Private records can be just as illuminating as public records. A team of ProPublica Illinois journalists used an unusual private record — a mother’s diary — as the primary material in an investigative narrative that exposed the human impact of a clinical drug trial of children with bipolar disorder.
In the hot summer of 2018, Hungary’s Atlatszo tracked two luxury vehicles – a private plane and a yacht – that the Hungarian government elite, including Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his closest allies, used to travel to business meetings, football games and vacations abroad. Here’s how they did it.
For the 50th anniversary of the riots that rocked Washington, DC after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Washington Post mapped the extent of the rioting throughout the city thanks to data compiled from declassified Secret Service reports and archival city planning documents.
As VICE weathers through cutbacks, VICE Arabia is betting on investigative journalism to set it apart from the competition in Arabic-speaking countries. Its team’s first big scoop exposed a smuggling network that exhumed corpses to sell them to medical students, who needed them for their studies. VICE Arabia’s senior editor tells GIJN how they uncovered the story.
When Washington, DC-based journalist Scilla Alecci began investigating a story that would later become part of the Implant Files, she hit a brick wall: Hospitals in India wouldn’t answer her phone calls. So she took the advice of an Indian colleague and booked a flight over. Together, they started knocking on doors all over the country, leading them to unexpected discoveries.
After a landmark New Jersey supreme court ruling made police use-of-force reports fully available to the public, NJ Advance Media decided to dig in. They fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the reports and create the United States’ most comprehensive statewide database on this issue.
Paul McNally produced what was South Africa’s first investigative podcast around the story of a wrongful conviction. Here’s what he discovered while writing, producing and editing Alibi — with some advice on how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Earlier this year, Botswana’s INK Centre for Investigative Journalism tracked down a dossier which detailed the heinous crimes of Gukurahundi — a series of massacres of civilians carried out by the Zimbabwe National Army in the 1980s — which had been kept under lock and key for decades. It was the first time the names of the deceased and blow-by-blow accounts of how the executions were carried out were made available to the public. INK’s Ntibinyane Ntibinyane writes for GIJN on how they did it.
Video games and journalism have had a history — the melding of the two has been less successful in breaking news because of the fast turnaround. However, it has seen more successes in longer investigations that take more time to develop. ProPublica’s Sisi Wei shares the process behind the unit’s gamification of five asylum seekers’ stories.
John Schrag had known for a while about an unexamined pool of data that could shed new light on the issue of concussions in high school sports. The executive editor of a newspaper in Oregon, his first instincts were to keep the story in-house and garner all the glory, but he quickly realized the only way the story would see the light of day was through collaboration.
