The paper trail has changed — money now moves digitally and business registries are databases — and this lets journalists do more than ever before in tracking people and companies across borders. Here’s a useful list of which business databases to start looking into if you’re background companies in China, India, and the Philippines.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Oct 31-Nov 6: election maps vs. cartograms (@LazaroGamio); US political geography (@nytgraphics); data pitfalls (@journalismnews); affordable healthcare (@sangerkatz); French literary awards @dataletemps); & more.
This year’s African Investigative Journalism Conference, boasting about 250 attendees from 28 countries, concluded an enthusiastic three days of workshops and presentations on Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa. Now in its eleventh year, the AIJC is the largest gathering of investigative journalists in Africa. With 70 sessions, the conference was, as one attendee put it, “a candy store for journalists.”
Earlier this month the Indian news site Newslaundry won a prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for a series of stories based on Right to Information (RTI) requests. The information — over 2,000 letters from Indian state-owned enterprises revealed how political leaders routinely misused up to US$15 million in public funds by asking for media ads or sponsorships for their pet organizations. Here’s the inside story of how the piece almost didn’t come to light.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Oct 24-30: Clinton/Trump facial analysis (@benheubl ); 10K edits to Clinton/Trump Wikipedia pages (@chrisalcantara); Amnesty 36-year dataviz (@jwyg); Latinos in office (@UnivisionData); open source tools (@M_Mandalka); & more.
“Stolen Memory” is the investigation that led to the creation of the first journalistic platform that collects massive data on illicit trafficking of cultural artifacts from Latin American countries. It is a project of Peruvian digital investigative journalism site Ojo Público, which invited four important media in the region to participate in a transnational and collaborative investigation.
For International Day to End Impunity, our excerpt today is an annex from a new UN report. It makes for a chilling read — an updated list of the status of judicial inquiries into journalist killings from 2006 to 2015. Out of 827 journalists killed in the past decade, only 63 have been resolved. The message right now is clear: opponents of a free press can literally get away with murder. Until we fix the problem of impunity, it will be impossible to meet the UN development goal of ensuring public access to information.
Today, November 2, marks International Day to End Impunity. Since 2014, the UN and press freedom groups have commemorated the day to spotlight the glaring number of unresolved journalists’ murders and the lack of punishment for their perpetrators around the world. This year’s awareness campaign is aptly titled “My Killers Are Still Free.”
On Wednesday, the UN and press freedom groups worldwide will mark International Day to End Impunity, commemorated since 2014 to highlight the glaring number of unresolved journalists’ murders and the lack of punishment for their perpetrators. As part of a series to mark the occasion, GIJN is pleased to excerpt “The Assault on Reporting” from a new report by David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Oct 17-22: challenging dataviz assumptions (@eagereyes); Clinton/Trump facial analysis (@TheEconomist); R & RStudio (@mjfrigaard); pharma money (@srfdata); code database (@srfdata); German lobbyists (@tagesspiegel); & more.
Mark your calendars! Be sure to join us for the seminal event in investigative journalism for 2017 — the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. It’s the GIJC’s 10th anniversary and our first time in Africa. There will be over 100 sessions, all targeted at working journalists determined to dig beneath the surface.
Corruption is one of the most dangerous beats for journalists, and one of the most important for holding those in power to account. There is growing international recognition that corruption is also one of the biggest impediments to poverty reduction and good governance. This is why journalists on this beat must be protected, including by multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links drawn from tweets during October 10-15: infographic sketches, the growth of data journalism, the Tapestry Conference, using Googlescraper, conflicts over water, and an Olympics dataviz.
The first Southern African Investigative Journalism Conference in Botswana took place in that country’s capital Gaborone from October 7-8 this month. About 175 journalists from 10 countries participated in the event, which featured talks ranging from the dangers of reporting on corruption and the Panama Papers in Africa to personal testimonies of reporters who have faced persecution and threats of violence for their reporting.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Oct 3-8: spy plane viz (@BuzzFeedNews); ggplot2 (@jburnmurdoch); graphics origins (@cjgiaimo); open source search tools (@OpenSemSearch); East & West Germany differences (@rick_n); Colombia drinking water (@eltiempo); & more.
All around the world, very real benefits result when legal tools are used to obtain government information. Because there are so many frustrations for those who seek information, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the positive benefits. Freedom of information (FOI) reform advocates need to document and celebrate the victories.
When the president of the parliament states that there are some MPs “doing nothing,” you know what to do as a data journalist: you turn to the numbers. This is how I did that and how I got a scatter plot in a printed paper and an interactive one online.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 26-Oct 1: future journo tech-jobs (@mkramer); open-source search tools (@OpenSemSearch); data viz projects (@chrtze); isotype chart generator (@albertocairo); data & digital collaboration (@jwyg); and more.
The job of journalists in Italy uncovering and reporting scandals about the Catholic Church has changed. The news media are dedicating more space to these stories, while internal factions within the Church have given an advantage to reporters on the Vatican beat. But dealing with the topic can still be quite tricky…
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 19-25: brilliant info graphics (@visualoop); data state of mind (@MaryJoWebster); global temperatures visualized (@NASAEarth); African grants (@Sage_Of_Absurd); DDJ and investigative tools (@M_Mandalka); and more.
As we gather for the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference, this seems a good time to share again with our colleagues where the Global Investigative Journalism Network and its conferences come from. It was a simple idea at the end of the 20th century — to gather the world’s investigative journalists to share their knowledge with each other — that gave birth to GIJN, which has now grown to 138 member organizations in 62 countries.
Independent news organizations in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea are experiencing both direct and indirect challenges in cyberspace, from content blocking to censorship and self-censorship. Edgardo Legaspi, executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, says threatened governments are “playing catch-up” after recognizing that the Internet can be an effective tool for voices to be heard.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Sept 5-10: America’s shrinking middle class (@FT); Latino voters & Trump (@UniNoticias); iPhone7 rave (@newyorker); DocumentCloud (@SchoolOfData); Chicago’s sensor net (@arrayofthings); Visual Vocab (@MartinStabe); and more.
Highway Africa — Africa’s largest annual gathering of journalists — brought together a host of media practitioners from across Africa. Discussions at the two-day conference this year ranged from the challenges of media sustainability in the digital age to digital activism and internet regulation in Africa.
At this year’s Highway Africa — the continent’s largest annual gathering of journalists — watchdog groups showcased a host of open data and accountability tools aimed squarely at Africa. Here are six of them, developed by Code4SA and presented by Wellington Radu of Media Monitoring Africa and Levi Kabwato of the Open Democracy Advice Centre.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for Aug 29-Sept 2: Earth warms at top rate in 1000 years (@NASAClimate); 2 million oil/gas docs (@Open_Oil); G20 CO2 emissions (@CarbonBrief); German dialects (@SPIEGELONLINE); Munich massacre on Twitter (@puls_br); ;and more.
With freedom of information statutes in over 100 countries today, the laws have become a key tool for journalists from India to Mexico. But their success depends on how they’re used and implemented, as Swiss scholar Vincent Mabillard explores in his recent paper, Freedom of Information Laws: Evolution of the Number of Requests in 11 Jurisdictions. We are pleased to present highlights from his paper from the University of Lausanne.
Many great actors failed to adapt from silent movies to the “talkies” and disappeared from the big screen. By the same token, many great journalists risk fading away because they are not adjusting from the era of virtually silent audiences to the virtual era of talking audiences.
