When journalist Umar Cheema launched the Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan (CIRP) last week, he did so with a bang: A blockbuster story that hit the headlines around the world. Two-thirds of Pakistani MPs, his report said, do not pay their taxes. Neither did President Asif Ali Zardari – famous for his spending sprees, polo games and luxurious country estates – and more than half the Cabinet.
India’s best journalists are producing impressive investigative reporting these days. But the unprecedented arrests last week of two journalists for extortion highlights a troubling problem for the country’s free-wheeling media: widespread payoffs and a worrisome lack of credibility. Veteran Delhi-based journalist Shantanu Guha Ray reports on what one prominent editor calls “our News of the World moment.”
On October 29, our Ukrainian colleague Oleg Khomenok was refused entry to Russia for unexplained reasons. A long-time trainer for GIJN member Scoop, the Denmark-based investigative reporting network, he was invited to Russia by the group’s St. Petersburg-based partner, the Regional Press Institute, to give a lecture at a seminar on investigative reporting in Kaliningrad. At the airport, he was barred from entry by border officials, without explanation, and deported on the same plane in which he had arrived.
The GIJN warmly welcomes six new member organizations, extending the global network to 74 groups in 35 countries.
Impressive, world-class reporting was honored this week at the 2012 Latin American Investigative Journalism Conference (COLPIN) in Bogota, Colombia. Here’s a look at the winners, drawn from the announcement by the award’s sponsors, the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute, or IPYS) and Transparency International.
You’d think that getting the names of the shareholders of a company would be fairly easy. Such information should be routinely available. In fact in many parts of the world, it isn’t. Not if you’re talking about private companies, which have managed to elude public scrutiny even in an era of increasing transparency. To be […]
For five-and-a-half-months, a team of European journalists has researched, at the behest of the European Parliament, the critical role that investigative journalism can play in deterring fraud in the European Union. Their nearly 300-page report, released today in Brussels, is a landmark study that makes a powerful case for the contribution that investigative reporting makes “to greater transparency on this issue, tracking irregularities, fraud and corruption, and uncovering misspending on different levels and scales in the EU member states and the EU institutions.”
GIJN is growing! Since July the Global Network has expanded by 30 percent–we now represent 60 groups in 35 countries. Our membership includes investigative reporting centers, professional associations, and grant-making bodies.
Planespotters are hobbyists who have a passion for planes: they track, photograph and record aircraft takeoffs and landings, taking note of registration numbers and other markings. I became interested in planespotting some years ago, after viewing the clever video posted by the Tunisian blogger Astrubal, who put together planespotters’ photographs of the Tunisian presidential plane’s comings and goings.
