Stories
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Sex in Parliament, Peace and Press Freedom and Vanishing Global Water
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 14 to 20 finds @FinancialTimes highlighting @NASA data on high risk drought areas across the globe, @infogram juxtaposing press freedom with global peace rankings and @BBCNews showing how smuggling mobile phones is a rampant problem in English and Welsh prisons.
Hong Kong’s FactWire Startup Takes Novel Approach: No Editors
Press self-censorship in Hong Kong has been deteriorating as businessmen behind media organisations increasingly use the press as their business tool rather than for public service. After seeing the public’s disillusionment and distrust of the media grow, investigative journalist Don Ng decided to kickstart FactWire, a back-to-basics news service that focuses on long-term investigations.
Case Studies
How They Did It: Investigating the Trafficking of Girls from Nepal to the Gulf
Last year Pramod Acharya traveled to Sindhupalchok in the land-locked nation of Nepal to follow up on the region’s recovery from the devastating earthquake of 2015. That’s when he stumbled across a human trafficking ring. He wrote up what he learned about covering human trafficking in South Asia — along with some tips — for GIJN.
The Dogged Investigative Reporter on the Aging Beat
Peter Gosselin at ProPublica has a very different investigative beat: Americans 60 years and older. More specifically: age discrimination and the treatment of older workers. Read how he recently exposed such practices at IBM by leveraging on crowdsourcing.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Trump Country, Conga Lines and the Nerds in the Corner
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 7 to 13 finds @adamrpearce brilliantly illustrating the problem and causes of backed up trains along the New York subway, @Textyorgua_Eng highlights the destruction of Ukraine’s landscape due to illegal amber mining and @duc_qn analyzes which university gives you the best bang for your buck.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How Not to Win a Journalism Grant
Journalists are not usually in the frame of mind for grants. They pitch their story to an editor, the editor says “no” or “yes” and they get to work. But drafting a grant application is a somewhat complex technique. Here is a list of mistakes that tend to kill many fledgling journalistic projects before they even stand a chance.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Here are 20 Guidelines for Working with Whistleblowers. What’s Missing?
One of the central ethical tenets of professional journalism is “first, protect your sources.” But in this digital age, it is becoming more dangerous to keep your sources safe as governments are able to track reporters and their sources digitally. Here are 20 guidelines for working with whistleblowers in the digital era. What’s missing?
News & Analysis
Can Civil’s Blockchain Save Journalism?
With a $5 million funding budget, the new platform is dreamily promising a new “canvas on which journalists can paint the future of their industry.” But it isn’t clear how the blockchain-based technology will generate the cold hard cash needed to sustain the industry’s revenue-starved publications, writes Rowan Philp for GIJN.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Lying Maps, Foul Mouthed Moms and Geek Sauce
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 30 to May 6 finds @theboysmithy talking to @MarkMonmonier about the influence a cartographer can exert over a naive map reader, @OCCRP’s data visualization platform to map complex crime networks and @PostGraphics’ mapping of diversity in America’s neighborhoods.
Case Studies
Al Jazeera Analyzed 6,500 Homepage Images. Here’s What They Learned
Using image analysis tools on their own means nothing without asking the right questions. AJ Labs experimented with Google Vision API, a machine-learning technology, to analyze images used by Al Jazeera over the course of last year. They hope to integrate the technology into their newsroom in the future to make processes easier for their journalists.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Solving a Journalist’s Murder — The Making of “Killing Pavel”
In a recent training session in Kyiv, producer Matt Sarnetski and journalist Anna Babinets talked about how they created Killing Pavel, a documentary about the murder of the well-known journalist Pavel Sheremet. GIJN has rounded up the key takeaways.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Innovative Visualization, Data Fellowships and the Dark Side
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 23 to 29 finds @thetimes’ interactive which will determine whether you will join the dark side, @albertocairo discussing precedents to innovative visualizations and @srendgen talking about the technological revolution encouraging data journalism.
News & Analysis
World Press Freedom Day — “No Democracy without Investigative Journalism”
At a time when the news media is under unprecedented attack, and the need for watchdog reporting has never been greater, we hope you will join GIJN today in marking World Press Freedom Day (#WorldPressFreedomDay). This is the 25th celebration of WPFD, but despite the years of meetings and proclamations by its sponsors UNESCO and others, conditions are getting worse, not better, for journalists around the world.
Meet the Watchdog Scientists Battling Dubious Scientific Research
Fraudulent, plagiarized or otherwise shoddy research is an increasing problem across all scientific disciplines — particularly in China — and can catch like wildfire. Australian Professor Jennifer Byrne and her French colleague Cyril Labbé, as well as projects like Retraction Watch, are fighting back.
Case Studies
How They Did It: Tracking the Copious Travels of Cameroon’s President
The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Dig into the Open Source Database of Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria
A Berlin-based group of researchers has launched the world’s first publicly accessible database of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Aimed mainly at human rights organizations, it could also help investigative reporters in some potentially surprising ways. A GIJN original.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Democratic Data, Berlin’s Bicycles and Cricket Crazy
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 16 to 22 finds @camellia_will debating the future of data portals, @DLeonhardt using hard data to show whether Democratic or Republican presidents have been more fiscally responsible and @morgenpost mapping bicycle thefts hotspots in Berlin.
101 Reporters Connects Journalists Across India with Media Organizations
Journalist Gangadhar Patil’s impressive idea of supporting independent journalists, helping with their edits and then matching them with mainstream publications has taken off in India — and landed its journalists in publications like CNN International, The Asia Times and The New Indian Express.
Pactio: Where Loyal Readers Follow — and Fund — Their Favorite Reporters
There’s a new funding strategy in the works, built around the idea that quite a few reporters have loyal followings and their readers just might be willing to chip in a few bucks to keep them in the news business. But as more organizations turn to reader support for revenue — whether framed as memberships or as subscriptions — they might face stiff competition for their individual crowdfunding model.
Reporting Tools & Tips
We Had Four Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns. Here Are 10 Tips for Your Newsroom
Raising money for your news organization via crowdfunding is difficult and can be stressful. Hungary’s Direkt36, which has run four successful crowdfunding campaigns so far, offers 10 tips from their experience to help you plan a good campaign. A GIJN original.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Ethics, Awards and Open Source for IJ
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 9 to 15 finds an ultra useful data visualization tool that is perfect for non-programmers by @Adobe and @GeorgiaTech, a list of 99 amazing data journalism works by @GENinnovate’s Data Journalism Awards nominees and @CARTO shares 50 experts on location intelligence to follow.
Data Journalism
How Pakistani Journalists Subvert Danger — and the Narrative — with Data
Journalists exposing corruption in countries with limited rule of law face enormous risks and their stories may not necessarily make things better for anyone. In Pakistan, journalists have employed a different — and safer — approach to trigger positive change by avoiding front-page corruption exposés and using data journalism to expose flaws in the system instead. A GIJN original.
News & Analysis
Historian: Why Reporters Are Heroes of Our Time
The real heroes are reporters who are out there taking risks by reporting the truth, says US historian Timothy Snyder. Support them by subscribing to newspapers and reading and sharing good journalism. And next time you meet a journalist, try thanking them for their service.
News & Analysis
Who Maps the World?
OpenStreetMap is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps. It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowdsources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. But despite its democratic aims, it’s still much like the mapping world overall — overwhelmingly dominated by male cartographers. That’s starting to change.