Nicolas Kayser-Bril, professionally curious.

My name is Nicolas Kayser-Bril, I am a journalist and a scholar.

I was one of the first in Europe to practice and reflect on data-driven journalism. I was in charge of datajournalism at OWNI, in Paris, in 2009-2010. I then cofounded and led Journalism++, a pan-European agency for datajournalism. I worked as head of Journalism for AlgorithmWatch from 2019 until 2026.

I now author the newsletter Gargant'IA, a weekly briefing on Artificial Intelligence and its impact on society.

Find me

hi@nkb.fr on e-mail

Nicolas Kayser-Bril on LinkedIn

nkb.15 on Signal

@nicolaskb@fediscience.org on Mastodon

@nicolaskb on Instagram

Books

Spreading Race

Nomos, 2025

La Guerre du Gras

Nouriturfu, 2025

Imposture à temps complet

Éditions du Faubourg, 2022

美食也吹牛

馬可孛羅, 2022

Voracisme

Nouriturfu, 2021

Breuvages Bluffants

Nouriturfu, 2020

Bouffes Bluffantes

Nouriturfu, 2018

Le Guide du Datajournalisme

Eyrolles, 2013

My latest blog posts:

2026 - We toyed with old laptops and inadvertently destroyed any hope of privacy
2026 - Quatre privilèges et un enterrement: Naissance d’une nouvelle société
2026 - Why that poor woman fed stray dogs
2025 - The conditions of professional curiosity
2025 - Schmerzloser Genderaustritt
2025 - How the war in Ukraine might change the state
2021 - La pâtisserie française est la meilleure du monde!
2021 - The colonial roots of French fries
2021 - Berlin, douze ans après
2021 - L'automobile, stade suprême du patriarcat
2021 - Il est temps d'éteindre les Lumières
2021 - Dans le passé jusqu’au cou
2020 - Money does not buy status. It's the other way around.
2020 - Capital, idéologie et matraque
2020 - Why Millenials binge on mafia series while Boomers watch law-and-order shows
2019 - The Thunbergist entrepreneur
2019 - Thunbergism is a thing
2019 - 12 German things that have nothing to do with Germanness
2019 - The purpose-free organization
2018 - Cancer Risks
2018 - The emergence of the mafia state
2018 - License to Kill
2018 - Cars, speed and cigarettes
2018 - À Bicyclette
2018 - Foucault au pays des données
2018 - Pourquoi les femmes sont-elles plus petites que les hommes?
2018 - Europe's most dangerous city for cyclists
2018 - Pourquoi j'ai écrit « Bouffes Bluffantes »
2018 - Froschfresser!
2018 - Online, everyone's a media - Online journalism 3/3
2018 - From digital sweatshops to the integrated newsroom - Online journalism 2/3
2018 - The media and the internet: The history of a failure - Online journalism 1/3
2018 - Denial
2018 - Facing evil
2018 - Everything we know about price formation is wrong
2018 - Global data sources
2018 - European and German data sources
2018 - La voie de Moscou
2018 - Comment une industrie a raté le virage des données et du numérique
2018 - Retour à Quick
2018 - The roots of fake news
2018 - Le journalisme et la post-vérité
2017 - Transparency does not beget trust - quite the opposite
2017 - How I overcame my fear of flying
2017 - Why I'm still doing development aid
2017 - Measuring the unmeasured with data
2017 - Leaving Google: Here's how I did it.
2017 - The Magic Queendom of Europe
2017 - PPDA et les contradictions du journalisme
2017 - Il ne faut pas 'libérer les données'. Il faut se libérer par les données.
2017 - Meyer revisited
2017 - What could Google do? (If it cared about journalism)
2017 - Airport controls
2017 - Ich bin jetzt Deutscher
2017 - The Humanist Paradox
2017 - Cinq nouvelles absurdes de Géorgie
2017 - Les clés pour comprendre
2017 - Things learned in 5 years of Journalism++
2017 - La parole d'un arabe
2017 - The collapse of academia
2017 - Collaboration in journalism
2017 - Pourquoi il faut boycotter les élections françaises
2017 - Lettre à mes amis
2017 - Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
2016 - Waiting for a new Humanism
2016 - Les espoirs inutiles [nouvelle]
2016 - Celebrating 10 years of datajournalism
2016 - Data-driven journalism in the post-truth public sphere
2016 - The road to authoritarianism
2016 - Eastern Europe
2016 - The Offshore Journalism Toolkit
2016 - The power of open data
2016 - The new legitimacy of power
2016 - Informer avec des données structurées
2016 - Free your data' is over. Now, we need data to be free.
2016 - When to engage with adversarial organizations
2016 - Why the European Union failed
2016 - Caricatures racistes
2016 - Racist cartoons
2015 - Don't ask too much from data literacy
2015 - Confronting authoritarianism
2015 - La logique de l'autoritarisme
2015 - Living without the European Union
2015 - The value chain of data in the news industry
2015 - Individual responsibility and climate change
2015 - Datajournalism
2015 - String of rulings bodes ill for the future of journalism in Europe
2015 - Why there is no European journalism
2015 - Dani Rodrik's Globalization Paradox
2015 - ECHR ruling might have a chilling effect on data journalism
2015 - Speed and the slowdown of History
2015 - Why start a blog in 2015
2015 - Singularity
2015 - Journalism schools must become information management schools