In week two of #gijnElectionWatchdog, GIJN’s project to arm US reporters with effective tools for election accountability coverage included a comprehensive election equipment database, campaign finance deep access, daily time-saving tools, and the rules for all 50 states in a single spreadsheet.
In this GIJN webinar, “The US Election: Digging into Disinformation,” the second of two that focus on the US Election, we bring together three extraordinary journalists who will share their analysis of the election info wars — and their tips for navigating the tsunami of disinformation while investigating in the public interest.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we found The Markup creating an online privacy tool, suggestions on how to make your maps more neutral, and practical tips for pitching donors during a pandemic.
How fast is the coronavirus spreading in countries around the world? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 14 to 20 finds data visualization designer Jan Willem Tulp simulating the speed of COVID-19 infections and German television news program ZDF heute mapping how the pandemic traversed the globe. Meanwhile, Thibi Recipes explores tutoring data journalism as if you’re following a cooking recipe, the Financial Times reports on climate extremes, and ICIJ and Buzzfeed bare suspect financial data.
With traditional media funding models in disarray, membership offers news outlets an alternative way of ensuring their profitability or survival. GIJN spoke to the Membership Puzzle Project’s Ariel Zirulnick about their latest guide and her top tips for organizations considering going down this route.
Citizen Matters is the flagship publication of the Bengaluru-based Oorvani Foundation, a nonprofit working on open knowledge platforms that help develop better cities. Today, it has successfully transitioned to become an online-only news site, and has been expanding its reach to other cities, writes Amruta Byatnal for GIJN.
United States’ government actions and policies at home and abroad affect people’s lives around the world. The outcome of the upcoming November election — not only for president but for the US Congress — will have global impact. In this GIJN webinar “The US Election: What’s At Stake”, the first of two focusing on the US Election, we bring together three American journalists who are digging into American politics to find out what’s at stake and what journalists need to investigate.
Digital technologies have changed whistleblowing, with a growth in new tactics and strategies based on the use of encryption-based communication tools. Philip Di Salvo writes for GIJN about his research into new platforms.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we found a guide for setting up a media membership model, DW Akademie’s handbook for media start-ups, and Google’s latest initiative to support digital news publishers.
In its first week, #gijnElectionWatchdog showed reporters how to quickly flag campaign finance abuses; listed Twitter handles for nearly all US secretaries of state; explained America’s wildly different vote recount rules by state; and found a pioneering tool to dig into dark money ad spending on Facebook.
Territorial disputes — over land, borders, or resources — are a long-standing source of tension around the world. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from September 7 to 13 finds Al Jazeera explaining the India-China dispute over a shared Himalayan border in seven maps, and the Financial Times attempting to put into context the tensions between Turkey and its neighbors competing over natural gas discoveries. We also find Stanford University and Big Local News offering data reporting grants on the pandemic, and other groups offering free data journalism workshops and webinars.
From the global coronavirus pandemic to the soul-searching that has come as a result of the Black Lives Matter protests, 2020 has cracked open society’s fault lines. Organizations are questioning their role, and journalism has not been spared this moment of introspection.
We’re delighted to announce that GIJN has launched a new initiative: GIJN Afrique. We’ll be sharing the best investigative tips and tools, groundbreaking stories, grants and fellowships, data sets and more, in French, with a focus on French-speaking countries across the African continent.
The stakes for the US election on November 3 are enormous — not just for Americans, but for the rest of the world. So, for the next two months, GIJN will be producing a daily stream of tips and tools most useful to reporters on the campaign front lines.
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke to award-winning Mexican journalist Marcela Turati, co-founder of Quinto Elemento Lab, about the resources she uses to investigate disappearances in Mexico’s drug war. While information from victims’ families is paramount, she also shared insights on the value of open source tools, bank records, social media mining, and collaboration with nonprofit forensic teams in tracking the patterns behind the crisis.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads around the world, we found stories about freelancers commissioned to write for a massive Russian-backed disinformation campaign, how to (not) get your pitch read by an editor, and a guide for reporting on US elections.
Millions of people go missing every year. Some vanish of their own accord, but many are victims of organized crime, security agencies, and criminal states. Journalists play a key role in investigating these disappearances, but the work is difficult, dangerous and often harrowing. In the final webinar of the GIJN series, Digging into Disappearances, we will hear from four senior journalists who have investigated notable missing persons cases related to criminal organizations and criminal conduct.
What was the magnitude of the Beirut port blast and how did it compare to other infamous explosions in history? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 31 to September 6 finds Reuters illustrating just how powerful last month’s blast was in relation to the Chernobyl disaster and other explosions. The Tampa Bay Times highlighted how a county sheriff’s office is using an algorithm to supposedly predict and intercept the criminals of the future, while The New York Times used satellite maps to show how physical and political geographies interact across the United States. ESPN has been looking into the potential of people in college football crowds to become COVID-19 super-spreaders, and Slate analyzed the overuse of the word “murmur” in the popular Twilight novel series.
From South Africa to Tunisia, France to Australia, the podcasts industry is booming. Here is our list of some of the best global podcasts from 2020 — so far! — that are either investigative in nature, or about investigative journalism, and compiled by GIJN’s global team.
Toxic negative partisanship between Democrats and Republicans is causing media audiences to selectively discount or exaggerate facts presented by reporters ahead of America’s November 3 election. From interviews with audience engagement editors and a survey of research, GIJN identified a dozen techniques that journalists can use to increase the chances that audiences across the divide will at least “hear” the facts they unearth.
Reporting of organized crime and missing people is complex and nuanced, and journalists must be both careful and deliberate in their approach. GIJN’s new guide rounds up case studies and examples of published investigations, relevant organizations to be aware of during the research stage, and tips for on-the-ground reporting.
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, in the United States has reignited national unrest just months after the death of George Floyd. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 24 to 30 finds ProPublica documenting police violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and tracking police accountability. The New York Times shows how the process of redlining, or denying mortgage finance to predominantly Black neighborhoods from the 1930s onwards, has resulted in heat disparities among cities, and BuzzFeed News uncovers scores of new internment camps in Xinjiang, China, by analyzing satellite data.
In the project Migrantes de otro mundo — Migrants from Another World — a team of more than 40 journalists in more than a dozen countries decided to collaborate to tell the untold story of the migrants from Asia and Africa who travel through Latin America each year. As the creators of the project put it: “By its wandering nature, migration is a story that can only be properly told through collaboration.”
For our series on journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Sérgio Spagnuolo, founder and editor of the Brazilian data journalism agency Volt Data Lab. He has worked on disinformation and data verification before founding Volt, an independent journalism agency focused on investigating, analyzing, and visualizing data.
CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan describes how he and a colleague were able to discover, and then prove, that the largest Black Lives Matter Facebook page in 2018 was an Australia-based scam. O’Sullivan also provides insights into the value of good archive sites and domain registration tools in investigating suspicious social media pages, in conjunction with traditional reporting methods.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we’re looking at the latest in mapping and satellite imagery, including some clever sleuthing by Buzzfeed News; how to protect protesters in your photos; buried secrets in a US Senate report; and a rescue fund for Lebanese media hurt by the big blast.
Satellite imagery has become increasingly useful in establishing evidence of human rights abuses and in shining a light on dubious activities being conducted in secretive parts of the world. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 17 to 23 finds NBC News utilizing satellite data to solve a long-standing mystery about North Korean “ghost boats” washing up on Japanese shores, The New York Times analyzing footfall data to determine how the coronavirus pandemic has influenced consumer spending, and Bellingcat revealing a coordinated network of attacks on Twitter against the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Investigative reporters around the world are tightening their digital safety habits, out of concern that emergency pandemic laws, new spy technologies, and the lockdown itself have exposed journalists to even greater threats of surveillance and harassment. A dozen reporters and experts interviewed by GIJN agreed that sound digital hygiene was no longer optional for journalists in the COVID-19 world — and offered 10 security tips, including threat modelling, encrypted document transfer, and virtual burner phones.
