The South African investigative site Oxpeckers uses a combination of data analysis, collaboration, and interactive data visualization tools to tell the most compelling stories about the land and those accused of damaging it. From mining to environmental crimes and wildlife trafficking, it has brought investigative techniques to beats like mining that were once the preserve of business reporters.
In a filing to the Supreme Court in the United States, a raft of media organizations including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Daily Beast, Dow Jones, VICE ,and The Washington Post, have argued that the interpretation of the country’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act needs to be narrowed to avoid “serious constitutional concerns.” In the document, which can be read in full here, the organizations argue that an interpretation of the law by the court of appeals “chills ordinary journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment.”
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the world in English, we found a helpful database that’s tracking government responses to COVID-19 with the help of 400 researchers, a multimedia project on how eight journalists from around the world are coping with reporting during the pandemic, and a piece on how autocrats are cracking down on independent news sites.
The coronavirus pandemic has upended the lives of people around the world, but some communities are especially hard hit. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 6 to 12 finds The New York Times analyzing data that reveals Black and Latino people have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, The Washington Post highlighting that business relief funds for the pandemic have gone to the rich and well-connected, and Bloomberg looking at more than 120 US businesses that say the coronavirus helped force them into bankruptcy.
In this third Africa-focused GIJN webinar, we bring together three journalists from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya who have used open-source tools during the COVID-19 crisis to produce groundbreaking investigations. They will share tips and insights on the tools they have used, the information they unearthed, how they turned their findings into compelling stories, and the impact that those stories have had.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Craig Silverman, who leads a global beat on misinformation and media manipulation for BuzzFeed News. An author and award-winning journalist, Silverman shared some his top open source tools for digital investigations and for probing disinformation.
The investigative team behind a story in The Washington Post that focused on two military helicopters that roared over demonstrators in Washington, DC on June 1 shared the exploratory scripts used to analyze and visualize flight data for the aircraft which monitored protesters in the city that day.
When Jeff Gerritt first started asking questions about deaths in Texas jails, he was told “it’s not news for someone to die in county jail.” But his reporting and the Op Ed pieces that resulted from it led to a Pulitzer Prize, a rare win for a scrappy thrice-weekly paper in an era where the journalism industry is seeing increasing cutbacks and layoffs.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the world in English, includes a toolkit for journalists on systems thinking from The New School, freelancer tips from the Pulitzer Center, and Bellingcat’s latest guide on tracking the locust swarms affecting East Africa.
