
Stories


Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Jan. 5- 11: Awesome public datasets (@github); 20 ways to find data (@journalismnews); 19th Century big data (@ddjournalism); tilemaps & dataviz in Switzerland (@rastrau); Carnival in Germany (@Schwaebische); and more.

2nd Asia Investigative Journalism Conference, Nepal, Sept. 23-25
Attention: Investigative journalists in Asia — mark your calendars! Join us at the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, on September 23-25, 2016. We will be featuring an all-star line-up of top investigative and data journalists from around the world.

Data Journalism Methodology
Inside a Pioneering Italian Data Journalism Collaboration
Confiscati Bene, released in mid-December in Europe, is a pioneering data journalism collaboration that digs into the $4 billion of goods in the EU confiscated from criminals by European authorities. An international team of journalists and their allies sought to create a European database of seized assets and answer troubling questions about the accountability of the process. Confiscati Bene (literally, Well Confiscated) received support from GIJN member JournalismFund.eu; the main project can be seen at http://eu.confiscatibene.it.

News & Analysis
Despite Challenges, S. African Muckraking Pushes Forward
A boom in investigative journalism in South Africa seems to be winding down as media houses slash budgets to balance their books to continue to pay dividends to shareholders. “South Africa has had something of a golden era in investigative reporting, with as many as four teams at different institutions dedicated to it,” said Professor Anton Harber, head of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Dec. 23- Jan.4: NYT’s best graphics & visual stories (@NYT); programmers’ StackOverflow questions (@jbkunst); AI & disaster reporting (@ddjournalism); New Year’s tweets (@tomaspetricek); 2015 top #ddj tweets (@gijn).

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj for 2015: The Year’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
Thanks to so many of you for following our weekly Top Ten #ddj, which uses NodeXL to do a social network analysis on data journalism tweets. Here’s our summary of the year’s best: the most popular hashtags, the most searched domains, and the top mentions. As we have through the year, GIJN sends big thanks to the great Marc Smith of Connected Action for gathering the links and graphing them.

News & Analysis
An Investigative Journalist Leaps From Print to Digital

Data Journalism Reporting Tools & Tips
Research Desk: Weather Disasters, Population, ICT

News & Analysis
Investigative Reporting in 2015: GIJN’s Top 12 Stories
As 2015 nears an end, we’d like to share our top 12 stories of the year — the stories that you, our dear readers, found most compelling. The list ranges from free data tools and crowdfunding to the secrets of the Wayback Machine. Please join us in taking a look at The Best of GIJN.org this year.

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Dec. 8-13: New book on ddj in newsrooms (@NiemanLab); a guide to bad data (@qz); persons of interest database (@pudo); US mass shootings (@washpost); terrorist attacks since 1970 (@datenblog); ddj en Ecuador; & more.

News & Analysis
Led by China, Egypt, 199 Journalists Now in Prison
The Committee to Protect Journalists is out with its annual census of journalists in prison, and, as always, the report makes for grim reading. Check it out, anyway — it’s important our community knows what’s happening to our colleagues around the world. Here’s the quick and dirty: Globally, CPJ found 199 journalists in prison because of their work on December 1, 2015, a modest decline from record highs of the past three years. (There were 221 in 2014.) CPJ’s list does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year.

News & Analysis
Propaganda & Media Freedom
We’re pleased to run this excerpt from the recent report, Propaganda and Freedom of the Media, produced by the Office of The Representative on Freedom of the Media at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “These are trying times,” said the Representative, Dunja Mijatović, at the November 26 roll out of the report, during which she branded propaganda “an ugly scar on the face of modern journalism” and called on governments “to get out of the news business.”

News & Analysis
Why the Open Government Partnership Needs a Reboot
OGP needs a new organizational structure with new methods for evaluating national commitments. There aren’t enough support unit resources to manage the expansion. We have to rethink how we manage national commitments and how we evaluate what it means to be an open government. It’s just not right that countries can celebrate baby steps at OGP events while at the same time passing odious legislation, sidestepping OGP accomplishments, buckling to corruption, and cracking down on journalists.

News & Analysis
ARIJ Awards Highlight Reporting by Arab Investigative Journalists
Arab journalists work amid some of the world’s most challenging environments. Terrorists and militias, arbitrary arrests and harassment, autocratic governments, and a lack of documents and data are just a few of the challenges they face on a daily basis. And yet, despite these conditions, extraordinary work is being done by investigative journalists in the Arab world.

Help GIJN Support Global Investigative Reporting
Journalism is under threat. Investigative reporting, in particular, is under attack as never before, and we need your help. For 15 years, the Global Investigative Journalism Network has trained and supported the world’s most determined reporters as they’ve dug into corruption and abuses of power. We’ve helped bring watchdog reporting to the far corners of the Earth, and today investigative journalists are in more countries doing tougher reporting than we ever imagined.

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

Reporting Tools & Tips
8 Lessons on Investigative Journalism from “Spotlight”
Spotlight is without a doubt the most compelling, most insightful movie on investigative journalism since All the President’s Men, the 1975 classic on the Watergate Scandal. This is great story-telling that takes viewers inside the Spotlight investigative team at The Boston Globe as it dived into one of the more notorious crimes of our time – the systematic tolerance and cover-up of thousands of cases of pedophilia by the Catholic Church. At a time when investigative journalists are under fire around the world, here is a public tutorial on why in-depth, watchdog reporting is so important to social accountability and democracy.

News & Analysis
Do Russian Media Get a Boost from Bots on Twitter?
Hundreds of what appear to be Twitter bots are artificially inflating the retweet and favorite counts of tweets with links to articles from some of Russia’s top news agencies. Lawrence Alexander discovered that these same fake accounts have previously mass-posted links to scores of pro-Kremlin LiveJournal blogs—themselves part of a network of thousands. In this piece, which originally appeared on Global Voices, Alexander walks us through his research process.

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 23-29: the beneficiaries of the refugee crisis (@br_data); attacks on asylum housing (@RechtesLand); job opportunity at Code for Africa (@code4africa); gender violence in Catalonia (@naciodigital); and more

News & Analysis
A Global Assault on Nonprofits
In an era of increasing hostility to independent media, one of the bright spots is the rapid expansion of journalism nonprofits around the world — training, promoting, and reporting on stories that otherwise would never see the light of day. But a dangerous trend now threatens the progress our colleagues have made on press freedom and watchdog reporting: a crackdown on nonprofit organizations. Restrictions on international funding account for more than a third of the measures since 2012. With that in mind, we are pleased to reprint this important story from the Journal of Democracy, detailing the global scope of the backlash.

Data Journalism Reporting Tools & Tips
Research Desk: Open Data Guides, Migration, Terrorism

News & Analysis
COLPIN Showcases Latin America’s Best Muckraking
The seventh Latin American Investigative Journalism Conference ended on Monday, bringing together 150 journalists from some 15 countries in Lima, Peru. The conference, held November 20-23, presented awards to an impressive array of stories from across the region. Noting the quality of the awards submissions, veteran journalist Gustavo Gorritti declared, “El periodismo de investigacion se ha salvado.” (“Investigative Journalism has been saved.”)

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 17-22: ISIS killings mapped (@wireditalia); 50 years of #ddj (@gijn); Airbnb’s Spain limbo (@elespanolcom); traffic accident black spots (@AalenerNachr); and Kickstarting Tanzania ddj (@Code4Africa).

News & Analysis
The Pentagon, Propaganda, and Independent Media
Gone are the days of complaints about information operations and psychological operations (PSYOPS) undermining media development being pursued by USAID and its contractors. But those have been replaced by broader concerns that the U.S government overall may now be too focused on counter-messaging at the expense of independent media development. “We are concerned that there is an increasing shift away from supporting genuinely independent media towards what might be termed counter-propaganda and promoting counter narratives,” says James Deane, director of policy and learning at BBC Media Action.

News & Analysis
European Parliament Taken to Court by Journalists from all EU
For the first time ever journalists representing all European member states have teamed up to file complaints with the European Court of Justice against the European Parliament (EP). The institution refused to grant the journalists’ requests for access to information related to how the 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) spend their allowances. Journalists filed complaints with the Court of Justice on 13 November.

Data Journalism
Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 9-16: James Bond’s Brands (@BIQdata); 50 years of #ddj (@gijn); Google News Lab Fellowship UK (@googlenewslab); the Journalist-Engineer (@matthew_daniels); Sparklines (@EdwardTufte); and data literacy (@KirkDBorne).

News & Analysis
Investigative Journalists Form Alliance in Latin America
Cross-border cooperation was the big takeaway from a three-day meeting of investigative journalists from 17 countries in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 4-6. Billed as “The First Caribbean Meeting of Investigative Journalists: Tracking the Stories that Connect Us,” one aim was to create a counterweight to the power of organized crime by cooperating across borders, according to Carla Minet of the Center of Investigative Journalism of Puerto Rico.