Citizen Investigation Guide

Titles Don’t Matter, Investigate! Curiosity fuels investigations, and there’s no monopoly on who can be curious.  Citizens can investigate, and they do. GIJN provides some great examples below.  This GIJN guide aims to help non-journalists investigate even more. The sections teach the techniques used by investigative journalists. Our guide will help with: Planning and carrying […]

Investigation: A Learnable Skill Journalists have to learn how to conduct investigations. Citizens can learn, too. Citizen investigators often begin with a very important advantage – motivation. Their drive may be based on a particular irritation, a suspicion, or a special interest. Whatever the source, having a goal is an advantage. Another plus for citizen investigators is […]

This chapter provides advice on ethical behavior for citizen investigators, and on how to work safely and securely. On both topics, we draw from the experience of the journalism world while trying to make it relevant for non-journalists. Ethics Codes of journalistic ethics are behavioral norms with value for citizen investigators.   Such ethics codes are […]

Online Search Strategies We’ll get to specific tips and tools on searching the internet in a minute, but the first suggestion is to consider carefully what you want to know. This is essential to effectively framing your search. It is usually best to start online searches with a few keywords. After seeing the results, try […]

Researching Individuals and Experts There are many sophisticated online tools for conducting research on individuals.  The range of digital investigative tools is visualized in this resource, The Open Source Intelligence Framework. Click on any category in the outline and see a wide array of options. Online Research Tools and Investigative Techniques by the BBC’s Paul Myers […]

Researching Corporations and Their Owners Learning about corporations is one of the toughest challenges for investigators, professional or amateur. Unfortunately, the identity of the real owners may be legally disguised. The good news is that there are many ways to research companies. These include: Free databases Subscription databases  Official records Corporate websites Court records Internet […]

Investigating Governments Investigating governments and their actions is a vast challenge.  There are tools to use, but the best place to begin is self-education about how things work in theory and practice. Whatever the investigatory goal, success will be enhanced through fundamental knowledge of how government works. What you learned in school may lay the […]

Researching Politicians There are many ways to dig into a politician’s finances and political record. Official resources are a good place to start. Despite their frequent limitations, you might find: income and asset disclosures; campaign funding disclosures; court records; public records about actions in office. This resource will focus on using official records and assume […]

Land Ownership Records: Useful But Hard to Find  Researching property records is mainly a local game. In some countries, learning who owns a piece of land or a house is easily done via online searching, but in other places you’ll need to visit government offices and dig through records. That is, if the records exist. […]