In this latest of GIJN’s webinar series, experienced African journalists will share their assessment of the COVID-19 coverage to date, offer suggestions for future investigations, and share their strategies, tips and tools to help journalists to investigate the most important pandemic stories on the continent.
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.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, delves into the perils of reporting on preprint research platforms, a snapshot of end-to-end digital advertising and publishing supply chains, and how the French government took down a “fake news” page after being accused of “overstepping its constitutional role and infringing on press freedoms.”
The use of open source tools, user-generated content, and advanced search filters has allowed reporters to break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic from home quarantine. In a recent GIJN webinar, three investigative researchers shared key insights on the tools and techniques that have unearthed facts and visuals beyond the reach of traditional field reporting.
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.
What will life be like after the coronavirus lockdown measures are relaxed? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 27 to May 3 finds German news outlets ZDF heute and RBB24 looking into pedestrian traffic in Germany post-quarantine, the Financial Times and The New York Times highlighting the complexities of getting an accurate COVID-19 death toll and the problem of undercounting fatalities, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention setting up a dashboard to track statistics related to the coronavirus across the region.
A group of Indian journalists have been calling out the government on social media over its opacity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaborative effort continues to press for official answers on overall health preparedness, such as drug availability, access to care, health inventory, and insurance schemes.
Like health professionals, care givers, and other essential workers, journalists face heightened and grave health risks as they pursue crucial stories on the COVID-19 crisis. But measuring coronavirus deaths among media workers poses many of the same problems as counting true mortality figures in the general population. The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a nonprofit focused on press freedom, recorded 64 deaths in 24 countries by May 5.
The COVID-19 pandemic narrative is dominated by numbers — mountains of data and seemingly endless statistical models. Yet most of the figures are uncertain at best, often highly flawed and simply untrue at worst. How to deal with the many claims on the truth that are made every day? What should journalists do if the evidence is poor?
