Who should you trust? (Or, for all you pedants out there, whom should you trust?) It’s an important question for all of us, not least when you’re buying a used car (and believe me, I know.) But it’s probably even more important for journalists, who talk to strangers on a regular basis and need to make snap judgments about how much faith we should have in what they say. So here’s the bad news: You shouldn’t trust yourself to figure out who you should trust.
We hear a lot about the next Silicon Valley, but we don’t hear much about the Valley of Death. That is where 80 percent of tech startups go to die. Startups die or join the walking dead mainly for two reasons: they don’t have enough cash or they don’t have enough knowledge to get to the next stage of development. They are unable to show investors that their project could be commercially viable. The Media Factory News Accelerator, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, wants to change those odds of making it across the Valley of Death.
This week, I moderated a discussion that followed the screening of Silenced, a new documentary that tells the stories of three whistleblowers who exposed torture, mass surveillance and government waste. What Silenced brought to the screen was the humanity of the whistleblowers and the patriotic idealism that compelled them to work in government agencies like the NSA and the CIA and then to speak out against the excesses they saw there. If anything, Silenced dramatizes how the landscape of government secrecy has changed dramatically since 9/11 and the war on terror.
For the past seven and one-half years, I have spent large portions of each year doing media-development work–most of it training of journalists or journalism students–in four countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and in Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inevitably, my own experiences and observations about what works and what doesn’t, and what is really important in this work, have passed through my mind while researching and writing this report. None of them is unique, but it may be useful to list what I consider my three strongest lessons from nearly a dozen different training projects.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for July 23-August 7), including items from Mother Jones, The Economist, and The New York Times, among others.
Mark your calendars! Uncovering Asia: The 1st Asian Investigative Journalism Conference is now happening. Join us in Manila on November 22-24 for this breakthrough event, bringing together top investigative reporters, data journalists, and media law and security experts from across Asia and around the world. Meet award-winning journalists and experts on data analysis and visualization, business investigations, and cross-border collaboration.
When it comes to small and medium organizations I have seen a consistent chronic under investment in fundraising and a consistent lack of understanding of the work. It’s not just about small and medium nonprofits learning key methods and techniques of larger institutions. It’s about changing the culture around fundraising, especially individual major giving. Small and medium nonprofits all rush the same foundation doors year after year. Foundation fundraising is easier to understand and doesn’t involve talking to individuals about their own money. Individual major gifts work is risky, harder to understand and involves talking to individuals about their money. So year after year these same nonprofits stay small.
Thank you for allowing me and my colleagues the opportunity to testify before you today. As you know, more than a year ago, I and 42 other NGO workers were convicted in an Egyptian court for working on programs designed to build democracy, monitor elections and train political parties and journalists. We were given sentences ranging from one to five years in prison. Most people who knew about the case probably think it was resolved long ago.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for July 19 -23), including items from PBS Media Shift, the Media Lab, and Stimme.de, among others.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network has joined the Global Forum for Media Development, a membership network of more than 200 media assistance organizations active in 80 countries. The Brussels-based GFMD works to make independent media development an integral part of international development strategies, much as education and health care are today.
How can media make sense of a country that has over 1.2 billion people (about 17 percent of the global population), close to 800 languages, an electorate of 814 million, and the largest urban agglomeration in the world? How does one plan for a country where, at the end of 2012, about 22 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line (with a daily spending of less than about US45 cents in rural India and US55 cents in urban India), but which also has 89 billionaires and features fifth in the Global Rich List?
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for July 7-16), including items from PBS Mediashift, Morgenpost, and the Nieman Lab, among others.
Four journalism nonprofits from four countries are the latest to join the Global Investigative Journalism Network. We’re proud to say they bring GIJN’s membership to 101 groups in 45 countries. Lots of other news in the latest edition of Global Network News, GIJN’s newsletter. GIJN’s social media also continues to grow, from just 700 followers in 2012 to more than 35,000 today. And GIJN’s newly elected board held its first meeting and chose four officers to oversee the organization.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for July 3-7), including items from CORRECT!V, Datenjournalism.net, and Netzwerk Recherche Conference, among others.
Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema has won awards, fellowships, and international acclaim for his investigative reports. But at home he and his colleagues are under sustained attack, and he reports now that surveillance and harassment are increasing. Check out the activity among Cheema’s impressive 123,000 Twitter followers after he announced his election to the GIJN board.
We are the first nonprofit investigative newsroom in the German-speaking world. Our goal is to give citizens access to information. We are one of the many answers to the media crisis. The old models of business are losing effectiveness. At the same time, journalists need to find better ways of explaining an increasingly complex world. Publishers are shutting down newspapers or cutting their budgets. Digital media has not been able to make up for this loss. The media has trouble fulfilling its watchdog role. CORRECT!V aims to change this: we want to make investigative and informative journalism affordable and accessible to media organizations throughout Germany.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for June 19-26), including items from The Star, The Functional Art, and The Huffington Post, among others.
GIJN is excited to introduce Digital Digging, a new feature by acclaimed Internet search expert Henk van Ess. In this inaugural story, Henk sets sail to a world without selfies or cat pictures, showing readers how to stay on top of Twitter by changing their workflow. Here’s part one of a series of three.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for June 12-21), including items from Berliner Morgenpost, La Nación, Journalism++, and The Huffingtonpost, among others.
The results are in! GIJN members have voted for their first elected board of directors, selecting 15 people from 11 countries. The week-long online election ended June 16. “It’s a really strong board with a good mix of people from different countries and regions, and also a good combination of GIJN veterans and new members,” said GIJN co-founder Nils Mulvad. “In fact, there are also many great people who ran but were not elected this time. I hope we can count on them to help us where they have expertise.”
Online local news start ups are devoting significantly more resources to creating content than they are to raising money to pay for it – and that may spell trouble for long term sustainability. That’s one finding from a new survey conducted earlier this year as part of my database of U.S. news start ups, www.micheleslist.org. About 80 publishers responded to the annual survey, which I conduct independently.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for June 6-12), including items from Journalism++, Tages-Anzeiger, the Tow Center, and Quartz, among others.
This compelling 15-minute documentary tells the inside story of Yanukovychleaks, the extraordinary team investigation that recovered thousands of documents left behind by Ukraine’s fleeing ex-president. Here’s how a group of young Ukrainian journalists from competing outlets banded together for one the great scoops of the decade. The video, sponsored by GIJN members OCCRP and Scoop, was released at last weekend’s Mezhyhirya Festival, in which more than 300 journalists, data experts, and activists gathered at Yanukovych’s former estate.
An extraordinary group of 20 journalists from 15 countries is running to serve on the first elected board of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The election, being held online all this week, is the direct result of last month’s big vote by our membership to register GIJN as a nonprofit and to restructure its board of directors with worldwide representation. Each GIJN member organization gets one vote, but everyone can view the candidate bios, statements, and the election rules on our election page. The results will be announced next week!
