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Reporting Tools & Tips

Investigating with Drones, Stone Tablets, and LinkedIn

This video was taken by a drone and then posted on a popular web portal in China. It provides an aerial view of the luxurious home of the son of Zhou Yongkang, the country’s security chief. There’s not much commentary here, just tracking shots of a white, two-story mansion built in the traditional style. But the real evidence showing corruption in the Zhou family wasn’t dug up by drones. Instead, it was names etched on tombstones in a village in China’s Jiangsu Province that allowed reporters to find the corruption trail.

Case Studies

How Three Independent News Sites Survived their First Five Years

Launching a news publication online is the easy part. Paying the bills and surviving for several years is the hard part. Three of those who have evolved and survived for at least five years are La Silla Vacia, a political website in Colombia, Homicide Watch, a news and data platform in three U.S. cities, and Texas Tribune, a news site focused on Texas civic life.

News & Analysis

Crowdfunding: Alternative Finance Builds Alternative Journalism

Greg Palast’s approach to investigative journalism can be summed up in one phrase: Stand up for the underdogs, and take on the fatcats. His hard-hitting reports on corporations like ExxonMobil, politicians like Bush, and shadowy institutions like vulture funds stem from an impulse to challenge those players with the power to bend the rules to their private advantage. That’s why functioning democracies need people like Palast.

Data Journalism

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for April 10-16), including items from Heap Data Blog, Visualizing Advocacy, and Data Driven Journalism, among others.

News & Analysis

South African Awards Showcase Impressive Investigations

Despite a tough environment for investigative reporting, South Africa’s muckrakers are turning out some of the world’s best journalism year after year. Here are the finalists and winner of the just announced Taco Kuiper Awards, that country’s highest prize for investigative journalism. In the awards presentation, Wits University Journalism Professor Anton Harber talked about the extraordinary range of reports submitted, from corrupt officials and crooks to rhino horn smuggling, bad doctors, botched circumcisions, and lion hunting.

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for April 1-9), including items from Morgenpost, the Global Editors Network, and Data Driven Journalism, among others.

GIJN Welcomes New Members from Argentina, Korea, S. Africa

GIJN is proud to welcome eight new members to the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The group includes respected journalism organizations in Argentina, Korea and South Africa, nonprofits focused on environmental and hate speech issues, and a start-up in France determined to spread investigative reporting across the Francophone world. This brings GIJN’s membership to 98 organizations in 44 countries. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to GIJN’s new members.

Resource

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for March 27-April 2), including items from The Migrant Files Project, NZZ Data, and the Tow Center, among others.

News & Analysis

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for March 20-March 27), including items from Al Jazzera, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) Data, The Guardian, and Quartz, among others.

Resource

Customise your Browser: Using Add-ons for your Web Research

While many people use Internet Explorer to surf the net, users of Firefox and Chrome enjoy a wider range of options when it comes to add-ons. Add-ons are little apps that run inside the browser and allow you some extra functionality. They are usually free and are launched by either clicking on a button or choosing from a right-click menu.

Aiming for the Stars: Teaching Investigative Journalism

This paper was presented during the professor’s track at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in October 2013 in Rio De Janeiro. For more on educators and investigative reporting, see the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium. This paper outlines an approach to teaching investigative journalism that produces publishable stories within an approximately four –month period. It is based on a five-step method that has been developed over the past few years on a journalism programme for graduate students.

Data Journalism

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for March 13-March 19), including items from The Guardian, Databootcamp, the University of Zurich, and New York Public Radio, among others.

Resource

A Guide to Verifying Digital Content in Emergencies

The Verification Handbook is a new resource for journalists and aid responders, with step-by-step guidelines for using using information generated by the public. Although targeted for use during emergencies, the handbook provides useful tips for verifying crowd-sourced information in general. Thanks to the European Journalism Centre, which developed the handbook, for allowing GIJN to publish this excerpt.

News & Analysis

The Future of Media Is Mobile

After years of predictions that this year would be the year of mobile, finally it has arrived. So here are some numbers that should prompt strategizing and action by digital media publishers. What small and large digital publishers ought to learn from these figures is that the public is moving so quickly to mobile consumption of news and social sharing that they need to take action.

Data Journalism

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for March 6-March 12), including items from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Quartz, OpenNews, and the European Journalism Center, among others.

News & Analysis

Spurring Cross-Border Collaboration on Journalism Investigations in Latin America

More and more, Latin American journalism is thriving in the digital space. Investigative journalism platforms online are joining forces, data journalism bootcamps are taking off and there are new accelerators looking to fund innovative news projects. “In today’s world, journalists spend more time in the virtual world than in the paper stacks,” said Carlos Eduardo Huertas, director of Connectas, a nonprofit which supports transnational journalism.

News & Analysis

Ukraine: Amid Attacks, Crimea Center Returns, New Sites Archived

We have several reports on Ukraine today. First, some good news: GIJN’s member in Crimea, the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism, is back in its office after vigilantes seized it on March 2. Spurred by the attack, GIJN worked with the Internet Archive to back up its site, and now we’ve helped preserve seven more independent media sites in Ukraine. And then the bad news: attacks continue on the media there, chronicled in a harrowing list of incidents compiled by the Crimean Center.

Data Journalism Methodology

Using Twitter to Find People at the Scene of a Breaking Story

As news stories break, journalists find themselves wanting to speak to members of the public. They could have witnessed an incident or may have been affected by an event. Their views count and they enhance our reports with a human angle. There are many ways to locate ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but we don’t always know how our approaches will be received, or indeed if our messages to them will be read at all. This is where Twitter comes into its own.

Data Journalism

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for February 27-March 5), including items from #NICAR14, #HybLab, Data Driven Journalism, and TechCrunch, among others.

Covering the Extractives Industry: Big Data, New Tools, and Journalism

The extractives sector (oil, gas, and mining) continues to be an important subject for journalists, particularly in developing countries. Revenues from oil, gas and mining contribute substantially to GDP and in many cases make up the bulk of government revenue. Indeed, among 29 nations that in 2011 were implementing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), 10 reported extractives revenues totaling over one-quarter of their respective government budgets (six of which were actually over 50%).

Data Journalism

Data Journalists from 20 Countries Gather for Cutting-Edge NICAR14

A record 950 journalists, data experts, and students from 20 countries gathered last weekend for NICAR14, the annual data journalism conference organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). The five-day gathering, twice the size of last year’s conference, has tripled in size over the past five years.

Data Journalism

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for February 20-26), including items from Morgenpost, Journalism.co.uk, Untapped Cities, and Zeit Online, among others.

Case Studies

YanukovychLeaks Update: “The Project Is Becoming Bigger”

The extraordinary story of how Ukrainian investigative reporters saved thousands of documents left by fleeing ex-president Viktor Yanokuvych has gone viral. YanukovychLeaks.org, the site thrown together by an impromptu team of journalists and hackers, has received more than 600,000 visitors since going live on Tuesday – and those documents have been viewed 3.8 million times. “That means people really do care about transparency. It is valued,” says Drew Sullivan of the nonprofit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which is helping provide resources for the project.