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.
Three people have died in Denmark due to infection from drug-resistant “super-bug” bacteria from pigs. None of the deceased themselves had been in contact with the animals. Data on the three deaths emerged in testimony in the City Court of Aarhus, Denmark, on Tuesday, in the trial of Danish journalists Kjeld Hansen and Nils Mulvad. The two journalists are being prosecuted for revealing farms in which the bacteria is spreading. Mulvad is a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and both work for GIJN-member Investigative Reporting Denmark.
Imagine a charming Italian town packed with journalists, data geeks, and students. Everywhere you go you run into old colleagues, someone you follow on Twitter, or your next partner in crime. Now add 225 sessions in beautiful century-old venues, 540 speakers from around the world, and 230 young volunteers ready to help. That about sums up the 8th International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Didn’t make it? Don’t worry, here are some highlights compiled by GIJN, including panels and tips on investigating crime, data techniques, social media, and crowdfunding. (Photo: GIJN members in Perugia from IRPI, ICIJ, OCCRP, VVOJ.)
Greg Palast’s approach to investigative journalism can be summed up in one phrase: Stand up for the underdogs, and take on the fatcats. His hard-hitting reports on corporations like ExxonMobil, politicians like Bush, and shadowy institutions like vulture funds stem from an impulse to challenge those players with the power to bend the rules to their private advantage. That’s why functioning democracies need people like Palast.
Despite a tough environment for investigative reporting, South Africa’s muckrakers are turning out some of the world’s best journalism year after year. Here are the finalists and winner of the just announced Taco Kuiper Awards, that country’s highest prize for investigative journalism. In the awards presentation, Wits University Journalism Professor Anton Harber talked about the extraordinary range of reports submitted, from corrupt officials and crooks to rhino horn smuggling, bad doctors, botched circumcisions, and lion hunting.
What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for March 20-March 27), including items from Al Jazzera, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) Data, The Guardian, and Quartz, among others.
