Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/)
Governments have already spent more than 40 billion dollars to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, so how can journalists investigate how the money is being used and who is getting the contracts? GIJN’s latest webinar, Tracking Billions in COVID-19 Contracts, focuses on how to investigate the contracting process, what red flags to look out for and how to find out where the money is going.
After the group that owned half of Quebec’s daily newspapers went bust, Canada’s Le Soleil newspaper was part of a group that created Canada’s largest newsroom cooperative, counting on the support of their readers and their own staff to ensure their survival. One year on, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, they are thriving.
The devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic can get lost in the mass of numbers presented. Journalists are working hard to humanize the data. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 18 to 24 finds The New York Times with a moving tribute to lives lost to COVID-19; Schema Design, the Google News Initiative, and Axios visualizing coronavirus-related Google searches; and The Atlantic revealing the US CDC conflated results of two types of coronavirus tests.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Katherine Eban, who has won awards for her work on gun trafficking, pharmaceutical counterfeits, and CIA interrogations. She described some of the low-tech tools and old-school strategies that have helped her break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around the world, official death tolls from the pandemic have been compromised by data lags, lack of testing, and sometimes deliberate distortions, leading to significant undercounts. In response, investigative reporters are using new tools and creative approaches to provide a clearer picture of direct and indirect deaths associated with the pandemic, and to hold governments accountable for inadequate responses.
Investigative journalists can discover story leads from scrutinizing financial or asset disclosures. Data journalist Paul Bradshaw shares nine ways to find stories in companies’ accounts, including looking out for conflicts of interest, and mapping connections between companies and directors.
Reporting on the ground and interviewing people face-to-face have become high-risk activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are ways to continue investigative work using your computer and cutting-edge online techniques – critical skills at all times. Join us for this GIJN webinar, Online Research with open source sleuth Paul Myers, part of GIJN’s series Investigating the Pandemic.
