Journalists are not usually in the frame of mind for grants. They pitch their story to an editor, the editor says “no” or “yes” and they get to work. But drafting a grant application is a somewhat complex technique. Here is a list of mistakes that tend to kill many fledgling journalistic projects before they even stand a chance.
One of the central ethical tenets of professional journalism is “first, protect your sources.” But in this digital age, it is becoming more dangerous to keep your sources safe as governments are able to track reporters and their sources digitally. Here are 20 guidelines for working with whistleblowers in the digital era. What’s missing?
With a $5 million funding budget, the new platform is dreamily promising a new “canvas on which journalists can paint the future of their industry.” But it isn’t clear how the blockchain-based technology will generate the cold hard cash needed to sustain the industry’s revenue-starved publications, writes Rowan Philp for GIJN.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 30 to May 6 finds @theboysmithy talking to @MarkMonmonier about the influence a cartographer can exert over a naive map reader, @OCCRP’s data visualization platform to map complex crime networks and @PostGraphics’ mapping of diversity in America’s neighborhoods.
Using image analysis tools on their own means nothing without asking the right questions. AJ Labs experimented with Google Vision API, a machine-learning technology, to analyze images used by Al Jazeera over the course of last year. They hope to integrate the technology into their newsroom in the future to make processes easier for their journalists.
In a recent training session in Kyiv, producer Matt Sarnetski and journalist Anna Babinets talked about how they created Killing Pavel, a documentary about the murder of the well-known journalist Pavel Sheremet. GIJN has rounded up the key takeaways.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 23 to 29 finds @thetimes’ interactive which will determine whether you will join the dark side, @albertocairo discussing precedents to innovative visualizations and @srendgen talking about the technological revolution encouraging data journalism.
At a time when the news media is under unprecedented attack, and the need for watchdog reporting has never been greater, we hope you will join GIJN today in marking World Press Freedom Day (#WorldPressFreedomDay). This is the 25th celebration of WPFD, but despite the years of meetings and proclamations by its sponsors UNESCO and others, conditions are getting worse, not better, for journalists around the world.
Fraudulent, plagiarized or otherwise shoddy research is an increasing problem across all scientific disciplines — particularly in China — and can catch like wildfire. Australian Professor Jennifer Byrne and her French colleague Cyril Labbé, as well as projects like Retraction Watch, are fighting back.
The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.
A Berlin-based group of researchers has launched the world’s first publicly accessible database of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Aimed mainly at human rights organizations, it could also help investigative reporters in some potentially surprising ways. A GIJN original.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 16 to 22 finds @camellia_will debating the future of data portals, @DLeonhardt using hard data to show whether Democratic or Republican presidents have been more fiscally responsible and @morgenpost mapping bicycle thefts hotspots in Berlin.
Journalist Gangadhar Patil’s impressive idea of supporting independent journalists, helping with their edits and then matching them with mainstream publications has taken off in India — and landed its journalists in publications like CNN International, The Asia Times and The New Indian Express.
There’s a new funding strategy in the works, built around the idea that quite a few reporters have loyal followings and their readers just might be willing to chip in a few bucks to keep them in the news business. But as more organizations turn to reader support for revenue — whether framed as memberships or as subscriptions — they might face stiff competition for their individual crowdfunding model.
Raising money for your news organization via crowdfunding is difficult and can be stressful. Hungary’s Direkt36, which has run four successful crowdfunding campaigns so far, offers 10 tips from their experience to help you plan a good campaign. A GIJN original.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 9 to 15 finds an ultra useful data visualization tool that is perfect for non-programmers by @Adobe and @GeorgiaTech, a list of 99 amazing data journalism works by @GENinnovate’s Data Journalism Awards nominees and @CARTO shares 50 experts on location intelligence to follow.
Journalists exposing corruption in countries with limited rule of law face enormous risks and their stories may not necessarily make things better for anyone. In Pakistan, journalists have employed a different — and safer — approach to trigger positive change by avoiding front-page corruption exposés and using data journalism to expose flaws in the system instead. A GIJN original.
The real heroes are reporters who are out there taking risks by reporting the truth, says US historian Timothy Snyder. Support them by subscribing to newspapers and reading and sharing good journalism. And next time you meet a journalist, try thanking them for their service.
OpenStreetMap is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps. It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowdsources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. But despite its democratic aims, it’s still much like the mapping world overall — overwhelmingly dominated by male cartographers. That’s starting to change.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 2 to 8 finds an alarming piece by @iamdylancurran on how much data Facebook and Google have actually gleaned from us, @OCCRP’s powerful database of public records and leaks, @davidottewell’s take on the evolution of data journalism and an investigation by @TheInterceptBr into the militias in Rio de Janeiro.
Representatives from several data projects in the MENA region made their way to Cairo last month to attend the first Arab Data Journalism Conference. They were there to share their initiatives to help data other Arab journalists — as well as academics and researchers — access reliable data that’s easy to find and delivered in usable formats. A GIJN original.
There are lots of different tools to measure analytics in the newsroom, but Google Analytics is one of the most widely used. Plus it’s free. Here are some ideas to help those working in organizations that don’t have access to expensive audience monitoring services to move beyond page views to measure the success of their digital content. A GIJN original.
Since its creation five years ago, Agência Pública has promoted a revolution not only in Brazil, but around Latin America. It is one of the main drivers of a regional scene that brings together digital native-media founded and led by journalists.
The US Treasury Department hit Russian oligarchs and their companies with a host of new sanctions today, zeroing in on the country’s energy sector and cronies of President Vladimir Putin. Among those blacklisted: seven oligarchs, 12 companies and 17 senior government officials, including metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is tied in media reports to Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. Here’s a look at the actual documents.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 26 to April 1 finds @washingtonpost on fatal police shootings, @decodeurs mapping Europe’s terrorist attacks, @DagmedyaVeri’s open data resources for Turkey and an undated chart of shrinking donut holes from the @smithsonian archives.
