp Bock is an editorial developer at Bergens Tidende in Norway. He builds interactive, data-driven journalism on tight deadlines.
Morten Michelsen was shot and killed by police outside his own front door.
For this investigative project (which was awarded the prestigious Skup award in 2024), I taught myself the entire 3D workflow from modelling in Blender to rendering in a web browser and writing shaders in WebGL.
Norwegian municipalities are in charge of kindergarten admission, but even they don’t have an overview of which facilities have places available. So we created one.
The interesting part of this project is not so much the result (a table halfway down an article), but the way it came about: We only had days to gather contact information for more than 250 child care facilities in Bergen, build infrastructure to collect data, send out hundreds of emails aksing already overworked kindergarten administrators to fill out our form, verify their responses, and present the numbers.
We take readers on a bike ride along Bergen’s most dangerous cycle paths. Traffic hotspots were crowdsourced from our readers.
(This project cured me of my fear of WebGL.)
I’ve worked at Bergens Tidende since moving to Norway in 2017. Before that, I worked at Der Tagesspiegel and OpenDataCity in Berlin.
Recently, my work has focused on front-end contributions to breaking news stories, usually written in TypeScript and Svelte or React and with a particular emphasis on accessibility.
I genuinely enjoy working with CSS.
The story of my colleague Osama’s escape from the Syrian regime.
This project came with some interesting challenges: how do we take readers along for the decisive moments when we have no photos? While we could reconstruct the scene, we had to take care to avoid making it look too real.
We ended up taking video with a drone that we turned into a sequence of 25 vector images composed of geometric primitives for a painterly style. I was quite pleased with this solution: it had the desired effect, performs much better than a video and looks great on all screens.
While the appeal of uphill races still eludes me, I was excited to take on the task of rebuilding BT’s popular but ageing målsøk service in 2023.
As before, readers can look up participants by name to watch them collapse on the finish line. The new version also displays a running ticker of athletes, is more robust, and more easily adapts to other races.
Our Christmas Card Machine let users send season’s greetings to a random stranger and receive a random card in return.
I contributed a Django-based API and backend for administration and moderation.
A comparison of different rental scooters operating in Bergen.
I’m really happy with how the visuals turned out – even though we’re not using a single photograph.
With illustrations rather than photos and fully custom styling, we take our readers on a journey to the bottom of a fjord that’s running out of oxygen.
The municipal reform of 2020 redrew borders across Norway. In the newly born Vestland county, 25 municipalities disappeared. This article is a homage.
Heavily inspired by dating apps, we let readers swipe through a stack of political and personal opinions to find the candidate who most resembles them.
In 2019, Bergen’s system of toll roads expanded as prices were increased. Our interactive route planner told readers how much more their commute was going to cost them.
The story of Adina Lange who survived hours buried five feet deep in an avalanche was my first large project at Bergens Tidende. We had the privilege of working closely together with Steffen Øie, a brilliant illustator and graphics designer.
This project won several awards, most notably Gullparaplyen in 2019.
A visual journey through eight decades of elections in Germany featuring campaign posters, election results, interviews with first-time voters and historical front pages.
One of my first projects at Der Tagesspiegel takes readers on an auditory journey through the German capital.
I’m especially happy with the virtual audio tours that let readers listen in at any point along a path on a map. I had to find a way to let colleagues cut the audio track while keeping it in sync with the GPS track.