Stories
Reporting Tools & Tips
GIJN Toolbox: SpyOnWeb, VirusTotal, and SpiderFoot HX
In this reboot of GIJN’s popular “Toolbox” series, we walk through the techniques journalists can use to find connections between websites using IP addresses and Google Analytics tags hidden in the source code of websites. We’ll also demonstrate how to use the powerful tool SpiderFoot HX to visualize network maps, which help journalists draw connections unseen in the offline world.
Online Investigative Techniques — GIJN Webinars and Workshops with Henk van Ess
GIJN is pleased to announce four free digital events for journalists on cutting-edge online investigative techniques. They will be led by the globally-renowned data journalist, open source reporting expert and trainer, Henk van Ess. The December webinars are open to all and last for 90 minutes. The January workshops are limited to a maximum of 25 people, by application only and will last five hours.
Data Journalism My Favorite Tools
My Favorite Tools: Alberto Cairo on Data Visualization
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to Alberto Cairo, head of visualization at the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing. Cairo shared several user-friendly tools and core principles to help investigative reporters shape their data visually to create new insights for audiences.
Investigative Techniques Methodology News & Analysis Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigating Sexual Assault and Abuse
In a GIJN webinar three journalists who have experience reporting on the #MeToo movement and sexual abuse told reporters how to investigate an often-hidden crime. Among their tips are preparing interviewees for the process, investigating the story doggedly, and using alternative forms of evidence to verify your story. Read these and other tips for investigating sexual abuse allegations in GIJN’s latest tipsheet.
News & Analysis Reporting Tools & Tips
Top 10 Tips for Investigating Health Care, from the Experts
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a public health crisis without precedent in living memory, and journalists have been racing to keep audiences informed. For those new to the health beat, GIJN is here to help with a comprehensive new guide into investigating health care and top tips from experts on what to watch out for, how to check results, and who to talk to about medical innovations.
GIJN Webinar — Investigating the Pandemic: Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine Race
GIJN’s webinar “Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine Race” is the second event to mark the publication of our new guide, “Investigating Health and Medicine.” In this webinar, we are pleased to present a noted physician specializing in vaccine development and an award-winning health journalist. Together, they will cut through the fog to show what red flags to look for both before and after a vaccine is approved.
Data Journalism
Data Journalism Top 10: Simple Google Searches, COVID Contracts, Mining Indigenous Land, Nashville Hot Spots, Blackstone in Berlin
Have you ever noticed how your Google search results now appear with boxes of information extracted from the websites by the search engine? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 9 to 15 found The Markup’s new “Simple Search” browser extension, which allows you to view the best results in the “traditional” Google search format. We also discovered a visualization of the connection between members of the ruling British Conservative Party and COVID-19 contracts, InfoAmazonia’s investigation into mining requests in protected Indigenous land in the Amazon, and German daily Der Tagesspiegel showing that the American private equity group Blackstone is a major private property owner in the German capital, Berlin.
News & Analysis
Latin America’s Best Investigative Journalism Honored at COLPIN 2020
Investigations into water exploitation, government spying, and paramilitary murders were among the stories honored with awards at the annual Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism (COLPIN), which drew hundreds of journalists from more than 20 countries in an online forum.
News & Analysis
Journalist Deaths from COVID-19 Rise Seven-Fold; Nearly 500 Dead Worldwide
At least 462 journalists have died from COVID-19, from 56 countries — with Latin American countries accounting for more than half this grim tally and a recent surge striking India and Bangladesh. One NGO tracking these deaths told GIJN that most journalists who died in the pandemic since October 1 were under the age of 60.
News & Analysis
How a Comic Series Reveals Heavy Metal Poisoning in Peru
The Peruvian investigative journalism outlet Convoca has been exploring what happens to people exposed to lead and other heavy metals. In its latest installment in the series — which is told in comics — the team used interactive images to tell the stories of some of the children and adults affected by high levels of lead in their blood and what has been happening to them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reporting Tools & Tips
GIJN Webinar — Investigating Health and Medicine: Strategies and Tips for Better Reporting
This GIJN webinar, “Investigating Health and Medicine,” open to everyone and free, is produced as part of the Misinformation in Medicine Summit, a two-day event convened by DataLEADS and hosted by the Google News Initiative as a part of the APAC Trusted Media Summit 2020. At the session, GIJN will also launch a major new reporting guide, “Investigating Health and Medicine.”
Data Journalism
Data Journalism Top 10: Musical Taste by Politics, Podcasts, Polling Problems, COVID Tweet Analysis
The US presidential election dominated the Twitter chat waves last week. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 2 to 8 found data journalists sharing live election results trackers by Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, while The Atlantic and Slate weighed in on the problems of polling. Elsewhere open source platform Mapbox is organizing an election mapping contest, and Lazer Lab created a dashboard to explore 29 million tweets related to COVID-19 shared by over half a million Americans.
Data Journalism
AI in Journalism: With Power Come Responsibilities
Media organizations worldwide are increasingly using artificial intelligence for information gathering, storytelling, and news distribution. Journalist Bennie Mols writes that given the potential transformative power of AI in journalism media organizations must consider how best to use it to fulfill their mission while reflecting on the impacts that AI has on democracy, diversity, and public values.
News & Analysis
Breaking the Ebola Sexual Abuse Scandal in Africa
In this behind-the-scenes look at an important investigation into sexual abuse by international aid workers, The New Humanitarian investigations editor Paisley Dodds recounts how reporters collected the heartrending stories of abuse from the front lines of the Ebola response.
Case Studies
When Journalism Goes Bad: A Case Study from South Africa
How did a crack South African investigative team, on the country’s biggest and richest newspaper, go horribly wrong? A new book by Anton Harber does a deep dive into the best and worst of the country’s journalism.
News & Analysis
What We’re Reading: Financial Investigators Under Pressure, Ethics of Unpublishing, EU Arms Exports, Subscription Models
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up interesting journalism news in English from around the world, we read about the ways journalists investigating financial crimes and corruption are pressured, the ethics behind unpublishing stories, and a new database of European Union arms exports.
Data Journalism
Data Journalism Top 10: Animating COVID Masks, Mapping US Campaign Cash, Homeless Arrests, Berlin Protests
Research shows that masks are an essential defense against the coronavirus. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 26 to November 1 finds The New York Times using animation and augmented reality to show just how masks work to filter and trap air particles that may carry the virus. This edition also includes several pieces on the United States presidential election: FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver talks to Vox about polling errors and uncertainties, freelance journalist Betsy Mason explains common shortcomings of US election maps, and NYT analyzed more than 25 million donations to Trump and Biden’s presidential campaigns.
Data Journalism My Favorite Tools
My Favorite Tools with Russia’s Roman Anin
In the newest post of GIJN’s series “My Favorite Tools,” French-British journalist Olivier Holmey interviews Roman Anin, the 33-year-old founder and editor-in-chief of IStories, a nonprofit Russian investigative news site. Anin discusses how he has used import/export data from the UN, as well as encryption software and data cleaning applications, in his investigations.
News & Analysis
UNESCO: Still Widespread Impunity for Killing Journalists
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out from UNESCO detailing that over the past decade, a journalist has been killed on average every four days. In 2018-2019, UNESCO recorded a total of 156 killings of journalists worldwide. See our roundup with links to the full report in English and links to resources in other languages.
News & Analysis
10 Tips for Investigating Police Misconduct
In a GIJN webinar on investigating the police, investigative journalists from Tunisia, South Africa, and the United States shared several effective approaches and tools for holding law enforcement bodies accountable for misconduct. Their tips include open source tools for visual forensic analysis of incidents, strategies for matching police radio audio files with social media video, and easy ways to begin your hunt for CCTV footage.
Fast Tools for the Election, from #gijnElectionWatchdog
For the past seven weeks, a special GIJN project, #gijnElectionWatchdog, has provided US reporters with tools to tackle the toughest election stories in daily tweets and weekly roundups. Here, with just a few days remaining til a hugely consequential election, we share quick-reference tools that matter in this period for time-pressed journalists.
News & Analysis
What We’re Reading: Greenwald Out of The Intercept, Collaborating on Pandemic Data, and Bellingcat’s Updated Toolkit
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up interesting journalism news in English from around the world, we read about Glenn Greenwald’s resignation from The Intercept, a data journalism collaboration on COVID-19 data which reaches across eight newsrooms, and Bellingcat’s already excellent, and now updated, Online Investigation Toolkit.
GIJN Webinar — Investigating Sexual Abuse: Reporting Tips & Tools
In this global GIJN webinar we bring together three journalists from France, China and India who have substantial experience in investigating cases of sexual abuse. They will share their strategies and reporting tips, ranging from collecting evidence to how to deal with survivors and their families during and after the investigation.
Data Journalism
Data Journalism Top 10: Ranking Halloween Candy, Formula 1, Canadian Prisons, COVID-19 Indoors
Gearing up for Halloween? You’ll want to refer to our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 19 to 25. We found FiveThirtyEight’s ultimate Halloween candy ranking from the archives to please the palates of finicky trick-or-treaters. This edition also includes The Economist’s mathematical model to determine whether Formula 1 racing success depends on its driver or the car engineer; The Globe and Mail examines bias in Canada’s prison system; and El Pais looks into how to reduce the probability of COVID-19 transmissions indoors.