Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://gijn.org/category/profiles/)
Indigenous communities are often under siege by dominant cultures, and suffer the consequences of colonialism. Their resources stolen, and their people subjected to discrimination and abuse. Indigenous journalists from Australia, Canada, and the United States talk about their award-winning investigations, ranging from forced displacement to fake tribes, and deaths in custody.
Carrie Lozano is a talented storyteller, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and recently became the director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. She spoke to GIJN’s Spanish editor, Andrea Arzaba, about the challenges and opportunities for documentary filmmakers and how her background has shaped her work.
The perpetrators of violence in South Africa tend to receive little sympathy and sparse coverage in the national press. But when Ruth Hopkins started to explore allegations of wrongdoing inside the country’s prisons, she was inundated by claims of abuse and torture. This story explores her decade-long investigation into incarceration in the country.
The French investigative journalism outlet Disclose made waves in 2019 by revealing the shocking extent of pedophilia in amateur sports and the widespread use of French-manufactured arms in the Yemen conflict. One of its founders tells GIJN why a reader-supported model is allowing it to exist “halfway between the media and an NGO.”
Secularism in the world’s largest democracy is threatened by a Hindu-nationalist movement that takes pages from the playbooks of authoritarian leaders around the world. In this longread, journalist Maddy Crowell shares the first-hand story of one New Delhi-based magazine that is trying to protect democracy in India when other news outlets fail to hold power to account.
After spending time in solitary confinement in Iran, Sarah Shourd started to explore what confinement meant in the United States and has produced a body of work about what she found in prisons around the country. Her play about confinement – “The BOX”– was broadcast over Zoom, bringing a story about the desperation of solitary confinement to audiences experiencing isolation around the world.
Citizen Matters is the flagship publication of the Bengaluru-based Oorvani Foundation, a nonprofit working on open knowledge platforms that help develop better cities. Today, it has successfully transitioned to become an online-only news site, and has been expanding its reach to other cities, writes Amruta Byatnal for GIJN.
The South African investigative site Oxpeckers uses a combination of data analysis, collaboration, and interactive data visualization tools to tell the most compelling stories about the land and those accused of damaging it. From mining to environmental crimes and wildlife trafficking, it has brought investigative techniques to beats like mining that were once the preserve of business reporters.
When Jeff Gerritt first started asking questions about deaths in Texas jails, he was told “it’s not news for someone to die in county jail.” But his reporting and the Op Ed pieces that resulted from it led to a Pulitzer Prize, a rare win for a scrappy thrice-weekly paper in an era where the journalism industry is seeing increasing cutbacks and layoffs.
Following the 2011 Tunisian revolution, the loosening of free speech created a vibrant marketplace of ideas but investigative reporting still lagged. A group of Tunisian journalists set out to change this by founding independent media outlet Inkyfada, which has experimented with data and audio storytelling and worked hard to diversify its revenue in order to guard its independence. Layli Foroudi profiled Inkyfada for GIJN.
Frustrated by journalism that gave voice to those in power rather than the voiceless, Yasuomi Sawa was inspired to become an investigative journalist. He shares with Scilla Alecci about the state of journalism in Japan, including the limitations to its existing freedom of information laws and how preventing institutional or individual embarrassment can hinder a relentless free press and uncomfortable public debates.
