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.
Storybench identified four areas of emphasis – data, local news, social media, and business models – that will be crucial for journalism students to spend time on, and interviewed five journalism educators across the country who lead especially forward-looking programs and courses.
Pakistan’s journalism landscape has lately come under immense pressure from the country’s powerful military. In one of the latest moves to pressure Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English newspaper, the government revoked its ads for the paper, as well as for its sister TV channel, DawnNews. Umer Ali writes for GIJN about the crises.
Charitable and nonprofit organizations have a lot to gain from adopting certain aspects of successful business models, and they should start with treating stakeholders as customers, argues Philip Piletic of CustomerThink.
For the very first story in our new series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Emmanuel Freudenthal, a freelance investigative reporter based in Nairobi. He told GIJN’s Gaelle Faure all about how he uses virtual tools like GPS Tracks and Gmail Snooze and physical tools like plane-tracking antennas and good old motorbikes.
The Wall Street Journal’s graphic-heavy series “The Price of Climate” took an ambitious look at how financial and economic markers reflect present and future thinking about the climate. One of the editors that worked on it says it was a response to the fact “that a lot of climate change stories feel and look the same.” Here’s how they did it.
You don’t need a million casual readers — just 1,000 committed ones. And there are signs that the “1,000 true fans” theory holds approximately true across a wide range of journalism enterprises — sometimes it’s actually a thousand; other times it’s 400, 1,500, or 5,000.
OpenCorporates is a site that shares information on more than 100 million corporate entities around the world as open data. With their latest project on German companies, OpenCorporates added data on more than 5 million companies. Here’s how they pulled it off.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 17 to 23 finds Federica Fragapane visualizing space debris and their distance from earth, The New York Times open-sourcing its in-house data curriculum, Nathan Yau visualizing what time is lost for people once they have children, and Guns & America quantifying gunshot incidents within 300 meters of Washington, DC schools.
In Russia, veteran human rights activist Leonid Agafonov and journalist Natalia Donskova have teamed up to create a series of investigative reports on life for women behind bars. The project covers taboo topics, spanning health issues like the treatment of cancer patients and childbirth in prison to sexual abuse and LGBT relationships.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for journalism. It can help fuel reporting, provide answers, and engage community participation. Jess Ramirez, who works as an engagement reporting fellow at ProPublica, lists the questions you can ask yourself when approaching an engagement project.
A small nonprofit investigative newsroom played an outsized role in the removal of South Africa’s president and his corrupt inner circle last year. Now, amaBhungane is building a separate hub to help new investigative start-ups throughout southern Africa. Rowan Philp writes about the newsroom and its latest initiative for GIJN’s new series about its members.
The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit uses social media and open-source tools to create powerful video reports. Here’s how they collected virtual breadcrumbs to retrace the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed Jamal Khashoggi.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 10 to 16 finds a gorgeous series of data visualizations by National Geographic on the Ring of Fire, Bloomberg analyzing the influence of dynasties in the Philippines’ politics, RStudio’s Hadley Wickham talking about why you shouldn’t assign data cleaning to a “data janitor,” and BR Recherche looking at the complexity of privacy policies.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome seven new member organizations based in seven countries. We are particularly pleased to welcome our first members in Bolivia and Lesotho. The new groups bring GIJN’s global membership to 182 groups in 77 countries.
If you’re an OSINT investigator or use OSINT in any of your work, it’s impossible to ignore Twitter as a collection source. Here’s how to get the most out of it by organizing your searches on a TweetDeck dashboard.
“Synopsis,” “soundtrack,” “episode,” “mood”… This is the language used daily within the Parisian offices of Les Jours. But don’t let its vocabulary fool you: While the 3-year old media company borrows many of the codes of fiction producers for television, it actually runs a hard-hitting investigative news site.
Every investigative journalist encounters moments of doubt. Neil Bedi, an investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, shares the set of rules his team followed to survive the toughest reporting challenges while reporting their Pulitzer-nominated series “Heartbroken.”
Ukraine’s largest bank is taking its battle with its former owners to US shores. In a civil lawsuit filed in the state court of Delaware, PrivatBank accuses Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, the billionaires who owned the bank before it was nationalized three years ago, of large-scale money laundering in the United States.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 3 to 9 finds @sto3psl mapping places the Avengers visited in Europe, @fedfragapane visualizing which elements in the periodic table are in danger of running out, @srfdata highlighting the top worries of the Swiss and @propublica doing researchers and journalists a huge public service by making 3 million US nonprofit records text-searchable.
Promoting journalists to management positions without letting them do any reporting is a dangerous road to go down, argues Colombian reporter Ginna Morelo. Here are her proposed 10 commandments of the Journalist, written as an exercise to remind herself about what journalists should never give up on.
