Whether it’s tables of data embedded in reports or spreadsheets saved as PDFs, journalists get lots of data in PDF format. But until you get that data into a spreadsheet, there’s not much you can do with it. Luckily, there are a few great tools that can liberate your data quickly and with relative ease.
In his second column, Ivo Burum has some tips on location sound recording, including suggestions on mic types and a basic checklist to make sure you’re getting it right while working solo.
Time to get your mapping game on. Here are a list of tools to help journalists get the picture, from the easy-to-use My Maps to custom maps for the more experienced, like Color Brewer and Mapbox.
Got time for a deep dive? From Journalism After Snowden to Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan, here’s a round-up of some of the books that have come across our desks at GJIN.
Some crucial stories have been uncovered by investigative journalists in the Arab world but they don’t get the attention – or the traction – they deserve. What they could use is some lessons in marketing.
We’re delighted to launch a new column — Mojo Workin’ — on tips and tools for mobile journalism by noted mojo expert Ivo Burum. Ivo’s workshops are a popular feature of GIJN conferences. The Australia-based journalist brings over 30 years of experience producing prime-time programing across genres. He’ll be profiling the latest techniques with investigative journalists in mind, so here’s a great chance to get your mojo workin’.
Every year the world loses 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forests, an area about the size of Greece. A critical way to stem this forest loss is to make concessions data more transparent. This information is critical as it gives journalists, civil society groups and the public the information they need to hold the government and the private sector accountable for deforestation.
Freedom of information requests can generate unique stories on a wide range of subjects. Here’s a sampling that covers fishing, Uber, football and a suspect land deal. They’re united in revealing the potential for developing stories based on requesting information — about government permits, local crime statistics and official correspondence.
Transnational investigations pose a different set of additional challenges. Coordinating journalists across borders, who have different priorities, and making them work as if they were sitting in the same newsroom, is not an easy task. Here are some lessons Investigate Europe has to share based on their experience.
Filing right to information requests can be a very frustrating process, but the reward can be a valuable exclusive article. Here are four examples from India, Northern Ireland and the U.S., in which journalists successfully developed stories using national freedom of information and right to information laws.
Your nonprofit board of directors can be a dynamic catalyst to bring in new major donations. People who are passionate about what your institution does and have a lifetime of connections can make the difference between “basic survival” fundraising or breaking out into the green fields of major gifts fundraising. Here are three ways to help your board shed their fears of fundraising and find their unique role in this aspect.
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s exposé on sexual abuse of minors by clergymen made a huge difference – worldwide, the Vatican defrocked more than 800 priests, laws were changed to better protect children and a lot of victims received help, counseling and money. Now, as finances of the news business are crumbling, reporters need help too. Because without the support of the public, investigations that should be done – like Spotlight’s – will not get done.
The Center for Investigative Reporting embarked on a new experiment last year: piloting an Animated Investigations collaborative course with the California College of the Arts. The course, which is intended for three semesters and a malleable work in progress, first taught students to animate existing Reveal investigations. However, it slowly transformed into a course where students identified their own underreported stories to animate.
The paper trail has changed — money now moves digitally and business registries are databases — and this lets journalists do more than ever before in tracking people and companies across borders. Here’s a useful list of which business databases to start looking into if you’re background companies in China, India, and the Philippines.
When the president of the parliament states that there are some MPs “doing nothing,” you know what to do as a data journalist: you turn to the numbers. This is how I did that and how I got a scatter plot in a printed paper and an interactive one online.
At this year’s Highway Africa — the continent’s largest annual gathering of journalists — watchdog groups showcased a host of open data and accountability tools aimed squarely at Africa. Here are six of them, developed by Code4SA and presented by Wellington Radu of Media Monitoring Africa and Levi Kabwato of the Open Democracy Advice Centre.
Many great actors failed to adapt from silent movies to the “talkies” and disappeared from the big screen. By the same token, many great journalists risk fading away because they are not adjusting from the era of virtually silent audiences to the virtual era of talking audiences.
Engaging and interactive journalism is still possible even without an extensive knowledge of coding. But how? We’ve taken the guesswork out, scouring the internet to find the most accessible tools to create multimedia content.
At First Draft, we frequently receive emails from a whole range of people asking how they can start doing the sort of online open-source investigation and verification that they’ve seen us doing. The skills and methodologies used are all something that can be learnt through a little persistence, but here are a few pieces of advice to get you started.
In the very early days of building Sonr*, we talked to newsrooms all over New York City and London to get a sense of what tools journalists are currently using to get the job done. Some of these newsrooms were more traditional than others, but we found that there was a core set of digital tools that most writers and editors couldn’t get through the day without. Let us know what you think, or if this list is missing anything in the comments!
When Gustavo Cerati, a legendary Argentinian musician and songwriter, was asked to share his best advice for new musicians, he refused—saying instead that “experiences are not transferable.” You may agree or may not with his statement, but if you’ve ever worn an Oculus Rift or a similar virtual reality (VR) headset, you’ll know we are getting closer and closer to transferable experiences.
How can you search and analyze collections of documents on your own computers with simple tools? At DataHarvest, Robert Gebeloff and I ran a workshop to answer that question. As people were seemed interested, here’s a write-up of the two key tools we worked with: Apache Tika for content extraction and regular expressions in Sublime Text as an advanced search tool.
When it’s time to start a new investigation, journalists prepare themselves in different ways: from doing the research to pitching the story to building the narrative. It’s not about a single formula, but about integrating different resources and strategies. Here, we present a selection of the tips presented at the 2016 conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors (#IRE16), useful for starting and developing investigations.
In an extract from his book Finding Stories with Spreadsheets Paul Bradshaw explains how to use basic cleaning functions in spreadsheets to make it easier to combine data, including a case study where the same functions were used to speed up a research process for a story.
Before the emergence of digital tools, recording and (especially) transcribing an interview was a tedious affair. The little microcassette tapes were of dubious reliability—and yes, I once had one fail on me during a crucial and contentious encounter. Transcribing was worse, as you’d sit there constantly hitting the “play” and “rewind” buttons, an imprecise process that risked damage to the tape.
Alongside the advantages available for criminals of operating on a global scale, making it harder to track them down, there are also disadvantages that the clever journalist or law enforcement official can exploit to expose them. How do we do this? Firstly, through data: more data means more transparency, provided the quality of information is there and supported by tools that allow proper analysis. Secondly, by journalists using advanced techniques.
With the aim of contributing to the promotion of data-based investigations and asserting its vision of journalism as an essential service to democracy, OjoPúblico has published “La navaja suiza del reportero. Herramientas de investigación en la era de los datos masivos” (“The Swiss Army Knife Journalist: Digital Research Tools in the Era of Big Data”), a resource for Hispanic reporters who want to become familiar with the world of data journalism and, above all, to understand its meaning and relevance in Latin America and the world.
