Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/)
On the evening of August 4, 2020, a devastating blast at the port in Beirut shook the Lebanese capital. It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. GIJN spoke to three outlets whose investigations all played a pivotal role in understanding what led to the explosion and why a ship and its deadly cargo were stuck at the port for so long.
A November 18 press release, claiming a safe vaccine that protects 95% of people against COVID-19, by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech was greeted with excited headlines. In this article, two leading health reporters shared tips on how to read such releases and balanced cautious optimism with the provision that the release relied on interim results from a trial in an accelerated setting.
GIJN’s Spanish Editor Andrea Arzaba rounds up the top investigative stories from Latin American media outlets in 2020, focusing on deep dive investigations into important but often overlooked topics including femicide and migration.
Around the world, people are toning down their celebrations in a bid to mitigate spread of the coronavirus. The latest casualty: Thanksgiving. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 16 to 22 found FiveThirtyEight’s timely piece explaining the risk of COVID-19 transmission from even small Thanksgiving dinner gatherings. Also popular: The New York Times tracking the status of all vaccine trials in progress, and The Pudding analysis of race and gender in crossword puzzles from five major US news publications.
In this reboot of GIJN’s popular “Toolbox” series, we walk through the techniques journalists can use to find connections between websites using IP addresses and Google Analytics tags hidden in the source code of websites. We’ll also demonstrate how to use the powerful tool SpiderFoot HX to visualize network maps, which help journalists draw connections unseen in the offline world.
GIJN is pleased to announce four free digital events for journalists on cutting-edge online investigative techniques. They will be led by the globally-renowned data journalist, open source reporting expert and trainer, Henk van Ess. The December webinars are open to all and last for 90 minutes. The January workshops are limited to a maximum of 25 people, by application only and will last five hours.
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to Alberto Cairo, head of visualization at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Cairo shared several user-friendly tools and core principles to help investigative reporters shape their data visually to create new insights for audiences.
