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Stories

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Methodology Teaching & Training

Document of the Day: U.S. Secret Service Contract for “Dark Web” Research

by David E. Kaplan • October 3, 2014

Paper trails have always been of great interest to investigative journalists. Digging into documents can tell a great deal about people, organizations, and what they’re up to. Here’s today’s Doc of the Day, a contract recently filled by the U.S. Secret Service, the law enforcement group charged with protecting the president and other political VIPs. It’s for “Dark Web Data Subscription.” More than 90% of the Web is thought to be unsearchable by Google and other common search engines. This is often called the dark or deep Web, and it includes sites behind firewalls and passwords, unusual formats, criminal and other hidden networks, and lots and lots of databases.

Methodology

When Comedy Meets Muckraking: “Fake” News Gets Investigative

by David E. Kaplan • September 27, 2014

You’ve probably seen the spoof broadcasts of The Daily Show and similar “fake” TV news programs: the realistic sets, the bogus “live” shots from overseas hot spots, the absurd interviews. While steeped in wisecracks and satire, the shows have a hard political edge and often stir controversy. Increasingly, in the absence of serious news from the “real” news media, they also are getting into actual journalism, prompting one scholar to call the phenomenon “investigative comedy.”

Data Journalism Methodology Research

What Is Big Data?

by Jenna Dutcher • September 9, 2014

“Big Data.” It seems like the phrase is everywhere. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary by 2014, and Gartner’s just-released 2014 Hype Cycle shows “Big Data” passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and on its way down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Big Data is all the rage. But what does it actually mean? we asked 40+ thought leaders in publishing, fashion, food, automobiles, medicine, marketing, and every industry in between how exactly they would define the phrase “Big Data.” Their answers might surprise you!

Data Journalism Methodology Research

Top Ten #ddj: The Week’s Most Popular Data Journalism Links

by GIJN Staff • May 26, 2014

What’s the data driven journalism (#ddj) crowd tweeting about? Here are the week’s Top Data Journalism Links on Twitter (for May 13-23), including items from Open News, IJNet, and the Tow Center, among others.

Data Journalism Methodology

Using Twitter to Find People at the Scene of a Breaking Story

by Paul Myers • March 10, 2014

As news stories break, journalists find themselves wanting to speak to members of the public. They could have witnessed an incident or may have been affected by an event. Their views count and they enhance our reports with a human angle. There are many ways to locate ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but we don’t always know how our approaches will be received, or indeed if our messages to them will be read at all. This is where Twitter comes into its own.

Methodology News & Analysis

ICIJ’s Offshore Exposé: Bigger than Wikileaks’ ‘Cablegate’

by Sheila Coronel • April 5, 2013

It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.

Data Journalism Methodology

The Scarecrow and the Watchdog

by Reg Chua • March 28, 2013

Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.Scarecrow
In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.

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