Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Fact-Checking
Fact-checking takes apart the reporting to ensure it is solid, accurate, and fair, a critical task for newsrooms.
Resource Center
GIJN’s Resource Center is here to help journalists expand their knowledge and skills. The Center holds more than 2,000 items in 14 languages – from tip sheets and guides to instructional videos. Use the menu on the right to navigate it or the search box below to find topics you’re interested in.
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Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Following the Money
Following the money is a complex set of techniques that allow reporters to track the flow of money across the world.
Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Interviewing Techniques for Beginners
This chapter looks at various types of interviews, approaches, and techniques for getting the most out of contact with sources, both friendly and antagonistic.
Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism
Investigations have underlying principles, elements, and rigorous requirements for evidence, accuracy, and fairness. They also require strong and detailed planning.
Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Finding Sources and Backgrounding People, Public Records, Freedom of Information
Sourcing starts with thinking about our goals for a story. This chapter shares a step-by-step guide for finding sources for investigations.
Chapter Guide Resource
Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Deep Internet Research: Leveraging Open-Source Research and Verification Techniques
This chapter guides you through advanced research techniques, including the use of open source intelligence tools and verification methods.
Resource Video
Investigating the Israel Hamas Conflict
Three senior investigative journalists shared tips and tools on investigating the conflict in Gaza.
Resource Video
Investigative Journalism and Digital Threats in 2024 Elections
Free and fair elections are fundamental to a functioning democracy. Investigative journalism helps to ensure the integrity of the electoral process by exposing and correcting false narratives and disinformation that can influence public opinion. This reporting not only helps voters to make informed decisions but empowers them to assess the information they encounter, fostering a […]
Chapter Guide Resource
Reporter’s Guide to Investigating Carbon Offsets — Short Version
Carbon offsets are truly an international climate change story. This short version of our GIJN guide helps reporters understand, research, and investigate the global players.
Chapter Guide Resource
Investigating War Crimes
This webinar shares methodologies for investigating war and conflict, and provide a briefing on the laws that govern what, in popular usage, are called “war crimes.”
Resource Video
GIJC23 – FOIA/RTI Investigations
More than half of the world’s countries have laws that require officials to supply public documents on request. These laws offer valuable windows for reporters, even for those outside of a country’s borders. But there are almost always tricks to targeting and expediting these disclosures, and this panel brings deep experience in how to do […]
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Working with Hackers
Uyghur abuse and internment in China. Luxury properties in Austria owned by Belarus’s oil minister. Criminal exploitation of London’s company services industry. These investigations were all possible because of hacked data dumps. As a journalist, how do you negotiate with hackers or hacktivists? What questions do you ask? What are the ethical considerations? What are […]
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Visual Investigations: Reporting Techniques
Once considered merely a form of fact-checking, forensic visual investigation has rapidly become a critical method of journalistic inquiry, thanks to new technologies, innovative skills, and the global ubiquity of social media imagery. In the chaos of dramatic public events, forensic visual reporting teams can now often answer the question: Who did exactly what, and […]
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Plane and Ship Tracking
A raft of new tools are helping journalists track shipping and aircraft around the world. The numerous ways to track ships and planes open a whole new range of stories for journalists to investigate, from following billionaires’ private planes to uncovering the details of refugee boats capsizing. ———————– The Global Investigative Journalism Network is an […]
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Investigating Food & Agriculture
There are numerous investigative topics to explore between the farmer’s field and the grocery store – and, indeed, the plate – and several recent projects have exposed abuses in the production, distribution, and access to food. This expert panel offers deep experience in issues from fisheries and pesticides to food security and biodiversity — with journalists based in Tunisia, the UK, the US, and Southeast Asia.
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Tracking Political Extremism
We are in the midst of a decade-long global backlash against democracy and human rights. A new extremism has taken hold, characterized by radical right-wing groups and ultranationalist political movements. These groups are not only growing but are becoming more organized. International ties among them are also growing — digitally, ideologically, financially — but their networks are poorly understood and investigative journalism in this area is lacking.
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Crowd Driven Journalism: Using Communities to Investigate
One of the great spin-offs of the digital age is that journalists can tap into crowds and communities in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. Local communities are reporting impactful stories, providing tips and resources, and bolstering the finances of watchdog media around the world. Here are journalists from remarkably diverse environments — Malaysia, […]
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Rewriting History: Investigations that Change Our Understanding of the Past
The best historians and investigative journalists share a great deal: they go after primary sources, they follow the trails of money and accountability, and they put events in a broader context that the public can understand. Often those events look shockingly different just 20 or 30 years later, based on documents, data, and interviews.
Resource Video
GIJC23 – Investigating Social Media: Telegram, Twitter, & WhatsApp
This workshop might just emerge as the one that changes your life as a watchdog journalist. Misinformation and disinformation on “closed” social media networks — such as WhatsApp and Telegram – have already had devastating consequences for democratic processes in places like India, Nigeria, Russia, and Brazil.
Guide Resource
Asset Disclosure
Required disclosures by public officials about their income and assets can be invaluable to investigative journalists. And information about wealth and its sources can play a vital role in uncovering corruption. Official filings are often the starting point for classic follow-the-money stories. However, disclosure laws have gaps, so the public records don’t always reveal the […]
Resource
10 Investigative Questions to Ask after a Natural Disaster
Watchdog reporters should discard the idea that damage from natural disasters is simply due to “acts of nature,” and rather think of it as a mix of hazardous events and human actions.
Resource Video
How Journalists Investigated the Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh
Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist working with Al Jazeera, was killed by a gunshot to the head on the morning of May 11, 2022, while reporting from Jenin, a city in the West Bank. Abu Akleh was covering a raid by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The controversial killing has drawn global media […]
Resource Video
How to Investigate the World Cup
Football (soccer to Americans) is the world’s most popular sport and the World Cup one of its highlights, anticipated by millions, even billions around the globe. The next World Cup takes place in November-December this year in Qatar, based on a decision made in 2010 by football’s governing body, FIFA (the International Federation of Football […]
Resource Video
So You Think You Can Google? – Workshop With Henk van Ess
We need to talk about Google! The world’s most popular search engine tries to please as many people as possible. But for journalists, the quality of results has rapidly declined. What is the issue and what can investigators do about it? GIJN is pleased to announce a hands-on session with search guru Henk van Ess, […]
Resource Video
How to Investigate a Billion-Dollar Corporate Fraud
Once a $30 billion global bluechip financial services and tech company, Germany’s Wirecard filed for insolvency in 2021 in what is one of the biggest corporate frauds of the modern era. The tenacious and prolonged investigative reporting by the Financial Times, helped to uncover widespread fraud, malpractice and negligence. Dan McCrum, a senior Financial Times […]
Resource Video
How to Investigate Elections
The state of democracy is at its lowest point in decades. Around the world, free and fair elections face growing threats from disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, voter suppression, campaign corruption, violence, intimidation, and more. Covering elections as a political “horse race” has never been enough. This approach to campaign reporting is even more inadequate today, […]
Chapter Guide Resource
Amateur Open Source Researchers Go Viral Unpacking the War in Ukraine
From college sophomores to 9-to-5 tech workers, open source hobbyist-investigators are gaining huge audiences by reconstructing events on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world.
Guide Resource
Investigating Russia and the War in Ukraine
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, GIJN has published a series of stories and tipsheets for investigative journalists covering the war.