In a recent GIJN webinar, open source reporting expert Henk van Ess shared several online search tricks. But he explains that these work-arounds are merely tools for a new approach to online research that he calls “thinking visual,” which invites reporters to think of keywords like a search engine, rather than a person.
Open source investigation teams around the world sprang into action as they watched a pro-Trump mob violently storm the US Capitol on January 6. A senior investigator with Bellingcat told GIJN how his team was able to scrape and preserve hundreds of social media videos from the attack, and shared ten tips on how any reporter can grab visual evidence during breaking news events.
People around the world believe the several promising COVID-19 vaccines were designed to do the two things we most want them to do: reduce severe illness and death, and reduce the spread of the disease. But a central problem, experts say, is that none of the new vaccine trials were designed to achieve either of those goals.
A November 18 press release, claiming a safe vaccine that protects 95% of people against COVID-19, by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech was greeted with excited headlines. In this article, two leading health reporters shared tips on how to read such releases and balanced cautious optimism with the provision that the release relied on interim results from a trial in an accelerated setting.
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to Alberto Cairo, head of visualization at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Cairo shared several user-friendly tools and core principles to help investigative reporters shape their data visually to create new insights for audiences.
At least 462 journalists have died from COVID-19, from 56 countries — with Latin American countries accounting for more than half this grim tally and a recent surge striking India and Bangladesh. One NGO tracking these deaths told GIJN that most journalists who died in the pandemic since October 1 were under the age of 60.
In a GIJN webinar on investigating the police, investigative journalists from Tunisia, South Africa, and the United States shared several effective approaches and tools for holding law enforcement bodies accountable for misconduct. Their tips include open source tools for visual forensic analysis of incidents, strategies for matching police radio audio files with social media video, and easy ways to begin your hunt for CCTV footage.
For the past seven weeks, a special GIJN project, #gijnElectionWatchdog, has provided US reporters with tools to tackle the toughest election stories in daily tweets and weekly roundups. Here, with just a few days remaining til a hugely consequential election, we share quick-reference tools that matter in this period for time-pressed journalists.
“Superspreading events” have emerged as major drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic. While available data on these events is limited, new information — including an interactive database of 1,500 events — offers reporters the means to map the patterns of past coronavirus outbreaks, and to evaluate the risks of planned gatherings.
In week six of GIJN’s project to arm US reporters with the tools for the toughest election stories, #gijnElectionWatchdog shared tools to unmask groups behind political ads, an AI-powered search function for any dataset, the list of rules restricting poll watchers in swing states, and a database of election sources searchable by state and category.
