What does a story about a rooftop party in war-torn Syria have to do with villagers in Nepal selling their kidneys for cheap? For Vocativ, the answer is data.
Vocativ, a news organization that launched out of beta on Monday, uses proprietary technology to analyze open data from social networks, government records and other databases in order to find patterns and connections — or what the startup is referring to as "low signals" — that others might miss amid all the information posted online. At the same time, Vocativ employs a team of about 30 editors, writers and producers from publications like the New York Times, CNN and Reuters, who can take that data and use it as the basis for stories.
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Mati Kochavi, the company's founder and primary financial backer, says he first came up with the idea after watching coverage of the financial meltdown in the United States and the wave of pro-democracy protests throughout the Middle East.
"I was surprised that journalism wasn't able to find it before it happened," Kochavi said in an interview with Mashable. "That was something that very much intrigued my mind and made me think, 'Why can't we as humans see big things before they happen?' "
That might seem like an overly naive question, if not for the fact that one of the companies Kochavi runs, 3i-Mind, develops software to help governments and law enforcement officials analyze web data to spot trends. The plan for Vocativ was to adapt this technology to create a new type of journalism outlet — one which Kochavi hopes will shed light on daily lives in different countries and appeal to appeal to readers in their 20s and 30s.

"We live in a world of social media, which is shifting a lot of the power, and it's shifting it to a generation which is a very smart generation," he says. "The generation with social media tools has the power to organize events and politics in our life; they were also the forces that shaped the events in the Middle East."
For this reason, the experience of reading Vocativ is similar to that of reading VICE, another publication that targets a younger audience with eye-catching investigative work, but with stories that get their start in data. In one example, the Vocativ team teased the idea of covering the summer climbing season at Mount Everest. In the process of researching the area, however, the data revealed a far more interesting story: a poor village in Nepal where many had sold their kidneys on the cheap. The team then sent a documentary crew to shoot the story.
While the original idea for the publication came out of Kochavi's desire to spot major shifts in regional politics and economies, he admits that he doesn't know if Vocativ will be able to accomplish that necessarily. But the hope, he says, is "if you look at the stories, you'll start to get a glance of different angles of life ... and over time you are going to understand the forces of societies in a better way."
Image: Vocativ