As our governments and businesses become increasingly flush with information, more and bigger data are becoming available from across the globe. Increasingly, investigative reporters need to know how to obtain, clean, and analyze “structured information” in this digital world. Otherwise, they and the news organizations they work for will miss some of the most important […]
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is now accepting proposals for the 10th Global Investigative Journalism Conference, to be held in the autumn of 2017. If your organization would like to host the next GIJC after this year’s conference in Rio de Janeiro, now is the time to assemble and submit a proposal. Deadline to submit a proposal is August 15.
Applications are open for the coveted Latin American Investigative Journalism Awards. Organized by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and Transparency International, the competition offers US$30,000 in awards, including a grand prize of $15,000. Deadline to apply is June 14. The awards will be presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio this October.
About a third of all countries in the world now require officials to publicly disclose their assets. Institutions like the World Bank and the OECD see this as a good thing. Asset declarations, they say, are crucial tools for fighting corruption and holding officials accountable. As an investigative journalist in the Philippines, I found asset statements vital to digging into conflicts of interest and the illegal accumulation of wealth by those in public office. But pushback on official disclosures is coming from an unlikely quarter.
One of the bright spots in investigative journalism over the past decade has been the rapid spread of nonprofits dedicated to supporting in-depth journalism around the world. A 2012 survey by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) identified 106 investigative journalism nonprofits in nearly 50 countries – with more than half of them founded […]
In October 2013, the Global Investigative Journalism Conference will again present the Global Shining Light Award, a unique award which honors investigative reporting in a developing or transitioning country, done under threat, duress, or in the direst of conditions. The winner receives an honorary plaque, US$1,000, and a free trip to the Global Conference in Rio de Janeiro.
So you’ve amassed terabytes of data, reams of documents and hours of expert testimony, all backing up your conclusions. What’s the best way to convince people you’re right?
Tell them a story.
Ideally, a compelling, colorful tale weaving in memorable anecdotes and striking details. Printed in a clear, legible font. Oh, and it helps – no kidding – if it rhymes.
At least according to Nobel-prizewinning economist Daniel Kahneman, author of the outstanding Thinking, Fast and Slow, who’s made a career out of understanding – experimentally – how our brains take in information and make decisions. It isn’t always pretty, but it does help explain why storytelling is a centuries-old means of passing on information.
High quality investigative journalism is spreading around the world. One country where it has put down strong roots, despite an often hostile environment, is South Africa. The depth of reporting can be seen in the just announced Taco Kuiper Awards, that country’s highest prize for investigative journalism. In the awards announcement speech last weekend, which GIJN is pleased to reprint here, Wits University Journalism Professor Anton Harber salutes the finalists for work on extraordinary stories ranging from police death squads to government waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust.
Kate Crawford, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, recently warned about failing to closely scrutinize the results of big data analysis. In a keynote speech at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, she called on “data scientists” to use the methods of social science in examining data to avoid wrong conclusions and misinterpretations. We decided to seek the thoughts and comments of award-winning journalists Jennifer LaFleur and David Donald.
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.
Today, more than 90 countries have laws that require officials to turn over public records, and the number continues to grow each year. And even in countries with no laws specifying whether records should be made available, it never hurts to ask.
Below are a few of the best resources for journalists seeking to file records requests in countries with laws governing access to information.
Hacks and hackers meetups. Open government initiatives. Hackathons and datafests. The media development world has discovered big data, and it is embracing it big time. Donors like the Knight and Omidyar foundations are focused almost exclusively on tech fixes to what ails the media. As one prominent donor told a nonprofit newsroom executive, “We no longer fund content.”
Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.Scarecrow
In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.
In a never-ending fight for resources – with editors, owners, donors, and developers – we investigative journalists need to make our case more effectively than ever before. Despite knowing that what we do makes a difference, we often don’t marshal the data and arguments that show why investigative reporting is worth the investment.
A concise guide to digital security for investigative journalists, including email, passwords, logins, and malware, with links to tipsheets and tutorials.
Español Journalists are being strongly urged to protect their communications and information from growing threats. Yet several studies show that most of us in the media, despite believing the danger is real, are not adopting basic protections. The Rory Peck Foundation issued a Digital Security Guide aimed at freelancers, stressing that “even taking small, simple […]
The figures are grim for our colleagues around the world. Since 1992, more than 1,400 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Well over 890 of them have been murdered with impunity; that is, no killer was ever brought to justice. And today, more than 274 journalists are in prison worldwide, […]
