Over the past two years, words like “bots,” “botnets” and “trolls” have entered mainstream conversations about social networks and their impact on democracies. Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab laid out some of the working definitions and their methodologies to help identify, expose and explain disinformation online.
Pick your collaborators like you pick your friends, if you can help it — trust is critical. Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University funded six collaborative reporting projects across the United States and gathered some of the lessons learned and main takeaways for other media considering collaborative reporting projects.
With daily headlines about massive data hacks, everyone should be worried about digital security. But investigative journalists may even be deliberately targeted. Digital security expert Chris Walker shared his top tips.
Want to track what Chinese businesses — big or small — are up to in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia? These tips from reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian and The South China Morning Post will help.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow from the US government to contractors around the world, but knowing how to dig into these contracts can be daunting. Here’s Michael Morisy from MuckRock with tips on how to dig in.
California officials and firefighters are becoming increasingly concerned that the drier, windier conditions spurred on by the warming climate will make wildfires more devastating and their seasons longer. But are enough people paying attention to their root causes and dire consequences? Here are eight ways US journalists have been chronicling this year’s wildfires.
For newsrooms that want to produce professional looking infographics but don’t have the technical skills or budget to hire a professional, Kat Duncan came up with five user-friendly tools to help you create neat looking infographics without worrying about too much coding.
Your newsletter mailing list is made up of real people who have allowed you into some of the most prime real estate in the world: their inbox, and this privilege should not be abused. Splice Newsroom offers their tips to offer your subscribers quality content.
Economist Jonathan Schwabish created a handy data visualization cheatsheet with straightforward key principles to adhere to when creating data visualizations. Remember: avoid 3D, make labels easy to read and try small multiples.
Customer, profits, monetize. These are just some of the words that make journalists cringe because they sound so dirty when associated with our ethically-produced investigative journalism. But university professor James Breiner argues that journalists and the media need to add these words to their vocabulary without feeling squeamish.
In this month’s Investigative Toolbox, GIJN’s Alastair Otter delves into how to share sensitive documents with OnionShare, mine Twitter with Treeverse and FollowerWonk and monitor website updates with Versionista and VisualPing.
Investigations take more time and effort than the average story — and can still leave you flat. Samantha Sunne rounded up some tools for GIJN which will help journalists around the world tease out investigative topics, find sources and keep track of that endlessly growing list of notes, sources and documents.
Research at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy show that email and SEO are critical to audience development and monetization in single-subject newsrooms. They offer some tips of how to improve and adapt these old-school web strategies to local newsrooms.
If you host your investigative documentary or journalism video on YouTube, check out this useful graphic on YouTube SEO statistics created by tech enthusiast Saksham Kumar. Knowing the ranking factors that YouTube takes into account could give you ideas on how to optimize your video to reach the largest audience it can.
There are different ways fake news sites fake us out. In GIJN’s latest tutorial, Olga Yurkova, co-founder of the Ukrainian fact-checking project StopFake, runs through the six main techniques used and offers up some simple tools to vet them.
The past few years have seen an explosion of digital tools that can be used to enhance journalism research and reporting. In this new monthly feature GIJN’s IT Coordinator Alastair Otter takes a look at some of the best and latest tools and techniques for enhancing investigative and data-driven journalism.
Is personalization the next revolution in the news industry? John S Knight Journalism Fellow Titus Plattner argues that at a time when more and more news outlets are shifting from an advertising-based revenue model to a subscription based model, personalization is the best way to reinforce the relation to the real client.
Starting a fact-checking organization in a country with limited media freedom is difficult, but not impossible. Some, like Rouhani Meter, which fact-checks Iran’s president, may have to operate from outside the country and be creative about how they distribute their content. Daniel Funke writes about fact-checkers who have found a way to work in less-than-friendly environments.
Miranda Patrucic has led numerous cross-border investigations and successfully uncovered intricate money laundering networks, billion-dollar bribes and the murky business dealings of oligarchs in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. She spoke with GIJN on how she does it.
Search engine optimization is particularly important when a publisher’s content solely exists online. Optimizing your stories for SEO for a digital-only news site is like placing the newspaper on the front row of the newsstand, face up. Emily Roseman has tips for your newsroom on how best to implement SEO optimization.
The documentary “Killing Pavel” won the prestigious IRE Medal this weekend. Top Ukranian journalist Dmytro Gnap shares tips for effectively collecting the CCTV footage which played a key role in the investigation.
In part two of this Mojo Workin’ column on developing and producing the story, Ivo Burum focuses on equipment, coverage and audio perspective.
Mobile journalism expert Ivo Burum is back with a column on the most frustrating part of mojo — developing and producing a story. He offers tips on developing your story idea and sharpening your focus on story structure, character and shots coverage.
De Correspondent has been tapping into the experience and expertise of its readers to build and research their stories. But instead of one-off engagements with their audience, they are reinventing their approach to the conventional rolodex: verifying their readers expertise and inviting them into conversations surrounding their stories.
There are hundreds of stories in business registries and court documents around the world just waiting for a journalist to uncover them. Emmanuel Freudenthal shares his five tips on finding open-source secrets in Africa with GIJN — helpful guidelines which can be used around the world.
Deep fakes — videos which feature one person’s face on another’s body — are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Samantha Sunne talked to some of the world’s experts on the techniques which can help you learn the weaknesses of this new phenomenon that’s got everyone talking.
Journalists can increase people’s trust and create a loyal audience by engaging with their readers in the comments section. This guide by The Coral Project has tips on how journalists can best interact with their audience, deal with potential abuse and find real value in the comments.
Journalists are not usually in the frame of mind for grants. They pitch their story to an editor, the editor says “no” or “yes” and they get to work. But drafting a grant application is a somewhat complex technique. Here is a list of mistakes that tend to kill many fledgling journalistic projects before they even stand a chance.
