Cross-border investigative reporting has come far since its early attempts in the 1980s and ’90s by a handful of nonprofits. Today’s projects are multinational efforts involving mainstream media, hundreds of journalists, and tech-savvy data analysis and security systems.
Hundreds of journalists are forced into exile around the world by despots, autocrats, and crime cartels. Exiled editors and émigré media are an old story. But amid the modern backlash against independent media, journalists are taking advantage of a new era in tools and technology. These digital toolkits are proving a game-changer, enabling journalists to better report on their homelands, and their audiences to better access that reporting.
More than $550 billion was spent on digital ads last year — on everything from banners and video ads to sponsored tweets and pop-ups of every sort. What’s behind this mega-business? The systems used to buy and sell digital ads are vast, complicated, poorly understood, and rife with fraud and deception.
There are numerous investigative topics to explore between the farmer’s field and the grocery store – and, indeed, the plate – and several recent projects have exposed abuses in the production, distribution, and access to food. This expert panel offers deep experience in issues from fisheries and pesticides to food security and biodiversity — with journalists based in Tunisia, the UK, the US, and Southeast Asia.
We are in the midst of a decade-long global backlash against democracy and human rights. A new extremism has taken hold, characterized by radical right-wing groups and ultranationalist political movements. These groups are not only growing but are becoming more organized. International ties among them are also growing — digitally, ideologically, financially — but their networks are poorly understood and investigative journalism in this area is lacking.
This hands-on class will deepen your reporting skills by using QGIS, a free, popular mapping program. More than pretty pictures, mapping programs help you uncover stories and discover important patterns. Crime, health, and environment are just some beats that benefit by knowing mapping skills. In this class you will get familiar with using QGIS and start doing fundamental analysis using real-life data.
If there was just one panel to attend at GIJC23, this might be it. We’re witnessing a global assault on democratic institutions and a sustained global decline in democracies. Investigative journalism, in partnership with civil society, has emerged as a last line of defense for human rights and democratic principles in countries around the world — even where we thought we were secure. This panel features giants in the push-back against fascism and authoritarianism. We have an extraordinary lineup — Lina Attalah, Vinod Jose, and David Cay Johnston. — who will offer inspiration and tools to fight for a free and accountable future.
The best historians and investigative journalists share a great deal: they go after primary sources, they follow the trails of money and accountability, and they put events in a broader context that the public can understand. Often those events look shockingly different just 20 or 30 years later, based on documents, data, and interviews.
This workshop might just emerge as the one that changes your life as a watchdog journalist. Misinformation and disinformation on “closed” social media networks — such as WhatsApp and Telegram – have already had devastating consequences for democratic processes in places like India, Nigeria, Russia, and Brazil.
This session will address how to convert unstructured data (documents) into structured data that can be filtered, summarized, and visualized.
