Satire can make journalism more entertaining and accessible for new audiences. But how can you turn your headline into a punchline? To find out, Amina Boubia from the Open Society Foundations’ Program on Independent Journalism spoke to two veterans of political satire: Isam Uraiqat and Juan Ravell.
A group of independent reporters and photographers, working in different parts of Mexico, decided to come together and try to answer a fundamental question: Where do the disappeared of the drug war end up? GIJN’s Spanish editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero spoke with the team of journalists to find out how they did it.
When journalists practice transparency around their processes, their goals, and their values, news consumers tend to respond positively — and sometimes, they even spend more money on journalism. That was the case with an experiment that Trusting News ran with PolitiFact.
Yemen has been embroiled in civil war for decades. But its current conflict has left 100,000 dead, with hundreds of thousands more displaced. While the war has received limited coverage by most international and mainstream media outlets, during 2018 and 2019 a team of Associated Press journalists spent months investigating Yemen’s Dirty War. Maggie Michael, Nariman El-Mofty, and Maad al-Zekri won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. GIJN’s Majdolin Hasan spoke with Michael about how they did it.
To investigate radicalization on YouTube, journalists from two Dutch media outlets teamed up and examined 600,000 videos, 120 million comments, and 20 million automatically-generated recommendations —using software they wrote for this occasion. Dimitri Tokmetzis, who runs the data desk at De Correspondent, wrote about how they did it for GIJN.
Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach had been investigating the alleged relationship between drug traffickers and politicians in northern Mexico for years when she was shot eight times in front of her home in 2016. However, several of her colleagues would not be silenced and, more than two years after her murder, published a series of reports on the case and the loose ends left by the official investigation of the crime.
Thriving as a digital publisher is a challenge anywhere, but those in lower-income countries and in repressive media environments face additional hurdles. A new report looks at the experiences of 54 digital publishers around the world and identifies factors that contribute to resilience in these markets.
Reporter Sarah Kliff has investigated healthcare billing in the United States by enlisting the help of readers, who sent her thousands of emergency room bills. Beyond writing for Vox and the New York Times, she’s also written about this topic for a professional medical journal that’s read by doctors.
The Guardian has re-built its business around membership, and last year it appointed its executive editor for membership, Lee Glendinning, who formerly led the Guardian US. She explains how she uses her role to experiment and test new approaches.
To expose the massive, cross-border corruption scandal that came to be known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, journalists from across Latin America had to find ways to work together. In the process, they transformed investigative journalism in the region. GIJN Spanish Editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero wrote the story of their epic collaboration.
After NJ Advance Media spent lots of time and money to find and clean up data for a police accountability project, it decided to sell this data, while still keeping its database free to the public. Reporter Stephen Stirling tells OpenNews’s Erika Owens how this works.
Reporter Patryk Szczepaniak has gone undercover as a Polish worker in the Netherlands, hired himself out as an Uber driver, and frequented Warsaw’s strip clubs, all in pursuit of a good story. It was useful preparation for his investigation into a slaughterhouse in Poland.
In US cities, the local news ecosystem is suffering from a long list of ailments. But in Colorado, hundreds of people — journalists, professors, students, business folk, local foundations, and more — have stepped up to do something about it. And they have a few ideas for where to start.
Hackastory has lined up its favorite digital stories of the year so far, from the Guardian’s interactive showing what the internet looks like from different parts of the world to a Dutch game that puts you in the middle of war-torn Mosul.
The African Investigative Publishing Collective recently conducted a multi-part investigation into the associates that handle business for African kleptocrats. Evelyn Groenink shares how the story took form and the massive challenges faced by reporters spread across multiple countries.
The Wall Street Journal’s graphic-heavy series “The Price of Climate” took an ambitious look at how financial and economic markers reflect present and future thinking about the climate. One of the editors that worked on it says it was a response to the fact “that a lot of climate change stories feel and look the same.” Here’s how they did it.
OpenCorporates is a site that shares information on more than 100 million corporate entities around the world as open data. With their latest project on German companies, OpenCorporates added data on more than 5 million companies. Here’s how they pulled it off.
In Russia, veteran human rights activist Leonid Agafonov and journalist Natalia Donskova have teamed up to create a series of investigative reports on life for women behind bars. The project covers taboo topics, spanning health issues like the treatment of cancer patients and childbirth in prison to sexual abuse and LGBT relationships.
The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit uses social media and open-source tools to create powerful video reports. Here’s how they collected virtual breadcrumbs to retrace the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed Jamal Khashoggi.
The idea of tapping audience knowledge gets to one of the core elements of beat reporting: finding people who know and care about subjects and drawing on that input to inform and improve journalism.
Vsquare publishes longform investigative journalism stories in English on Central Eastern Europe, focusing on the Visegrád region that includes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
For several weeks after the Yellow Vest protest movement took off in France, most major media outlets failed to report on the violent police repression of protesters. This troubling silence was shattered by the work of David Dufresne, an independent journalist who has become the main chronicler of police violence against Yellow Vests through his ongoing project “Allô Place Beauvau.” He explains how it all started with a tweet.
Satellite imagery has become an indispensable tool in investigative journalism for fact-finding, gauging the impact of a particular situation and figuring out the exact details. Here’s a round-up of of some major stories which satellite imagery helped uncover.
On November 27, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Central European Time, five separate media organizations broke similar stories on a United Nations cover-up of the murders of their own staff. It took nothing less than the “radical sharing” of information between these rival platforms to expose a global conspiracy of silence.
The documentary “Trafficked in America” investigates a labor trafficking scheme targeting Guatemalan teenagers who were smuggled into the United States and forced to work long hours at an egg farm to pay off their smuggling debts. In an interview with Journalist’s Resource, the film’s authors offer insights into the investigative reporting process and the importance of cultural competency in doing high-quality journalism.
A fugitive convict from the Netherlands has taunted Dutch police with provocative pictures and videos from Iran, playing a game of “catch me if you can” on Instagram. Investigative reporters from Bellingcat were able to reveal the last known location of the criminal with the help of over 60 Twitter users. Here’s how they did that.
Reporters at a regional newspaper in Bangladesh, Gramer Kagoj, heard from local villagers that a maternity allowance scheme for poor mothers was being abused by women who weren’t pregnant. With guidance from an expert, they applied statistical survey methods to interview 400 beneficiaries, and their investigation took a different turn — revealing a deeper, systemic problem.
The German nonprofit news site Correctiv wanted to cover important issues — such as property ownership in German cities — that didn’t have accessible public data. So it created CrowdNewsroom, a platform that enables it to empower readers to contribute to investigations.
