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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At a time of growing intolerance toward independent media and free expression, we at GIJN are particularly pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has approved a record 20 new member organizations from 14 countries. GIJN now has 203 member groups in 80 countries.
In this explainer, the team at Splice Media show how they pulled off the fantastic Splice Beta “virtual experience,” a month-long festival which focused on media startups in Asia.
A French freelance journalist tracked down a man accused of being involved in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Here’s how French journalist Théo Englebert delved into the eight-month investigation, including his top tips for finding someone who wants to disappear.
“Superspreading events” have emerged as major drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic. While available data on these events is limited, new information — including an interactive database of 1,500 events — offers reporters the means to map the patterns of past coronavirus outbreaks, and to evaluate the risks of planned gatherings.
In week six of GIJN’s project to arm US reporters with the tools for the toughest election stories, #gijnElectionWatchdog shared tools to unmask groups behind political ads, an AI-powered search function for any dataset, the list of rules restricting poll watchers in swing states, and a database of election sources searchable by state and category.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads in English from around the world, we came across the launch of The Media Manipulation Casebook, a piece on how to make your newsletter a key revenue driver, and a supportive — if implemented — UN resolution on the safety of journalists.
How does climate change increase the likelihood of weather extremes? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 12 to 18 finds ProPublica examining how the warming global climate exacerbates wildfire activity, and designer Will Chase visualizing some of the most destructive hurricanes with an interactive wheel graphic. The Financial Times is summarizing key trends of the pandemic using charts, maps, and graphics, while The Markup announced its latest project looking into the black box algorithms of social media platforms.
The Double Exposure film festival showcases the creative work of reporters and filmmakers who pursue investigations in the public interest. From a film shot in Wuhan’s hospital wards to an investigation into the murder of a member of North Korea’s ruling family, here are five of the top investigative documentaries featured at this year’s festival.
For data journalists there is a balancing act between publishing information vital to a story and protecting the person behind that information. Vojtech Sedlak explains the pitfalls and offers tips on how journalists can protect the people that feature in the data without compromising the story.
Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, from failing democracies to despotic regimes. In this global GIJN webinar, we bring together four extraordinary journalists from Russia, Egypt, South Africa, and the Philippines to share strategies for staying effective and true to the journalism profession’s highest standards.
The Peruvian investigative journalism association Ojo Público – a GIJN member — has created a new tool to investigate government contracts. In this piece, data journalist Romina Colman explores what the tool, which is called FUNES, can do and who can use it.
In week five of GIJN’s project to arm US reporters with tools for the toughest election stories, #gijnElectionWatchdog shared a tool to spot Twitter bots, a live dashboard to combat the hottest election disinformation efforts as they arise, a free cybersecurity toolkit for reporters, and tips for finding hard-to-access election sources.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we read about how researchers verified a chemical weapons attack in Syria, BBC News Labs’ new storytelling graphic for Facebook, and AP Stylebook’s latest election guide.
The advancement of technology and availability of complex data tools has been a real boon to society, but utilizing the wrong tools for the job can have dire consequences. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from October 5 to 11 finds British media organizations the BBC and the Guardian reporting on a blunder by the English national health authority: it used the wrong Excel file format to store data, resulting in the loss of thousands of COVID-19 test data results. Meanwhile, German television news program ZDF heute highlighted how the Arctic has reached record high temperatures this year, DCist and Spotlight DC examined problems in the process of evictions, and we find Information is Beautiful offering a daily feed of uplifting news among the gloom of 2020’s news cycle.
In this edition of Document of the Day, we feature a new report out today from Freedom House, a US-based think tank, about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected digital freedoms around the world. The report includes details on governments’ actions that have curtailed citizens’ access to open information on the web, and the website features and interactive map where users can see which countries made the “free” list and which ones didn’t.
This summer a Swedish prosecutor announced that a 30-year probe into the killing of a Swedish prime minister would be closed since there was “reasonable evidence” that the assailant had been identified. The man now believed to have carried out the crime was identified two years ago by investigative journalist Thomas Pettersson, who spent 12 years investigating who killed Olof Palme.
