Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/category/case-studies/)
Fundamentally, journalists and scholars do similar work – diving into documents, crunching numbers, conducting interviews. But their timeframes, and their measures of success, can be quite different. The Global Reporting Centre tries to bridge that gap, both by funding such collaborations and serving as an ambassador between two very different cultures.
Community news co-op advocates see the new model they’re shaping as having a high chance for success in places where existing approaches to digital sites might struggle or fail, including in many news deserts. The Banyan Project’s Tom Stites writes about how news co-ops work, pointing out the pros and cons of the model.
WhatsApp’s popularity in Latin America and Africa presents an opportunity for emerging, digital-first titles and smaller newsrooms. Laura Oliver explains how newspapers and startups from Zimbabwe to Brazil and South Africa are using the platform in innovative ways to share their stories.
Despite its overt political objectives, the research section of FBK — an anti-corruption nonprofit founded by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny — has emerged as a potent investigative team that recently attracted 110 million YouTube views for a video that exposed massive corruption at a Black Sea palace. FBK’s head of investigations told GIJN about the methods the team uses for these investigations, and what professional journalists can learn from their approach.
How did a crack South African investigative team, on the country’s biggest and richest newspaper, go horribly wrong? A new book by Anton Harber does a deep dive into the best and worst of the country’s journalism.
A joint investigation by a historian and a journalist revealed that a number of US universities were beneficiaries from land expropriated from Indigenous communities. The authors, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, reveal what tools helped them uncover the story. They built a geodatabase and traced the money to find out where the land had come from and how much was paid for it.
In South Sudan, conflict and government repression make it difficult to do on-the-ground reporting, so a team of journalists designed a mobile phone survey to gather data on forced displacement and destruction across the country. Carolyn Thompson explains why their award-winning investigation may offer lessons to others working in repressive environments or facing movement restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.
An Australian documentary team used user-generated footage to create a film about Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 outbreak. They used clips filmed on mobile phones that showed people with the virus being dragged into vans by police, and bodies left on the street and on hospital floors, using different tools to verify the material.
The New York Times’ Privacy Project highlighted the alarmingly unregulated activity of location data companies collecting data from millions of smartphone users. As the coronavirus pandemic sheds further light on the uses and misuses of location tracking, here’s a deeper look at the project that visualized phones being tracked around the US, from the Pentagon and the White House to the streets of San Francisco.
As coronavirus sweeps through communities around the world, the Membership Puzzle Project has shared examples from newsrooms around the world on how they have quickly adapted pillars of their membership programs and memberful routines to respond to the realities of this crisis.
Governments around the world, some which have sent workers home, are announcing interruptions in responding to freedom of information requests. Journalists are being told to expect delays in more than a dozen countries. But press freedom advocates warn that countries are taking big steps backward just when the free flow of information is most needed. GIJN’s Toby McIntosh rounds up some of the nations which have been affected.
