This is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers to traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family.
The movie Spotlight, based on the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting into pedophilia inside the Catholic Church, won best picture and best screenplay at the 2016 Academy Awards late Sunday. “We would not be here today without the heroic efforts of our reporters,” declared producer Blye Pagon Faust as she accepted the award. “Not only do they effect global change, but they absolutely show us the necessity of investigative journalism.”
Sustainable Development Labs can bring the benefits of Technology and Innovation to the poorest communities in our cities and nations, providing education, jobs, and growth by channeling IT projects to work with and for the people in those communities.
The BBC has more journalists than any other media outlet in Britain, but out of those 4,000 men and women, yes 4,000, precisely none of them work in an investigations unit. The Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Mail have far less journalists between them but they all maintain centralized investigations units.
The American conservative movement is redefining the practice of investigative journalism to support its objectives. The movement’s key tool is undercover work, penetrating liberal organizations to collect and report embarrassing material, then feeding it to social and political adversaries of those organizations.
A data-driven investigation that exposed the human cost of school re-segregation in central Florida is the first-place winner of the 2015 Philip Meyer Journalism Award. Investigations that explored the growth of diversity in American cities and revealed the small cadre of attorneys who dominate the U.S. Supreme Court docket are also top winners. The Meyer Award, given annually by Investigative Reporters and Editors, recognizes the best use of social science methods in journalism.
A boom in investigative journalism in South Africa seems to be winding down as media houses slash budgets to balance their books to continue to pay dividends to shareholders. “South Africa has had something of a golden era in investigative reporting, with as many as four teams at different institutions dedicated to it,” said Professor Anton Harber, head of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
As 2015 nears an end, we’d like to share our top 12 stories of the year — the stories that you, our dear readers, found most compelling. The list ranges from free data tools and crowdfunding to the secrets of the Wayback Machine. Please join us in taking a look at The Best of GIJN.org this year.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is out with its annual census of journalists in prison, and, as always, the report makes for grim reading. Check it out, anyway — it’s important our community knows what’s happening to our colleagues around the world. Here’s the quick and dirty: Globally, CPJ found 199 journalists in prison because of their work on December 1, 2015, a modest decline from record highs of the past three years. (There were 221 in 2014.) CPJ’s list does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year.
We’re pleased to run this excerpt from the recent report, Propaganda and Freedom of the Media, produced by the Office of The Representative on Freedom of the Media at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “These are trying times,” said the Representative, Dunja Mijatović, at the November 26 roll out of the report, during which she branded propaganda “an ugly scar on the face of modern journalism” and called on governments “to get out of the news business.”
OGP needs a new organizational structure with new methods for evaluating national commitments. There aren’t enough support unit resources to manage the expansion. We have to rethink how we manage national commitments and how we evaluate what it means to be an open government. It’s just not right that countries can celebrate baby steps at OGP events while at the same time passing odious legislation, sidestepping OGP accomplishments, buckling to corruption, and cracking down on journalists.
Arab journalists work amid some of the world’s most challenging environments. Terrorists and militias, arbitrary arrests and harassment, autocratic governments, and a lack of documents and data are just a few of the challenges they face on a daily basis. And yet, despite these conditions, extraordinary work is being done by investigative journalists in the Arab world.
Hundreds of what appear to be Twitter bots are artificially inflating the retweet and favorite counts of tweets with links to articles from some of Russia’s top news agencies. Lawrence Alexander discovered that these same fake accounts have previously mass-posted links to scores of pro-Kremlin LiveJournal blogs—themselves part of a network of thousands. In this piece, which originally appeared on Global Voices, Alexander walks us through his research process.
In an era of increasing hostility to independent media, one of the bright spots is the rapid expansion of journalism nonprofits around the world — training, promoting, and reporting on stories that otherwise would never see the light of day. But a dangerous trend now threatens the progress our colleagues have made on press freedom and watchdog reporting: a crackdown on nonprofit organizations. Restrictions on international funding account for more than a third of the measures since 2012. With that in mind, we are pleased to reprint this important story from the Journal of Democracy, detailing the global scope of the backlash.
The seventh Latin American Investigative Journalism Conference ended on Monday, bringing together 150 journalists from some 15 countries in Lima, Peru. The conference, held November 20-23, presented awards to an impressive array of stories from across the region. Noting the quality of the awards submissions, veteran journalist Gustavo Gorritti declared, “El periodismo de investigacion se ha salvado.” (“Investigative Journalism has been saved.”)
Gone are the days of complaints about information operations and psychological operations (PSYOPS) undermining media development being pursued by USAID and its contractors. But those have been replaced by broader concerns that the U.S government overall may now be too focused on counter-messaging at the expense of independent media development. “We are concerned that there is an increasing shift away from supporting genuinely independent media towards what might be termed counter-propaganda and promoting counter narratives,” says James Deane, director of policy and learning at BBC Media Action.
For the first time ever journalists representing all European member states have teamed up to file complaints with the European Court of Justice against the European Parliament (EP). The institution refused to grant the journalists’ requests for access to information related to how the 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) spend their allowances. Journalists filed complaints with the Court of Justice on 13 November.
Cross-border cooperation was the big takeaway from a three-day meeting of investigative journalists from 17 countries in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 4-6. Billed as “The First Caribbean Meeting of Investigative Journalists: Tracking the Stories that Connect Us,” one aim was to create a counterweight to the power of organized crime by cooperating across borders, according to Carla Minet of the Center of Investigative Journalism of Puerto Rico.
A year ago I wrote an article about digital media startups around the world and attempts to categorize and analyze them. Some of that material is now a bit dated, and I have come across some other analyses and lists that have good road maps for media entrepreneurs.
More than 30 journalists were honored Friday night as award-winners and finalists in Argentina’s annual investigative awards competition. The awards were sponsored by the Argentinian Journalism Forum (FOPEA), the only member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network in that country.
On the occasion of International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, UNESCO is releasing a new study today, World Trends In Freedom of Expression and Media Development. Of particular note is the chapter Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age. We are reprinting below that section’s key findings and recommendations, which add another important voice calling for stronger measures to protect sources.
Here’s the annual map of global Internet freedom, drawn from Freedom on the Net 2015, released this week by Freedom House. The news is not good: Internet freedom worldwide declined for the fifth straight year in 2015, with more governments censoring information of public interest while expanding surveillance and restricting privacy tools, the report found. More than 61 percent of Internet users reside where criticism of governments, militaries, or ruling families have been subject to online censorship. A striking 58 percent live in countries where people have been imprisoned for posting political, social, or religious content.
There is a war on journalism around the world, and those attacking us are literally getting away with murder. Over the past decade more than 700 journalists have been killed — and less than one in ten of those cases have been solved. On average, a journalist is killed every five days while practicing his or her profession. Join your colleagues this November 2 for International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. There will be events around the world spearheaded by UNESCO, the UN agency with a mandate to defend freedom of expression and press freedom.
On September 25, world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a United Nations summit. The new goals commit all 193 UN member states to an ambitious development agenda that calls for poverty eradication, environmental protection, gender equality, disease prevention, universal schooling, ‘inclusive’ growth, and good governance – and includes, for the first time a commitment to public access to information. This new commitment has potentially transformative implications for the free flow of information and independent media development worldwide.
What happens when a journalist investigates treatment facilities for malaria patients in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo? For Francis Mbala, it led to his arrest and a Kafkaesque tale about the dangers of investigating in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Mbala’s story comes from the ZAM Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.
