What is the best way into the COVID-19 story? Pick an angle. No matter what your beat is, the pandemic is seeping into almost every story. In response, the Kampala-based African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) created a running list of story ideas on COVID-19 which stretches across beats: from agriculture and food to the economy, education, religion, sports, and arts and entertainment.
Here’s a guide to understanding how the government in China regulates and controls the media. Jin Ding explains the relationship between Chinese news publications and the state’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, the methods of censorship, media funding, and notable publications to follow.
In this latest of GIJN’s webinar series, experienced African journalists will share their assessment of the COVID-19 coverage to date, offer suggestions for future investigations, and share their strategies, tips and tools to help journalists to investigate the most important pandemic stories on the continent.
In South Sudan, conflict and government repression make it difficult to do on-the-ground reporting, so a team of journalists designed a mobile phone survey to gather data on forced displacement and destruction across the country. Carolyn Thompson explains why their award-winning investigation may offer lessons to others working in repressive environments or facing movement restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, delves into the perils of reporting on preprint research platforms, a snapshot of end-to-end digital advertising and publishing supply chains, and how the French government took down a “fake news” page after being accused of “overstepping its constitutional role and infringing on press freedoms.”
The use of open source tools, user-generated content, and advanced search filters has allowed reporters to break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic from home quarantine. In a recent GIJN webinar, three investigative researchers shared key insights on the tools and techniques that have unearthed facts and visuals beyond the reach of traditional field reporting.
An Australian documentary team used user-generated footage to create a film about Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 outbreak. They used clips filmed on mobile phones that showed people with the virus being dragged into vans by police, and bodies left on the street and on hospital floors, using different tools to verify the material.
What will life be like after the coronavirus lockdown measures are relaxed? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 27 to May 3 finds German news outlets ZDF heute and RBB24 looking into pedestrian traffic in Germany post-quarantine, the Financial Times and The New York Times highlighting the complexities of getting an accurate COVID-19 death toll and the problem of undercounting fatalities, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention setting up a dashboard to track statistics related to the coronavirus across the region.
A group of Indian journalists have been calling out the government on social media over its opacity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaborative effort continues to press for official answers on overall health preparedness, such as drug availability, access to care, health inventory, and insurance schemes.
Like health professionals, care givers, and other essential workers, journalists face heightened and grave health risks as they pursue crucial stories on the COVID-19 crisis. But measuring coronavirus deaths among media workers poses many of the same problems as counting true mortality figures in the general population. The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a nonprofit focused on press freedom, recorded 64 deaths in 24 countries by May 5.
The COVID-19 pandemic narrative is dominated by numbers — mountains of data and seemingly endless statistical models. Yet most of the figures are uncertain at best, often highly flawed and simply untrue at worst. How to deal with the many claims on the truth that are made every day? What should journalists do if the evidence is poor?
Splice Media have been running “check-in” sessions with the media startups they support in Asia to find out how organizations and individuals are coping through the coronavirus pandemic. Here are his tips for hosting an online media event like this. His takeaway? The technology is the easy part.
Media organizations across Latin America are working together to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic is playing out in the region. Reporters say that cross-border collaboration is helping them report the story of a lifetime so that jointly they can work to “connect the dots.”
This Sunday, May 3, is World Press Freedom Day, an initiative to stand up for journalists around the world, particularly those who are facing repression.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, features a Nieman Reports story about European media’s eroding trust problem during COVID-19, the latest edition of Craig Silverman’s Verification Handbook, and the free-to-stream investigative documentary playlist from the good people at the DIG Festival.
The popularity of TikTok has surged during the pandemic, and one particular “data investigation” clip has gone viral. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 20 to 26 found TikTok user Rebecca fact-checking a woman’s claim about the COVID-19 quarantine and her grey hair roots, the Coronavirus Fact-Checking Alliance visualizing the thousands of fact checks they have produced during the pandemic, The New York Times analyzing United States President Donald Trump’s messages about the country’s coronavirus response, and FiveThirtyEight examining how concerned Americans are about the coronavirus compared to the economy.
Journalists are playing a critical role informing the public about the virus. Understanding it — and the measures governments are putting in place to control reporting of the pandemic — are vital if journalists are going to report safely.
The New York Times’ Privacy Project highlighted the alarmingly unregulated activity of location data companies collecting data from millions of smartphone users. As the coronavirus pandemic sheds further light on the uses and misuses of location tracking, here’s a deeper look at the project that visualized phones being tracked around the US, from the Pentagon and the White House to the streets of San Francisco.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Barbara Maseda, the founder and editor of Proyecto Inventario, an open data platform for journalists reporting on her native Cuba. She told GIJN about the investigative tools she uses to overcome the difficulties of data reporting in and about Cuba.
The COVID-19 pandemic brings yet another level of danger to the press: reporting on the ground and interviewing people face-to-face have become high-risk activities — even illegal in some countries. But there are ways to continue investigative work using your laptop, your wit and some very useful techniques — as three experienced investigators will highlight in this GIJN webinar, Using Open Source Information to Report from Home.
Newspapers around the world are vulnerable to the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, and many of Africa’s print publications might not survive it. Ntibinyane Ntibinyane from the INK Center for Investigative Journalism in Botswana writes about what’s to come and what can be done to support the industry.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a Bellingcat post on what to look out for when reporting on Russian disinformation, how Documented is using WhatsApp to maximize reporting and audience reach, and the Oxford research group’s global effort to gather publicly available data on the coronavirus.
Misinformation has grown ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic, so much so that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proclaimed: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has emerged as a favorite target of disinformation actors, according to The New York Times, that we discovered through our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 13 to 19. We also found The Economist and ProPublica examining the true impact of the pandemic by looking into “excess mortalities” such as home deaths, the Associated Press releasing and updating a coronavirus public dataset for the United States.
The 2020 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), shows that the coming decade will be decisive for the future of journalism, with the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting and amplifying the many crises that threaten the right to freely reported, independent, diverse, and reliable information.
As coronavirus sweeps through communities around the world, the Membership Puzzle Project has shared examples from newsrooms around the world on how they have quickly adapted pillars of their membership programs and memberful routines to respond to the realities of this crisis.
