Nils Mulvad, co-founder and board member of GIJN, and Helena Bengtsson, editor for the Data Projects Team at the Guardian, share twelve tips on how to use data for stories. These were presented at the 2015 Netzwerk Recherche Conference in Hamburg.
We’re proud to announce that eight organizations have joined the Global Investigative Journalism Network. This brings GIJN’s membership to 118 organizations in 54 countries. Our new members include groups that support investigative reporting based in Eastern Europe (Hungary’s Direkt36, Montenegro’s Center for Investigative Journalism, and Ukraine’s Slidstvo and Svidomo), the United States (Internews, ProPublica, and Public Herald), and Italy (DataNinja).
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for June 18-26: The Migrant Files’ Money Trail; global access to medicine (@civio); the German arms trade (@welt); Swiss Election Data (@DataLeTemps); Mapping Rents in Munich (@SZ); and more.
Krautreporter proved it: donation-financed journalism is possible. Not only in the United States, but also in Germany – and possibly everywhere. It started a campaign for its own online magazine for in-depth journalism with experienced writers. Within one month it raised around 1 million Euros (about US$1.1 million). But 19% of this money was gone the moment it was raised. Devoured by sales tax.
For the last seven years I have been interviewing and profiling successful entrepreneurial journalists in various countries of various socioconomic classes. I’ve talked to publishers and editors with staffs of as many as a hundred as well as some one-man/one-woman bands. The ones that survive and thrive after several years share some common practices.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for Jun 11-18: mapping global tax evasion (@grandjeanmartin), vote for best data journalism site (@GENinnovate); data viz examples (@visualoop, @OKFN), data retention (@Frontal21) and more.
What I see in Africa open data today is a very immature movement/industry totally dependent on international aid funding, local heroic leadership against almost impossible odds, and absolutely no governmental institutional commitments. Governments are not funding programs and deploying talented resources on their own and there is no public demand. Without international funding there would be no open data programs in Africa today and a movement without indigenous will and commitment cannot stand on its own. Why?
From Seoul to Bogotá. From Tromsø to Johannesburg. The list of speakers and participants for GIJC15 at Lillehammer is filling up. There are just over 100 days before the opening of the ninth Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer, Norway. So far we’ve confirmed 61 sessions at the conference, with dozens more to come over the next few weeks.
From my experience of more than eight years managing transactions and capacity building programs in Latin America and Africa, a radical approach to transparency is the key to enable public-private partnerships to deliver more and better infrastructure services. The crude truth is that opaque policies serve a lot of interests, but almost none of them benefit service users or taxpayers.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for Jun 4-11: 60 Years of European World Cup Data (@elmundoes); 4 cheap ways to put ddj in newsrooms (@IJNet); ICIJ’s data team (@ICIJorg); events in Argentina (@HacksHackersBA) & Italy @Glocalnews); @knightfdn grants.
We’re already seeing the use of drones proliferate across a whole variety of stories — from incredible imagery of the vastness of the natural world to investigations that couldn’t be told with conventional cameras, to views of the inaccessible right under our noses. So how are the drone journalists of the future being trained for their work?
I am back from Philadelphia, where I attended my first annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the world’s largest and oldest association of investigative journalists. The conference featured plenty of research resources and other useful online tools. Here’s a roundup featuring some of the highlights.
Here’s your chance to support the global spread of investigative journalism. We need your help to sponsor dozens of journalists from developing and transitioning countries to come to the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Norway this October 8-11.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 29-June 4: Free Software and Tools for Investigative Journalists (@DDJ_Tools); Debunking ddj Myths (@jsource); The Art & Science of ddj, German Rent Index (@zeitonline), Swiss Election Dataviz (@srfdata) and more.
In the fall of 2003 the story made its way to journalists at La Nación, the leading national newspaper in the Central American republic of Costa Rica. The reporters at the paper’s investigative unit pricked up their ears as soon as the disgruntled real estate agent spoke the name of her exasperating client: Eliseo Vargas, the man in charge of the country’s vaunted national health-care agency. “We didn’t really know what she had,” recalls reporter Ernesto Rivera.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 22-29: Atlas of Germany’s far right (@rechtesland), same-sex marriage (@insightnewslab), Code for Africa Fellowships (@ICFJ), World Bank resettlements (@ICIJorg), open data conference (@opendatacon), and more.
How do reporters know when their sources are telling the truth? In the collapse of Rolling Stone’s November story on campus rape, a gullible reporter relied far too heavily on the unchallenged word of an alleged victim. Heinrich Böhmke, an adviser to the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting, takes a look back at the case and warns that journalists should learn from the law and apply a tough standard even when sources are convincing, confident, and have consistent stories.
We’re back with another selection of web resources and reports that might be of interest to journalists around the world. On the list this week: new reports from the International Labour Organization, Congressional Research Service, and UK House of Commons; and tools to search domain ownership, load tweets into a spreadsheet, and search open data. Good hunting!
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 14-22: document mining for journos (@pudo), R & rvest web scraping (@Computerworld), arms exports (@srfdata), Spain elections (@elmundoes), German hospitals (@ARDde), a “magical Piano app,” and more.
I have been involved in politics and policy-making for over 50 years, and as you can imagine I hold strong feelings about reporters and the media. They’re not what you might think, however. Far from considering journalists to be irritating pains in the neck — though I’ve known a few who qualified — I believe them to be indispensable to our democracy.
Burma is one of the world’s champions of media censorship. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently ranked my country as No. 9, while listing Eritrea and North Korea as the most censored countries worldwide. Should I be proud of this? Ironically, yes. Burma, also known as Myanmar, was ranked No. 2 in 2006 when I started working as a journalist, so this ranking is an improvement.
For the second time, organizers of MezhyhiryaFest are going to bring together more than 300 journalists and public activists on June 6-7, establishing a tradition of celebrating the Journalist’s Day in the former billion-dollar estate of runaway President Viktor Yanukovych, who continues to hide out from murder and corruption charges in Russia.
Over the past few years we have seen the huge potential of data and document mining in investigative journalism. Tech savvy networks of journalists such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have teamed together for astounding cross-border investigations. OCCRP has even incubated its own tools, such as VIS, Investigative Dashboard and Overview. But we need to do better. There is enormous duplication and missed opportunity in investigative journalism software.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 8-14: Seven reasons to use dot graphs (@maartenzam), 5 truths about the UK election (@SPIEGELONLINE), ICIJ’s #luxleaks (@cabralens), history of men’s tennis (@duc_qn), U-shaped challenges (Data Colada) and more.
Journalism start-ups from throughout Europe gathered at DataHarvest 2015 in Brussels on May 8, for a roundtable discussion on possible cooperation and collective needs. With journalism increasingly seeking new business models and investigations coming out of non-traditional media outlets, there is much to gain by fledgling publishing platforms, investigative centers and non-profit organizations in sharing knowledge and strategies.
As the glittering PEN awards ceremony came to a close on Tuesday, a set of cartoons flashed onto the screen. At the end of the night, postcards were handed out to members of the audience bearing the same cartoons. The pictures all told aspects of the story of a journalist from Azerbaijan. Khadija Ismayilova had just been presented with PEN’s Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write award – in absentia, since she was unable to attend the ceremony herself.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the Top Ten links for May 1-8: Easy-to-use historical maps (@wired); Lobbyradar (@ZDF); @GENdjawards shortlist gradients+news graphics (@EdwardTufte); network analysis tutorial (@cguibourg); Saudi death penalty (@jeune_afrique), and more.
