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Facebook and Google and their humongous data crunching machines flourish while fine media wilt. How to compete? They take media’s original costly-to-produce-content for free and make it available to users to circulate, anticipating their needs with their intelligent algorithms.
Some of the best tips and techniques come out of the annual meetings by our colleagues in Scandinavia, and this year is no different. More than 600 participants attended the SKUP conference in Tønsberg, Norway, on April 8-10. Among the tip sheets presented was this gem of 25 practical tips that reporters in even the smallest newsrooms can use to good effect, focused on finding great characters and cases to bring your story to life.
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.” They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
Podcast are a great way to find out stories and to be entertained. However, have you ever thought about using them to learn data journalism? In this list, I have collected some of the best podcast about data. Some are specifically about data journalism, whereas others approach data from an innovative perspective.
The International Women’s Media Foundation prepared this report, An Overview Of The Current Challenges To The Safety And Protection Of Journalists, in support of a UNESCO meeting last week, News Organizations Standing Up for the Safety of Media Professionals.”
Attention: Investigative journalists in Asia — mark your calendars! Join us at the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, on September 23-25, 2016. We will be featuring an all-star line-up of top investigative and data journalists from around the world.
A boom in investigative journalism in South Africa seems to be winding down as media houses slash budgets to balance their books to continue to pay dividends to shareholders. “South Africa has had something of a golden era in investigative reporting, with as many as four teams at different institutions dedicated to it,” said Professor Anton Harber, head of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
OGP needs a new organizational structure with new methods for evaluating national commitments. There aren’t enough support unit resources to manage the expansion. We have to rethink how we manage national commitments and how we evaluate what it means to be an open government. It’s just not right that countries can celebrate baby steps at OGP events while at the same time passing odious legislation, sidestepping OGP accomplishments, buckling to corruption, and cracking down on journalists.
Journalism is under threat. Investigative reporting, in particular, is under attack as never before, and we need your help. For 15 years, the Global Investigative Journalism Network has trained and supported the world’s most determined reporters as they’ve dug into corruption and abuses of power. We’ve helped bring watchdog reporting to the far corners of the Earth, and today investigative journalists are in more countries doing tougher reporting than we ever imagined.
It started with trying to predict the outcome of a US presidential election. More than six decades later, computer-assisted reporting is at the core of investigative reporting globally.
On the occasion of International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, UNESCO is releasing a new study today, World Trends In Freedom of Expression and Media Development. Of particular note is the chapter Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age. We are reprinting below that section’s key findings and recommendations, which add another important voice calling for stronger measures to protect sources.
We’re back from the wonderful Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer with a new roundup of resources for you. Thanks to everyone who came to and shared the presentation I did there with Margot Williams of The Intercept, 100 Best Databases for Internet Research. You can find links to all the resources that Margot and I talked about in this post.
On September 25, world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a United Nations summit. The new goals commit all 193 UN member states to an ambitious development agenda that calls for poverty eradication, environmental protection, gender equality, disease prevention, universal schooling, ‘inclusive’ growth, and good governance – and includes, for the first time a commitment to public access to information. This new commitment has potentially transformative implications for the free flow of information and independent media development worldwide.
The Internet is an amazing research resource but often discovery of quality reference tools and reports can be challenging, especially when you think about how quickly new resources appear and often disappear. I hope that these columns not only alert you to useful material but will help you build up your own collection of reference resources, which you can save on your own computer, or utilize a tool like The Wayback Machine to archive it for yourself and others.
Time for a new collection of tools and reports. This week we’ve got a human rights database, file conversion for 208 formats, and nine new reports from research organizations, ranging from terrorism and corruption to European migration. Got a suggestion for The Research Desk? Write me at gprice@mediasourceinc.com.
$8 billion in just a few hours earlier this year? It was because of a web scraper, a tool companies use—as do many data reporters. A web scraper is simply a computer program that reads the HTML code from webpages, and analyze it. With such a program, or “bot,” it’s possible to extract data and information from websites.
It’s time for another roundup of resources and research reports that we’ve curated from around the web. Most of these selections are new on the web in the past few weeks. Several of the reports listed below are full of data including visualizations and can be thought of as reference tools for both current and future research.
Nils Mulvad, co-founder and board member of GIJN, and Helena Bengtsson, editor for the Data Projects Team at the Guardian, share twelve tips on how to use data for stories. These were presented at the 2015 Netzwerk Recherche Conference in Hamburg.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 29-June 4: Free Software and Tools for Investigative Journalists (@DDJ_Tools); Debunking ddj Myths (@jsource); The Art & Science of ddj, German Rent Index (@zeitonline), Swiss Election Dataviz (@srfdata) and more.
Over the past few years we have seen the huge potential of data and document mining in investigative journalism. Tech savvy networks of journalists such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have teamed together for astounding cross-border investigations. OCCRP has even incubated its own tools, such as VIS, Investigative Dashboard and Overview. But we need to do better. There is enormous duplication and missed opportunity in investigative journalism software.
Online research is often a challenge for traditional investigative reporters, journalism lecturers and students. Information from the web can be fake, biased, incomplete or all of the above. Offline, too, there is no happy hunting ground with unbiased people or completely honest governments. In the end, it all boils down to asking the right questions, digital or not. This chapter gives you some strategic advice and tools for digitizing three of the biggest questions in journalism: who, where and when?
Some think of scholarly or academic journals and the articles they contain as boring, not easy to read, and not useful if you’re not an academic. While this might be the case for some articles, the belief that this is the case for all articles in all publications is wrong. Academic and scholarly publications can be of tremendous value to the journalist and researcher.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting about? Top Ten links for March 27 – Apr 5: journalists and coding, 30+ free data tools, #ddj for beginners, asbestos in Italy, political money in Germany, and more. This list is determined by NodeXL, a social media network mapping program. The full map is available at the bottom of this roundup.
The Research Desk is back with another selection of web resources and reports of interest to journalists around the world. This round-up includes a Transparency Portal on UNESCO’s global projects, fact sheets from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and published reports from the U.S. Congressional Research Service and the UK’s House of Commons Library.
