As GIJN has grown to 145-strong member organizations, we’re finding a wealth of unique methods they’re using to increase revenue, expand outreach, and support investigative work. Here are a few out-of-the-box ideas and programs implemented by GIJN members that are worth a second look.
Many media investors see disaster everywhere they look, as traditional media lose audience, revenues, and relevance. However, the importance of media is “absolutely obvious” and media companies need more support from democratic societies than they are getting.
Here are the top data journalism tweets for Feb 13-19, per our NodeXL mapping: France’s capital of celibacy (@LeTelegramme); Ode to Hans Rosling (@ddjournalism); Portugal’s tax-free Madeira (@BR_Recherche); Love/hate pie charts (@storywithdata); Dutch ddj guide (@henkvaness); & more.
As the Syrian civil war has played out on the battlefields with gunshots and mortars, a parallel conflict has been fought online. In this interview, Al Jazeera’s Juliana Ruhfus details the methodology and challenges of her investigation into an “invisible” cyberwar and the process of transforming the investigation into an online game.
Here are the hottest data journalism tweets for Feb 6-12, per our NodeXL mapping: data tips (@pilhofer); Trump tweets (@DataRemixed); 165 years of Swiss Immigration (@duc_qn); Lisa Charlotte Rost’s data blog (@lisacrost); open corporate data (@ddjournalism); & more.
Divine intervention appears to be the only thing protecting journalists in Iraq these days. Local reporters are sent off to do conflict reporting with no prior training and equipped with bad, cheaply made and easily penetrable vests. Mustafa Sa’adoun, director of Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights, details the dangers of being an Iraqi war reporter.
FOIA is the solar-powered flashlight of the journalism world — it offers direct access to primary source material which sometimes leads to a big scoop. MuckRock executive editor JPat Brown shares the compelling, and sometimes hilarious, stories that results from MuckRock’s FOIA requests.
Here are the hottest data journalism tweets for Jan 30-Feb 5, per our NodeXL mapping: Visual Trumpery (@albertocairo); dataviz colour functions (@FastCoDesign); How to Lie with Statistics (@PenguinBooks); mapping 13m climate change tweets (@CarbonBrief); OpenStreetMap (@datenjournalist); & more.
Transnational investigations pose a different set of additional challenges. Coordinating journalists across borders, who have different priorities, and making them work as if they were sitting in the same newsroom, is not an easy task. Here are some lessons Investigate Europe has to share based on their experience.
This is a list of winning stories drawn from 16 major global or regional journalism awards given in 2016, which hopefully might serve as a source of inspiration for you to find original stories, to innovate in how to tell them, or to find a thread to develop a fresh angle. Take heart that the quality of work by solo reporters or fledgling investigative teams can sometimes stand out as much as that of huge media outlets.
