Applications are open for the coveted Latin American Investigative Journalism Awards. Organized by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and Transparency International, the competition offers US$30,000 in awards, including a grand prize of $15,000. Deadline to apply is June 14. The awards will be presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio this October.
One of the bright spots in investigative journalism over the past decade has been the rapid spread of nonprofits dedicated to supporting in-depth journalism around the world. A 2012 survey by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) identified 106 investigative journalism nonprofits in nearly 50 countries – with more than half of them founded […]
In October 2013, the Global Investigative Journalism Conference will again present the Global Shining Light Award, a unique award which honors investigative reporting in a developing or transitioning country, done under threat, duress, or in the direst of conditions. The winner receives an honorary plaque, US$1,000, and a free trip to the Global Conference in Rio de Janeiro.
High quality investigative journalism is spreading around the world. One country where it has put down strong roots, despite an often hostile environment, is South Africa. The depth of reporting can be seen in the just announced Taco Kuiper Awards, that country’s highest prize for investigative journalism. In the awards announcement speech last weekend, which GIJN is pleased to reprint here, Wits University Journalism Professor Anton Harber salutes the finalists for work on extraordinary stories ranging from police death squads to government waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust.
Kate Crawford, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, recently warned about failing to closely scrutinize the results of big data analysis. In a keynote speech at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, she called on “data scientists” to use the methods of social science in examining data to avoid wrong conclusions and misinterpretations. We decided to seek the thoughts and comments of award-winning journalists Jennifer LaFleur and David Donald.
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.
Today, more than 90 countries have laws that require officials to turn over public records, and the number continues to grow each year. And even in countries with no laws specifying whether records should be made available, it never hurts to ask.
Below are a few of the best resources for journalists seeking to file records requests in countries with laws governing access to information.
Hacks and hackers meetups. Open government initiatives. Hackathons and datafests. The media development world has discovered big data, and it is embracing it big time. Donors like the Knight and Omidyar foundations are focused almost exclusively on tech fixes to what ails the media. As one prominent donor told a nonprofit newsroom executive, “We no longer fund content.”
Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.Scarecrow
In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.
