For GIJN’s My Favourite Tools series, we spoke with Indian journalist and information designer Gurman Bhatia. She has worked at the Hindustan Times in Delhi and been a part of the award-winning team at Reuters Graphics, where she worked on visualizations for topics as diverse as election fraud in India, use of force during protests in Hong Kong, and bushfires in Australia.
What happens to the clothes we donate to charity? Or the clothes we buy online, try on, and then return? Two Finnish journalists used tracking devices in order to investigate these post-consumer supply chains, finding that many items make their way on a complex journey to Africa and the Middle East before sometimes ending up in landfill.
When Giacomo Bologna was working on his first freelance story, he reached out to the Fund for Investigative Journalism for help. With a grant to cover his gas mileage, the cost of copying records, and his time, Bologna set up shop in a small room on the third floor of a courthouse in Mississippi and started reviewing paper files to trace a large nonprofit hospital’s practice of aggressively pursuing payment from thousands of poor patients.
Investigating the environment in developing countries can be a particularly dangerous game – far more so in the Global South than in North America and Europe. Journalists in the developing world are prime targets for powerful political and economic interests, operate in a hostile climate, and often lose their lives far from the Western media spotlight.
How did a team of reporters across Asia investigate digital sex crimes, and what did they learn about interviewing victims of image-based abuse during their deep dive into this phenomenon? Sarah Karacs speaks to the team to find out how the collaboration worked, and what they learned about a phenomenon of growing concern worldwide.
In March 2020, environmental journalist Helena Carpio, leaned out of her window to see Caracas filled with smoke. Something was burning, but no one knew where and there was no official news on what was happening. She started to investigate, and the resulting project analyzed two decades of satellite data on hotspots to explore the when, where, and why of forest fires in Venezuela and across Latin America.
A haven of banking secrecy for decades, Switzerland has now become a land of raw materials trading. Most of the private hydrocarbon trading giants have set up their headquarters in Geneva. But unlike banks, which have to comply with international standards on money laundering and tax fraud these trading companies are accountable to virtually no one.
Talya Cooper spent several years working alongside journalists in a newsroom, where she witnessed some “unholy messes” of files on both physical and virtual desktops. But as she writes here, while taking good care of data requires some time and money the loss of irreplaceable reporting work can come at a higher cost.
After more than a year of living with a pandemic that shut down the world, lockdowns are beginning to lift for many across the globe. But for many journalists – a number of whom are already struggling with traumas of their own in a beleaguered industry known for its hostile and pressure-cooker environments – concerns are mounting about an impending mental health crisis brought on by a year of mass isolation, uncertainty, and endless dread.
Since 1998, El Faro has fought for accountability in El Salvador, a Central American country saddled with stubborn poverty, a history of civil conflict, and pervasive criminal gangs. But after decades of investigating criminal organizations, corruption, and illegal practices by security forces, the newspaper might be facing one of its greatest challenges yet.
