Satellite imagery has become an indispensable tool in investigative journalism for fact-finding, gauging the impact of a particular situation and figuring out the exact details. Here’s a round-up of of some major stories which satellite imagery helped uncover.
The fifth edition of DIG Festival, the annual international conference that celebrates and awards the best investigative documentaries in the world, is fast approaching. The jury, chaired this year by Naomi Klein, will pick and announce the winners in Riccione, Italy during the festival, from May 30 to June 2.
On November 27, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Central European Time, five separate media organizations broke similar stories on a United Nations cover-up of the murders of their own staff. It took nothing less than the “radical sharing” of information between these rival platforms to expose a global conspiracy of silence.
The documentary “Trafficked in America” investigates a labor trafficking scheme targeting Guatemalan teenagers who were smuggled into the United States and forced to work long hours at an egg farm to pay off their smuggling debts. In an interview with Journalist’s Resource, the film’s authors offer insights into the investigative reporting process and the importance of cultural competency in doing high-quality journalism.
Being struck by lightning is often used as an example of heavenly retribution because it is so unlikely. Fatalities due to lightning are statistical outliers, since most people struck by lightning survive. So what is the best way to avoid becoming one of these outliers? The following is a step-by-step set of instructions for unpacking a dataset – and being careful about the conclusions we draw.
A fugitive convict from the Netherlands has taunted Dutch police with provocative pictures and videos from Iran, playing a game of “catch me if you can” on Instagram. Investigative reporters from Bellingcat were able to reveal the last known location of the criminal with the help of over 60 Twitter users. Here’s how they did that.
The German nonprofit news site Correctiv wanted to cover important issues — such as property ownership in German cities — that didn’t have accessible public data. So it created CrowdNewsroom, a platform that enables it to empower readers to contribute to investigations.
If current trends continue, the old debate about whether journalists can ever be truly objective may fade away, say Mark Lee Hunter and Luk N. Van Wassenhove. Objectivity, they argue, is morphing into a radically new form.
How often is social media used as a source in news stories? Can a decision tree algorithm generate tens of thousands of 250-word stories? And what is belief-driven data journalism? These questions were at the heart of some of the promising projects featured at the 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium.
In the public imagination, reporters working with whistleblowers has traditionally meant All the President’s Men-style cloak-and-dagger stealth — meetings in shadowy underground garages, potted plants turned into signals, Hal Holbrook’s whispered exhortations to “follow the money.” But today, journalists’ interactions with whistleblowers are more likely to come in Signal chats or secure drop boxes than Washington, DC garages. And that shift has changed the terms of engagement in often confusing ways.
