Stories
The Power of Emotion: How to Connect With Investigative Podcast Listeners
Connecting with your audience is key to telling a good story. But how do you actually make it happen? Podcast producer Siobhán McHugh explains how she uses emotion — and lots of technique — to connect with her listeners.
Member Profiles
Mobile-First and Local Language: Innovative INK Spreads Investigative Journalism in Botswana
Two investigative editors took huge pay cuts to launch Botswana’s first nonprofit newsroom. A year later, they took another, temporary cut just to pay for a single satellite image that proved that the country’s president had abused state funds to build a private lodge. Here’s Rowan Philp on the INK Centre for Investigative Journalism for GIJN’s member series.
Case Studies
How The Guardian’s Membership Editor Connects Supporters and the Newsroom
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.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Tarantino’s Swearing, TheyDrawIt Tool, Climate Crisis
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 5 to 11 finds Spiegel Online analyzing the typical features in Quentin Tarantino’s films, MU Collective releasing an interactive “TheyDrawIt” tool to engage and educate readers, and the conversation on the climate crisis heating up — with 101 East Al Jazeera looking into Cambodia’s deforestation, Neue Zürcher Zeitung analyzing Switzerland’s forest fires, and the Financial Times digging into the impact of jet streams on the climate.
Case Studies
How Lava Jato Brought Together Latin America’s Investigative Journalists
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.
News & Analysis
When Media Capture Backfires: Local Elections and Digital Media in Turkey
Turkey captivated the world’s attention recently as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s seemingly unstoppable accumulation of power ground to a halt in a series of humiliating defeats in local elections. To the surprise of many, digital news media emerged as a potent medium for information and mobilization for the largely victorious opposition forces in the campaigns.
Case Studies
Dollars for Data Journalism: How One Project Makes Money by Selling Data on Police
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.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Visualizing Climate Change, Numbers from Phrases, Democratic Donors, Moscow Money
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 29 to August 4 finds a number of articles related to the climate crisis, including the BBC’s piece on tree planting and its interactive tool on temperatures across the world, as well as Alberto Cairo’s blog post on misleading charts created by climate deniers. We also found useful tips and tools: a data GIF maker by Google News Initiative, Datajournalism.com’s strategies for teaching data journalism, and Paul Bradshaw’s tutorial on how to extract numeric data from phrases.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How to Build a GIF of Satellite Imagery in R
Sometimes, the best way to tell a story is to take a bird’s eye view. Here’s how Storybench editor Aleszu Bajak did this by recreating a GIF of Chennai’s disappearing Lake Puzhal reservoir. Check out his process and code, which could be used for countless other animations — to show, say, dam collapses, deforestation, forest fires, and more.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How the FT Improved Storytelling With Templates That You Can Use, Too
Sharing is caring. The Financial Times created templates for different types of digital stories and has now shared them on GitHub so that other newsrooms can adapt them.
Case Studies
Becoming a Butcher: Lessons From Working Undercover
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.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Hong Kong Protests, Migration Waves, Democratizing Dataviz
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing the catalyst behind Hong Kong’s recent protests, National Geographic visualizing human migration in the past 50 years, Ellery Studio’s fun and informative renewable energy coloring book, and The Economist’s findings that Hillary Clinton could have won the 2016 US election if all Americans had turned up to vote.
Case Studies
A Model Collaboration That’s Working to Rebuild Local News in Colorado
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.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Measuring Impact: 6 Tools for Media Makers and Funders
There are many ways to measure impact — but you don’t need to do it all on your own. Here are six impact measurement frameworks appropriate for media makers and funders with various needs and approaches, selected by Media Impact Funders.
News & Analysis
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Aging Wimbledon, Must-Read DataViz, Bad Charts, German Opera
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 15 to 21 finds Information Is Beautiful’s sharing its gallery of must-read data visualization books, Datajournalism.com highlighting pitfalls in creating charts, the FT analyzing the age of Wimbledon players, and WDR scrutinizing Germany’s opera repertoire.
Member Profiles
How Armando.info’s Exiled Reporters Keep Reporting on Venezuela
Venezuelan investigative website Armando.info, which is a member of GIJN, is going through difficult times. Its core team has been working in exile for more than a year, and their staff continue to receive serious threats — not only against their reporters working in Venezuela, but also against those who have found refuge in neighboring Colombia.
The Moroccan Journalist Who Fled His Country
Hicham Mansouri, who co-founded the Moroccan Association of Investigative Journalists, had to flee his country after he was jailed for 10 months. Now exiled in France, he still faces pending charges of threatening state security in Morocco.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Get Crafty: 7 Story Structures to Try Out in Your Next Investigation
Christopher Booker’s “The Seven Basic Plots” provides a useful set of frameworks. It’s a book about fictional storytelling, but you will find the same structures recurring in longform and investigative work, writes Paul Bradshaw.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Amazon.com, the Menstrual Cycle, Canadian Sex Crimes, Nonsensical Diagrams
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 8 to 14 finds BBC News analyzing Afghan election results as well as graphing the milestones of the 25-year-old Amazon empire, Federica Fragapane visualizing the female menstruation cycle for Scientific American, and Bloomberg taking a closer look at China’s domination of the South China Sea. We also have a fun piece by Alberto Cairo on nonsensical diagrams.
12 Investigative Projects Named as Finalists in 2019 Global Shining Light Awards
Twelve investigative projects focused on 11 different countries have been selected as finalists for the eighth Global Shining Light Award, a prize that honors investigative journalism in developing or transitioning countries that was carried out under threat, duress, or dire conditions.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Digital Security for Journalists Requires an Adaptable Toolkit
When it comes to digital security, what does a journalist from West Africa, a Syrian journalist based in Turkey, and a French journalist on a reporting trip to Kashmir have in common? Answer: Very little. While they all need to protect their data, their communications, and their sources, they must each do this in different ways that are adapted to the context, explains Grégoire Pouget of the Paris-based nonprofit Nothing2Hide.
Case Studies
10 Great Digital Stories From 2019 (So Far)
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.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Document of the Day: Annotating “The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail”
If you read “The Case of Jane Ponytail,” published in The New York Times in 2018, you’re likely to remember it. The award-winning story recounted the life and death of Song Yang, a Chinese woman who came to the United States with dreams of becoming an American citizen, but who ended up dying after falling from a building during a raid on the illicit massage parlor where she was employed as a sex worker. Now you can read the story with annotations by Dan Barry, explaining how he crafted the heart-rending narrative.
Case Studies
Investigating the Money Men of African Kleptocrats
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.
News & Analysis
Four Essential Areas for Journalism Students & Educators
Storybench identified four areas of emphasis – data, local news, social media, and business models – that will be crucial for journalism students to spend time on, and interviewed five journalism educators across the country who lead especially forward-looking programs and courses.
Dawn, Pakistan’s Paper of Record, Under Pressure as Military Tightens Grip
Pakistan’s journalism landscape has lately come under immense pressure from the country’s powerful military. In one of the latest moves to pressure Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English newspaper, the government revoked its ads for the paper, as well as for its sister TV channel, DawnNews. Umer Ali writes for GIJN about the crises.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Advice for Nonprofit Media: Treat Your Supporters Like Customers
Charitable and nonprofit organizations have a lot to gain from adopting certain aspects of successful business models, and they should start with treating stakeholders as customers, argues Philip Piletic of CustomerThink.