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Stories

2787 posts

News & Analysis

What We’re Reading: The Problem with Preprints, Publishing’s Missing Money, and State-sponsored Misinformation Labels

by Tanya Pampalone • May 8, 2020

This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, delves into the perils of reporting on preprint research platforms, a snapshot of end-to-end digital advertising and publishing supply chains, and how the French government took down a “fake news” page after being accused of “overstepping its constitutional role and infringing on press freedoms.”

Reporting Tools & Tips

6 Tips for Using Open Source Tools When Reporting from Home

by Rowan Philp • May 8, 2020

The use of open source tools, user-generated content, and advanced search filters has allowed reporters to break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic from home quarantine. In a recent GIJN webinar, three investigative researchers shared key insights on the tools and techniques that have unearthed facts and visuals beyond the reach of traditional field reporting.

Case Studies

Exposing Chaos and Repression in Wuhan with User-Generated Content

by Rowan Philp • May 7, 2020

An Australian documentary team used user-generated footage to create a film about Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 outbreak. They used clips filmed on mobile phones that showed people with the virus being dragged into vans by police, and bodies left on the street and on hospital floors, using different tools to verify the material.

Data Journalism

Data Journalism Top 10: Hidden COVID-19 Deaths, Post-Lockdown Traffic, Pandemic Data Overload, Wealth Inequality

by Eunice Au & Connected Action • May 7, 2020

What will life be like after the coronavirus lockdown measures are relaxed? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 27 to May 3 finds German news outlets ZDF heute and RBB24 looking into pedestrian traffic in Germany post-quarantine, the Financial Times and The New York Times highlighting the complexities of getting an accurate COVID-19 death toll and the problem of undercounting fatalities, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention setting up a dashboard to track statistics related to the coronavirus across the region.

News & Analysis

Indian Journalists Challenge Government Over Coronavirus Transparency

by Sukhada Tatke • May 6, 2020

A group of Indian journalists have been calling out the government on social media over its opacity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaborative effort continues to press for official answers on overall health preparedness, such as drug availability, access to care, health inventory, and insurance schemes.

COVID-19’s Toll on Journalists: At Least 64 Dead in 24 Countries

by Rowan Philp • May 6, 2020

Like health professionals, care givers, and other essential workers, journalists face heightened and grave health risks as they pursue crucial stories on the COVID-19 crisis. But measuring coronavirus deaths among media workers poses many of the same problems as counting true mortality figures in the general population. The Press Emblem Campaign (PEC), a nonprofit focused on press freedom, recorded 64 deaths in 24 countries by May 5.

GIJN Webinar — Investigating the Pandemic: Evaluating the Evidence

by GIJN Staff • May 5, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic narrative is dominated by numbers — mountains of data and seemingly endless statistical models. Yet most of the figures are uncertain at best, often highly flawed and simply untrue at worst. How to deal with the many claims on the truth that are made every day? What should journalists do if the evidence is poor?

Reporting Tools & Tips

Tips for Running an Online Event in the Time of COVID-19

by Alan Soon • May 5, 2020

Splice Media have been running “check-in” sessions with the media startups they support in Asia to find out how organizations and individuals are coping through the coronavirus pandemic. Here are his tips for hosting an online media event like this. His takeaway? The technology is the easy part.

News & Analysis

What We’re Reading: European Media’s COVID-19 Trust Test, New Verification Handbook, Documentaries to Stream

by Tanya Pampalone • May 1, 2020

This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, features a Nieman Reports story about European media’s eroding trust problem during COVID-19, the latest edition of Craig Silverman’s Verification Handbook, and the free-to-stream investigative documentary playlist from the good people at the DIG Festival.

Data Journalism

Data Journalism Top 10: COVID TikTok, Fact-Checking Coronavirus, Trump Narcissism, Pandemic Economy

by Eunice Au & Connected Action • April 30, 2020

The popularity of TikTok has surged during the pandemic, and one particular “data investigation” clip has gone viral. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 20 to 26 found TikTok user Rebecca fact-checking a woman’s claim about the COVID-19 quarantine and her grey hair roots, the Coronavirus Fact-Checking Alliance visualizing the thousands of fact checks they have produced during the pandemic, The New York Times analyzing United States President Donald Trump’s messages about the country’s coronavirus response, and FiveThirtyEight examining how concerned Americans are about the coronavirus compared to the economy.

Case Studies

How The New York Times is Visualizing the Smartphone Tracking Industry

by Erin Merkel • April 29, 2020

The New York Times’ Privacy Project highlighted the alarmingly unregulated activity of location data companies collecting data from millions of smartphone users. As the coronavirus pandemic sheds further light on the uses and misuses of location tracking, here’s a deeper look at the project that visualized phones being tracked around the US, from the Pentagon and the White House to the streets of San Francisco.

My Favorite Tools

My Favorite Tools with Cuban Data Journalist Barbara Maseda

by Kristina Puga • April 28, 2020

For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Barbara Maseda, the founder and editor of Proyecto Inventario, an open data platform for journalists reporting on her native Cuba. She told GIJN about the investigative tools she uses to overcome the difficulties of data reporting in and about Cuba.

GIJN Webinar: Using Open Source Information to Report from Home

by GIJN Staff • April 27, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic brings yet another level of danger to the press: reporting on the ground and interviewing people face-to-face have become high-risk activities — even illegal in some countries. But there are ways to continue investigative work using your laptop, your wit and some very useful techniques — as three  experienced investigators will highlight in this GIJN webinar, Using Open Source Information to Report from Home.

News & Analysis

What We’re Reading: WhatsApp Engagement, Media Survival, and Russian Disinformation

by Tanya Pampalone • April 24, 2020

This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a Bellingcat post on what to look out for when reporting on Russian disinformation, how Documented is using WhatsApp to maximize reporting and audience reach, and the Oxford research group’s global effort to gather publicly available data on the coronavirus.

Data Journalism

Data Journalism Top 10: Bill Gates Conspiracies, COVID-19 Excess Mortality, Home Deaths Spike, Test Kits

by Eunice Au & Connected Action • April 23, 2020

Misinformation has grown ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic, so much so that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proclaimed: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has emerged as a favorite target of disinformation actors, according to The New York Times, that we discovered through our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 13 to 19. We also found The Economist and ProPublica examining the true impact of the pandemic by looking into “excess mortalities” such as home deaths, the Associated Press releasing and updating a coronavirus public dataset for the United States.

News & Analysis

Document of the Day: World Press Freedom Index in the Time of Coronavirus

by GIJN Staff • April 22, 2020

The 2020 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), shows that the coming decade will be decisive for the future of journalism, with the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting and amplifying the many crises that threaten the right to freely reported, independent, diverse, and reliable information.

GIJN Welcomes Seven New Member Organizations in Five Countries

by GIJN Staff • April 21, 2020

The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome seven new member organizations based in five countries. We are particularly pleased to welcome our first member in Australia and our first representing Syrian journalists. The new groups bring GIJN’s global membership to 184 organizations in 77 countries.

GIJN Webinar — Staying Safe: How to Report a Pandemic

by GIJN Staff • April 20, 2020

In a global crisis like this, journalists play a critical role: they inform the public and they monitor and report abuses of power by officials. But how can they do this when they’re dealing with psychological stress and threats to their own health and safety? In this webinar “Staying Safe: How to Report a Pandemic,” two experts will focus on how to best manage the multiple threats faced by journalists when reporting on COVID-19.

Data Journalism

Data Journalism Top 10: Viral Dataviz, DIY Masks, Breaking the Wave, China and US Response to COVID

by Eunice Au & Connected Action • April 16, 2020

From “flattening the curve” to “social distancing,” and now “breaking the wave,” the global data journalism community is using new terminology in its attempts to explain the intricacies of COVID-19 to the masses. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 6 to 12 finds Reuters Graphics explaining their “breaking the wave” chart, The Washington Post helping readers figure out the best material to use to make their own masks, the Financial Times comparing the response of China and the United States in handling the pandemic, and Press Gazette highlighting the huge appetite for data-driven visual journalism about COVID-19.

Reporting Tools & Tips

Multilingual Journalism Could Make a Comeback. Here Are Some Tools That Might Help

by Patrick Boehler • April 15, 2020

New tools and industry trends are making it easier for media organizations to publish translations and localized adaptations of their work, writes Patrick Boehler, executive editor of the Swiss public broadcaster’s international service — and publishing in multiple languages helps newsrooms develop new sources and fact-check. Boehler outlines three new tools for multilingual journalism from a recent “hackathon.”

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