Last week Twitter and Facebook suspended some accounts which originated in China and acted in a “coordinated fashion” with intent to disrupt the recent protests in Hong Kong. We asked Sophia Xu, a China-based social media specialist, to help us better understand the trends in Chinese social media, as well as how to counter fake news and disinformation in the country.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Fabiola Torres of Salud Con Lupa. She told GIJN’s Gaelle Faure all about the tools that help her carry out cross-border investigations into public health, including tools to find data as well as to analyze and visualize it.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 12 to 18 finds information designer Giorgia Lupi discussing how to embrace data complexity, The New York Times Opinion building a forking path visualization to predict an individual’s political leanings, the Guardian visualizing Brexit’s potential impact on the UK’s food imports, and El Universal Mexico looking at the incidences of crime claiming young victims.
Connecting with your audience is key to telling a good story. But how do you actually make it happen? Podcast producer Siobhán McHugh explains how she uses emotion — and lots of technique — to connect with her listeners.
Two investigative editors took huge pay cuts to launch Botswana’s first nonprofit newsroom. A year later, they took another, temporary cut just to pay for a single satellite image that proved that the country’s president had abused state funds to build a private lodge. Here’s Rowan Philp on the INK Centre for Investigative Journalism for GIJN’s member series.
The Guardian has re-built its business around membership, and last year it appointed its executive editor for membership, Lee Glendinning, who formerly led the Guardian US. She explains how she uses her role to experiment and test new approaches.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 5 to 11 finds Spiegel Online analyzing the typical features in Quentin Tarantino’s films, MU Collective releasing an interactive “TheyDrawIt” tool to engage and educate readers, and the conversation on the climate crisis heating up — with 101 East Al Jazeera looking into Cambodia’s deforestation, Neue Zürcher Zeitung analyzing Switzerland’s forest fires, and the Financial Times digging into the impact of jet streams on the climate.
To expose the massive, cross-border corruption scandal that came to be known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, journalists from across Latin America had to find ways to work together. In the process, they transformed investigative journalism in the region. GIJN Spanish Editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero wrote the story of their epic collaboration.
Turkey captivated the world’s attention recently as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s seemingly unstoppable accumulation of power ground to a halt in a series of humiliating defeats in local elections. To the surprise of many, digital news media emerged as a potent medium for information and mobilization for the largely victorious opposition forces in the campaigns.
After NJ Advance Media spent lots of time and money to find and clean up data for a police accountability project, it decided to sell this data, while still keeping its database free to the public. Reporter Stephen Stirling tells OpenNews’s Erika Owens how this works.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 29 to August 4 finds a number of articles related to the climate crisis, including the BBC’s piece on tree planting and its interactive tool on temperatures across the world, as well as Alberto Cairo’s blog post on misleading charts created by climate deniers. We also found useful tips and tools: a data GIF maker by Google News Initiative, Datajournalism.com’s strategies for teaching data journalism, and Paul Bradshaw’s tutorial on how to extract numeric data from phrases.
Sometimes, the best way to tell a story is to take a bird’s eye view. Here’s how Storybench editor Aleszu Bajak did this by recreating a GIF of Chennai’s disappearing Lake Puzhal reservoir. Check out his process and code, which could be used for countless other animations — to show, say, dam collapses, deforestation, forest fires, and more.
Sharing is caring. The Financial Times created templates for different types of digital stories and has now shared them on GitHub so that other newsrooms can adapt them.
Reporter Patryk Szczepaniak has gone undercover as a Polish worker in the Netherlands, hired himself out as an Uber driver, and frequented Warsaw’s strip clubs, all in pursuit of a good story. It was useful preparation for his investigation into a slaughterhouse in Poland.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing the catalyst behind Hong Kong’s recent protests, National Geographic visualizing human migration in the past 50 years, Ellery Studio’s fun and informative renewable energy coloring book, and The Economist’s findings that Hillary Clinton could have won the 2016 US election if all Americans had turned up to vote.
In US cities, the local news ecosystem is suffering from a long list of ailments. But in Colorado, hundreds of people — journalists, professors, students, business folk, local foundations, and more — have stepped up to do something about it. And they have a few ideas for where to start.
There are many ways to measure impact — but you don’t need to do it all on your own. Here are six impact measurement frameworks appropriate for media makers and funders with various needs and approaches, selected by Media Impact Funders.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 15 to 21 finds Information Is Beautiful’s sharing its gallery of must-read data visualization books, Datajournalism.com highlighting pitfalls in creating charts, the FT analyzing the age of Wimbledon players, and WDR scrutinizing Germany’s opera repertoire.
Venezuelan investigative website Armando.info, which is a member of GIJN, is going through difficult times. Its core team has been working in exile for more than a year, and their staff continue to receive serious threats — not only against their reporters working in Venezuela, but also against those who have found refuge in neighboring Colombia.
Hicham Mansouri, who co-founded the Moroccan Association of Investigative Journalists, had to flee his country after he was jailed for 10 months. Now exiled in France, he still faces pending charges of threatening state security in Morocco.
Christopher Booker’s “The Seven Basic Plots” provides a useful set of frameworks. It’s a book about fictional storytelling, but you will find the same structures recurring in longform and investigative work, writes Paul Bradshaw.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 8 to 14 finds BBC News analyzing Afghan election results as well as graphing the milestones of the 25-year-old Amazon empire, Federica Fragapane visualizing the female menstruation cycle for Scientific American, and Bloomberg taking a closer look at China’s domination of the South China Sea. We also have a fun piece by Alberto Cairo on nonsensical diagrams.
Twelve investigative projects focused on 11 different countries have been selected as finalists for the eighth Global Shining Light Award, a prize that honors investigative journalism in developing or transitioning countries that was carried out under threat, duress, or dire conditions.
When it comes to digital security, what does a journalist from West Africa, a Syrian journalist based in Turkey, and a French journalist on a reporting trip to Kashmir have in common? Answer: Very little. While they all need to protect their data, their communications, and their sources, they must each do this in different ways that are adapted to the context, explains Grégoire Pouget of the Paris-based nonprofit Nothing2Hide.
Hackastory has lined up its favorite digital stories of the year so far, from the Guardian’s interactive showing what the internet looks like from different parts of the world to a Dutch game that puts you in the middle of war-torn Mosul.
If you read “The Case of Jane Ponytail,” published in The New York Times in 2018, you’re likely to remember it. The award-winning story recounted the life and death of Song Yang, a Chinese woman who came to the United States with dreams of becoming an American citizen, but who ended up dying after falling from a building during a raid on the illicit massage parlor where she was employed as a sex worker. Now you can read the story with annotations by Dan Barry, explaining how he crafted the heart-rending narrative.
The African Investigative Publishing Collective recently conducted a multi-part investigation into the associates that handle business for African kleptocrats. Evelyn Groenink shares how the story took form and the massive challenges faced by reporters spread across multiple countries.
