The plenary session of the 9th Global Investigative Journalism Conference, opening today in Lillehammer, Norway, focused on how journalists are fighting back against the extraordinary level of attacks against them worldwide. After hearing case studies about their colleagues in Angola, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Mexico, journalists from 121 countries approved the following declaration.
We’re gearing up for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference with coverage that is multimedia, multilingual, and multinational. Here’s one of our new features: a social media wall that integrates #GIJC15 tweets and other items in a continuous flow. We’re a week away and the wall is already buzzing. Plus we’ll have four streaming video channels and an international team posting stories, interviews, photos, video, and lots of social media.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for September 17-24: refugee-crisis dataviz (webk1d); 230 examples of fiscal dataviz; ranking Swiss hospitals (RTSinfo); mapping Berlin (morgenpost); EU iPhones & tax money (zeitonline); and more.
On September 25, world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a United Nations summit. The new goals commit all 193 UN member states to an ambitious development agenda that calls for poverty eradication, environmental protection, gender equality, disease prevention, universal schooling, ‘inclusive’ growth, and good governance – and includes, for the first time a commitment to public access to information. This new commitment has potentially transformative implications for the free flow of information and independent media development worldwide.
From South Africa to Brazil; from Yangon to Kabul, I heard media editors sing varying versions of the same lyrics: I feel the earth move under my feet. The media business model has now cracked all over the world. Subscriptions to newspapers and magazines drop by the thousands; traditional advertising revenue vanishes into thin air; and digital advertising revenue is poor and only seems to work for web giants. Media have certainly learnt how to increase the value of Facebook or Twitter in their quest to fish readers for their stories, but have plenty of trouble in finding how to increase the value of their own outlets.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for September 10-17: refugee origins (berlinermorgenpost); #ddj podcast (partiallyd); football players birthplaces (BR_data); EU iPhones & tax money (zeitonline); and data viz guru’s sculpture park (EdwardTufte).
The Internet is an amazing research resource but often discovery of quality reference tools and reports can be challenging, especially when you think about how quickly new resources appear and often disappear. I hope that these columns not only alert you to useful material but will help you build up your own collection of reference resources, which you can save on your own computer, or utilize a tool like The Wayback Machine to archive it for yourself and others.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for September 3-9: Syrian Refugees in Europe (elmundoes); Nukes in Japan (StatisticsViews); Mapping Tennis (Natgeo); Rent Prices as Mountains (datenblog112); and the World’s Fastest Lifts (FT).
Twelve extraordinary stories from 12 countries are finalists in the sixth Global Shining Light Award, a unique prize which honors investigative journalism in a developing or transitioning country, done under threat, duress, or in the direst of conditions. The winners will be announced and presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference this October 10 in Lillehammer, Norway.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for August 26 to September 3: how to think visually (annavitals); beautiful evidence books (EdwardTufte); dating site scam (elespanol); Data Journalism Handbook (ddjournalism); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for August 16 to 27: a dating site’s sad truth (@gizmodo); cops & crime perception (@correctiv); using maps in data viz (@paulbradshaw); end of the Amazon (@InfoAmazonia); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for August 10 to 23: Africa ddj Initiative (@justinarenstein); mapping UK/Ireland pubs (@CityMetric); Amazon’s end (@InfoAmazonia); L.A. trash (@latimes); NSA patents (@alice_corona); Hacktivist toolbox (@POLITICOEurope).
What happens when a journalist investigates treatment facilities for malaria patients in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo? For Francis Mbala, it led to his arrest and a Kafkaesque tale about the dangers of investigating in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Mbala’s story comes from the ZAM Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.
Time for a new collection of resources and research reports. Today’s roundup features two online databases — one on nuclear reactors, the other on health — and the latest international research reports from Brussels, London, and Washington. Global Health Facts from the Kaiser Family Foundation is an organized and frequently updated collection of browsable and searchable data.
In spite of official efforts to control news coverage of last week’s deadly explosions in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, Chinese media have responded swiftly not only to cover the fast-moving disaster, but also to probe the why and how of the tragedy. Within hours of the blast, leading Chinese media, both traditional and online, began investigating reasons for the toxic facilities to be built next to residential developments, the ownership of the storage, the failure of government oversight, and the botched response to the disaster.
Web scraping is a way to extract information presented on websites. As I explained it in the first installment of this article, web scraping is used by many companies. It’s also a great tool for reporters who know how to code, since more and more public institutions publish their data on their websites.
With web scrapers, which are also called “bots,” it’s possible to gather large amounts of data for stories. But what are the ethical rules that reporters have to follow while web scraping?
$8 billion in just a few hours earlier this year? It was because of a web scraper, a tool companies use—as do many data reporters. A web scraper is simply a computer program that reads the HTML code from webpages, and analyze it. With such a program, or “bot,” it’s possible to extract data and information from websites.
This October, the membership of the Global Investigative Journalism Network will vote to elect members of the GIJN Board of Directors. The board consists of 15 members. Of these, seven seats are now up for election — all for a period of two years. To be eligible to run, candidates must belong to a GIJN member organization and their candidacy must have the support of that organization.
The local host of the 10th Global Investigative Journalism Conference, to be held in 2017, will be chosen by GIJN member representatives during the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer, Norway. GIJN is pleased to present GIJC17 proposals for three cities: Amman, Jordan, from Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism; Johannesburg, South Africa, from the Investigative Journalism Workshop, Wits University; and Vancouver, Canada, from the Global Reporting Centre.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for July 23 to 30: mapping money and doctors in Germany (@ZEITONLINE); maps at the Berliner Morgenpost (@moklick); #ddj for francophone African journalists (@Afronline); carsharing in Berlin (@tagesspiegel); and more.
Just as an article or a gallery of photos can shine a light on an issue for the public, so can these in-person gatherings. Some media organizations are putting on full-fledged festivals in the same vein as South by Southwest and TED. These gatherings include panels of experts, one-on-one conversations with major newsmakers and presentations that explore ground-breaking topics. In other words, they’re an entirely new way of informing and providing information — undoubtedly journalistic functions.
