With robust data journalism hands-on training and many presentations focusing on covering mining and oil issues, the 2014 Power Reporting Conference in Johannesburg drew over 350 participants from 19 African countries.
In 2009 the European Parliament proposed to start a research grant scheme for investigative journalists who plan to investigate cases that affect at least two member states, or the EU as whole. EUR 1.5 million was allocated for this purpose in the EU’s 2010 budget. In 2010 a pilot project defaulted due to an unresolved administrative issue. Then, from 2012 on, the pilot project was turned into a preparatory action and an external consultant was hired for about a quarter of a million euros to figure out how the administrative problem could be solved. The feasibility study was drafted in 2013, yet the Commission felt it could not implement the program in 2014, because the necessary legislation would not go through, they said, due to administrative difficulties. So they didn’t do anything.
GIJN member Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) will host its seventh annual forum for Arab investigative journalists in Amman in December. The conference, whose theme is “Arab Media: The Battle for Independence,” will feature 30 + panels and trainings with speakers like Sy Hersh, Marwan Muashar, Tim Sebastian, and more.
At long last we can retire Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as the icons of investigative reporting. With his second book probing the dark tunnels of the so-called war on terror, James Risen has established himself as the finest national security reporter of this generation… Although parts of Risen’s new revelations have been published in the Times or elsewhere, here they are fleshed out in richly reported chapters studded with eye-popping new charges.
Getting hassled by authorities is nothing new for investigative journalists. But two recent incidents serve notice that some countries are cracking down with a tried-and-true technique to stop pesky foreign reporters: prosecuting them for visa technicalities. In Indonesia and Russia this week, authorities are trying to stop coverage and even training by investigative journalists.
Exposés of questionable financial transactions in Argentina, Trinidad, and Mexico led the 2014 Latin American Investigative Journalism Awards, announced over the weekend in Mexico City. Judging by the strength and breadth of the 14 finalists, investigative journalism is alive and well across Latin America. First prize went to “El señor de los hoteles y el socio de la Presidenta” (“The Lord of the Hotels and the President’s Partner”) by Hugo Alconada and Mariela Arias of Argentina’s La Nación.
Open Data should be Open, right? When I read “Open Data” I think it means the data can be used openly by anyone for any purpose. But it ain’t so. Read the fine print in the terms and conditions and you’ll quickly realize that Open Data really means wide open liability. How on earth can Open Data restore trust in government if the governments publishing their own Open Data won’t even accept responsibility for the quality of what they publish?
The civil society movement campaigning for government openness reached a significant landmark yesterday with the Latin American country of Paraguay enacting the world’s 100th access to information law. Twenty years ago, in 1994, there were just 15 access to information laws globally. But “there are still many challenges ahead,” says Helen Darbishire of Access Info Europe. “The quality of access to information laws varies enormously. There is insufficient transparency in practice and we urgently need more comparative data on how these laws are working.”
Africa’s premier investigative journalism, Power Reporting, returns to Johannesburg, South Africa, this November 3-5. The annual event is organized by the Journalism Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), a GIJN member. The three-day conference is an opportunity to learn new skills, hear about the top investigative stories and share experience on investigative techniques, data journalism, and more.
Where I live, it’s common to hear people say that the U.S. government destroyed the World Trade Center. What looks to me and my reporter colleagues like a Russian invasion of Ukraine looks to them like a murky situation where no one is right or wrong. But when someone said to me over dinner that a Polish fighter plane had shot down MH17 over Ukraine, citing yet another obscure Internet “news” site, something snapped. I turned away, but the problem is still there.
Behind the scenes, proponents of freedom of expression are working to ensure that independent media is for the first time a priority in the global development goals set by the UN and its member states. As part of that push, last week more than 300 representatives from media NGOs, journalist unions and associations, civil society groups, governments, and international agencies gathered for The Bali Media Forum organized by UNESCO. The three-day meeting, on August 26-28 in Bali, Indonesia, ended with a clarion call to make access to information and free media a development priority.
Norway’s Association for Investigative Journalism — SKUP — is holding its first big data conference on October 18, with top data journalists from across Scandinavia and overseas. The intensive day includes 16 sessions of 90 minutes each, ranging from basic to advanced levels. SKUP will also host the next Global Investigative Journalism Conference — in October 2015.
Even as a growing number of authoritarian regimes crack down on the political press, business news is thriving. And the coverage is more vigorous than might be expected. Enterprising journalists are exposing mismanagement and unearthing shady business deals—and even at times exposing official corruption—that otherwise might never see the light of day. While other journalists face censorship, jail, or worse, business journalists are eschewing political stories to provide news and statistics on markets, business deals, and international trade.The expansion of economic and business journalism is not a substitute
for truly free and independent media. But it is a sign that—even in the most repressive environments—the demand for trustworthy information is strong and growing.
Who should you trust? (Or, for all you pedants out there, whom should you trust?) It’s an important question for all of us, not least when you’re buying a used car (and believe me, I know.) But it’s probably even more important for journalists, who talk to strangers on a regular basis and need to make snap judgments about how much faith we should have in what they say. So here’s the bad news: You shouldn’t trust yourself to figure out who you should trust.
We hear a lot about the next Silicon Valley, but we don’t hear much about the Valley of Death. That is where 80 percent of tech startups go to die. Startups die or join the walking dead mainly for two reasons: they don’t have enough cash or they don’t have enough knowledge to get to the next stage of development. They are unable to show investors that their project could be commercially viable. The Media Factory News Accelerator, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, wants to change those odds of making it across the Valley of Death.
This week, I moderated a discussion that followed the screening of Silenced, a new documentary that tells the stories of three whistleblowers who exposed torture, mass surveillance and government waste. What Silenced brought to the screen was the humanity of the whistleblowers and the patriotic idealism that compelled them to work in government agencies like the NSA and the CIA and then to speak out against the excesses they saw there. If anything, Silenced dramatizes how the landscape of government secrecy has changed dramatically since 9/11 and the war on terror.
Thank you for allowing me and my colleagues the opportunity to testify before you today. As you know, more than a year ago, I and 42 other NGO workers were convicted in an Egyptian court for working on programs designed to build democracy, monitor elections and train political parties and journalists. We were given sentences ranging from one to five years in prison. Most people who knew about the case probably think it was resolved long ago.
How can media make sense of a country that has over 1.2 billion people (about 17 percent of the global population), close to 800 languages, an electorate of 814 million, and the largest urban agglomeration in the world? How does one plan for a country where, at the end of 2012, about 22 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line (with a daily spending of less than about US45 cents in rural India and US55 cents in urban India), but which also has 89 billionaires and features fifth in the Global Rich List?
Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema has won awards, fellowships, and international acclaim for his investigative reports. But at home he and his colleagues are under sustained attack, and he reports now that surveillance and harassment are increasing. Check out the activity among Cheema’s impressive 123,000 Twitter followers after he announced his election to the GIJN board.
We are the first nonprofit investigative newsroom in the German-speaking world. Our goal is to give citizens access to information. We are one of the many answers to the media crisis. The old models of business are losing effectiveness. At the same time, journalists need to find better ways of explaining an increasingly complex world. Publishers are shutting down newspapers or cutting their budgets. Digital media has not been able to make up for this loss. The media has trouble fulfilling its watchdog role. CORRECT!V aims to change this: we want to make investigative and informative journalism affordable and accessible to media organizations throughout Germany.
Online local news start ups are devoting significantly more resources to creating content than they are to raising money to pay for it – and that may spell trouble for long term sustainability. That’s one finding from a new survey conducted earlier this year as part of my database of U.S. news start ups, www.micheleslist.org. About 80 publishers responded to the annual survey, which I conduct independently.
An extraordinary group of 20 journalists from 15 countries is running to serve on the first elected board of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The election, being held online all this week, is the direct result of last month’s big vote by our membership to register GIJN as a nonprofit and to restructure its board of directors with worldwide representation. Each GIJN member organization gets one vote, but everyone can view the candidate bios, statements, and the election rules on our election page. The results will be announced next week!
It’s been three months since ex-president Viktor Yanukovych fled in the dead of night, after a last, desperate attempt to cover his tracks by destroying documents. It’s not going to be that easy, Mr. President. For the past three years, Ukraine’s “Journalists Day” has been commemorated with an anti-censorship rally in front of his former Mezhyhirya residence. This year, the sprawling compound itself has been hacked. From June 6-8, the Mezhyhirya Festival on investigative journalism, digital activism, and leaks will celebrate a new era of freedom of expression with those who were on site to help usher it in.
Two Danish journalists, Kjeld Hansen and Nils Mulvad, have been found guilty of violating that country’s Data Protection Act for releasing a story on the spread of pig-to-human infection. They have been fined 2.500 Danish kroner (about US$450) each. But the two say they’ve now decided to try to appeal part of the verdict. “We want the court to accept that what we have been publishing on the web since end of October 2010 is in the line with Danish law,” said Mulvad.
