Newsrooms are increasingly embracing newsletters as they seek to engage and grow their audiences. But there’s more than one way to tackle the form. Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into creating newsletters for nonprofit newsrooms that explore single-subject issues, like education or gun violence.
Media outlets’ communities have a lot to offer — and often, they would like to help. Here are 25 jobs that community members can do to aid newsrooms and examples of how to best include them.
It is unfortunately becoming easier and easier to harass journalists online through the use of technology such as bots, with the intent to intimidate and silence truth-tellers. These attacks can be relentless and if left unchecked, can be a real threat to journalists’ mental health and reputation. To deal with these online “pests,” TrollBusters created an infographic that offers clear steps on how to deal with various types of cyberviolence ranging from doxing to sexually explicit photos.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from February 4 to 10 finds exciting releases with a document analysis tool by @ICIJorg and an audio-driven visualization tool by @f_l_o_u_r_i_s_h, while @kloopnews highlights domestic labour imbalance in Kyrgyzstan and @davidottewell emphasizes that data journalism is not just for nerds in a corner.
A reader asked ProPublica Illinois how the media organization finds new story ideas. Reporter Jodi S. Cohen, who was just as curious as the reader, spoke to her colleagues to find out where they got their inspiration. From fleshing out ideas found in other colleagues’ stories to digging into data anomalies, and even paying extra attention to an idle truck parked at an abandoned gas station, their answers show that there are a myriad of ways in which inspiration for your next big story could strike.
The 11th Global Investigative Journalism Conference, scheduled for this September 26-29 in Hamburg, Germany, will feature an academic research track. Journalism professors and researchers worldwide are invited to submit research paper abstracts highlighting trends, challenges, teaching methodologies, new developments and best practices in investigative and data journalism. Abstracts are due April 8, 2019.
Looking for a data journalist working in Spanish? Periodistas de Datos aggregates up-to-date information on data journalists working across Spain and Latin America. The platform’s creators explained to Maria Crosas Batista how they built it.
When it comes to doing mobile journalism, is there a big difference between expensive Androids and iOS phones? Is using an old phone fine and, if not, which phone should one upgrade to? Mobile journalism trainer Ivo Burum offers up the skinny on phone basics, the truth about pixels, lenses and more to help journalists decide the best phone to get the story done well.
Freedom House’s 2018 Freedom in the World report, which was just released this week, signals an alarming trend: Democracy is in retreat. There were media freedom reversals in many countries spanning across regions, including long-standing democracies such as the United States and consolidated authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 28 to February 3 finds @sciam highlighting a curious case of mapping cholera, @nbarrowman arguing that raw data is not as perfectly objective as imagined, @bbc tracking Trump’s performance, and @VismeApp compiling a list of the best data visualizations on climate change.
With the increase in eyewitness media, open source investigators are usually exposed to high amounts of graphic footage and this can cause mental distress if left unchecked. Hannah Ellis, research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, shares a guide to prevent excessive secondary trauma and how to address the symptoms.
What’s the best way to protect you and your sources from commercial spyware? When the actual systems and applications used in everyday communications aren’t transparent and lack adequate security measures, using open source programs with encryption can be the best line of defense. Katarina Sabados rounded up some options for open source digital security for GIJN.
Journalists and data experts were busy last year attempting to quantify and analyze the criminal justice machine in the United States. Storybench cut through the noise and pulled out these 10 visualizations that best explain the world of criminal justice.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 21 to 27 finds @schemadesign and @GoogleTrends teaming up to visualize news cycles in 2018, the @washingtonpost’s flyover tour of the entire US-Mexico border and two interesting football-related visualizations: @ftblsm’s history of football and @NZZ’s analysis of whether football coaches Jose Mourinho and Julen Lopetegui should have been sacked.
Measuring the impact of journalism can help newsrooms reconnect with its audience and attract new funders. But the wider journalism ecosystem has yet to embrace the concept of keeping track of journalism’s impact. Impact Makers Bernadette Kuiper talks to the European Journalism Centre about why journalists should care about impact, how to create it and where to draw the line between journalism and advocacy.
Khabar Lahariya started as a four-page experiment to educate women who were learning to read and write but has now grown into a full-blown newspaper that exposes corruption and society’s injustices. Staffed with women from rural India, the newspaper is shaking a deeply entrenched system of neglect in the small villages of India.
Effective digital investigative research relies heavily on gathering small pieces of information on a person or group and combining those to build a more comprehensive picture. Being able to find things like email addresses, usernames and sites with which they have accounts helps build out a profile that can be used for further investigation. GIJN’s Alastair Otter rounds up some tools worth checking out.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, was recently named one of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers for 2019. The New Arab recently talked to Higgins about what motivated him to start the website and the role of developing technology in countering disinformation and fake news.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 14 to 20 finds a @FinancialTimes exposé of possible electoral fraud in Congo, @sxywu’s beautiful visualization of interaction data between a museum and the public, and @maartenzam’s the ultimate data visualization list to end all lists.
In tribute to the media groups and individual journalists who continue to pursue truth in one of the world’s most difficult regions, GIJN’s Arabic Editor Majdoleen Hassan rounded up some of the best investigative reports published last year in the Middle East and North Africa.
Many in the journalistic profession fear Artificial Intelligence will leave them without a job. But AI could become the savior of the trade, making it possible to better cover the increasingly complex, globalized and information-rich world we live in. Open Society Foundations’ María Teresa Ronderos writes about the ways some of the world’s newsrooms are using it now.
In an era of digital media disruption, Africa Confidential has avoided the complicated revenue tools many news media have been forced to experiment with, like soft or metered paywalls, crowdfunding, programmatic ads, blockchain systems or slashed costs and access fees. Instead, the London-based political news group has defied global trends by not only retaining its old school subscription model, but actually increasing its annual cost to a sky-high 902 British pounds. Rowan Philp writes for GIJN on AC’s secret to success.
With the global spread of data journalism, the advent of artificial intelligence and the increasing use of big data moving alongside a rapid rise of disinformation, GIJN asked data journalism experts around the world what they anticipate for 2019. Here are their thoughts on the major trends, ideas and technologies that will affect how we do our jobs.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 7 to 13, 2019 finds @SZ’s analysis revealing how children’s books perpetuate gender stereotypes, @A24COM mapping the hottest crime spots and times in Buenos Aires, @dw_akademie offering a data journalism fellowship opportunity, and great chances to win awards from @WorldGovSummit and @GENinnovate’s Data Journalism Awards.
Chinese journalists have broken stories this year on medical abuses, #MeToo and the environment, leading to government prosecution, consumer uproar and boycott, and disciplinary actions. Here are some of the best investigative journalism work in China in 2018, nominated by practicing Chinese journalists and media professionals, and selected by the GIJN Chinese team.
With the backlash against democracy and anti-press sentiment growing, the need for investigations around issues such as corruption and climate change continues to rise. GIJN asked the leaders of our global community about what they see happening in investigative journalism around the world in 2019. Here’s what they told us.
