For the very first story in our new series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Emmanuel Freudenthal, a freelance investigative reporter based in Nairobi. He told GIJN’s Gaelle Faure all about how he uses virtual tools like GPS Tracks and Gmail Snooze and physical tools like plane-tracking antennas and good old motorbikes.
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.
You don’t need a million casual readers — just 1,000 committed ones. And there are signs that the “1,000 true fans” theory holds approximately true across a wide range of journalism enterprises — sometimes it’s actually a thousand; other times it’s 400, 1,500, or 5,000.
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.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 17 to 23 finds Federica Fragapane visualizing space debris and their distance from earth, The New York Times open-sourcing its in-house data curriculum, Nathan Yau visualizing what time is lost for people once they have children, and Guns & America quantifying gunshot incidents within 300 meters of Washington, DC schools.
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.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for journalism. It can help fuel reporting, provide answers, and engage community participation. Jess Ramirez, who works as an engagement reporting fellow at ProPublica, lists the questions you can ask yourself when approaching an engagement project.
A small nonprofit investigative newsroom played an outsized role in the removal of South Africa’s president and his corrupt inner circle last year. Now, amaBhungane is building a separate hub to help new investigative start-ups throughout southern Africa. Rowan Philp writes about the newsroom and its latest initiative for GIJN’s new series about its members.
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.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 10 to 16 finds a gorgeous series of data visualizations by National Geographic on the Ring of Fire, Bloomberg analyzing the influence of dynasties in the Philippines’ politics, RStudio’s Hadley Wickham talking about why you shouldn’t assign data cleaning to a “data janitor,” and BR Recherche looking at the complexity of privacy policies.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome seven new member organizations based in seven countries. We are particularly pleased to welcome our first members in Bolivia and Lesotho. The new groups bring GIJN’s global membership to 182 groups in 77 countries.
If you’re an OSINT investigator or use OSINT in any of your work, it’s impossible to ignore Twitter as a collection source. Here’s how to get the most out of it by organizing your searches on a TweetDeck dashboard.
“Synopsis,” “soundtrack,” “episode,” “mood”… This is the language used daily within the Parisian offices of Les Jours. But don’t let its vocabulary fool you: While the 3-year old media company borrows many of the codes of fiction producers for television, it actually runs a hard-hitting investigative news site.
Every investigative journalist encounters moments of doubt. Neil Bedi, an investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, shares the set of rules his team followed to survive the toughest reporting challenges while reporting their Pulitzer-nominated series “Heartbroken.”
Ukraine’s largest bank is taking its battle with its former owners to US shores. In a civil lawsuit filed in the state court of Delaware, PrivatBank accuses Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, the billionaires who owned the bank before it was nationalized three years ago, of large-scale money laundering in the United States.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 3 to 9 finds @sto3psl mapping places the Avengers visited in Europe, @fedfragapane visualizing which elements in the periodic table are in danger of running out, @srfdata highlighting the top worries of the Swiss and @propublica doing researchers and journalists a huge public service by making 3 million US nonprofit records text-searchable.
Promoting journalists to management positions without letting them do any reporting is a dangerous road to go down, argues Colombian reporter Ginna Morelo. Here are her proposed 10 commandments of the Journalist, written as an exercise to remind herself about what journalists should never give up on.
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.
The last time GIJN Spanish Editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero was in El Salvador, she was so shaken up by stories of violence and sexism towards women there that she ended up writing an Op-Ed for The New York Times with the following opening line: “I don’t want to go back to El Salvador.” But last month she returned to the country to attend the ForoCAP, the Central American Journalism Forum.
In a digital world where it’s become easy to fake an identity — through low-cost websites, fabricated LinkedIn resumes, or even AI-created profile photos — the usual signals are increasingly garbage. Mike Caulfield cautions against trying to decipher cheap signals, and instead look for signs that use the network properties of the web.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 27 to June 2 finds immense buzz around the recent European Parliament elections, with @SZ explaining the EU political landscape, @morgenpost looking at the results in Berlin, and @journocode collecting data journalism pieces related to the election. There’s also @datajournalism’s tips on presenting data through audio and @BIRNSrbija’s data investigation into major corporate tax fraud in Serbia.
GIJN recently hosted a webinar with Paul Myers, a leading international expert in online investigation. More than 300 people from approximately 70 countries joined as Myers, who works for the BBC and is a big favorite at GIJN’s conferences, shared his tips on the best tools and strategies for digging up information about people. This tipsheet is an overview of some of the techniques he shared.
The winners of the 2019 SOPA Awards were recently announced at a gala held by the Society of Publishers in Asia. Here’s a look at six of the inspiring investigations that were rewarded.
How do you track cryptocurrency transactions? Brenna Smith, an undergraduate researcher at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, who specializes in investigating disinformation and the illicit use of cryptocurrencies, has created a tutorial using Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades’ bitcoin funding campaign as a case study to show you how.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 20 to 26 finds @PostGraphics’ meticulous cataloguing of all on-screen deaths in Game of Thrones, @datajournalism’s tips on covering the crime beat, @DIEZEIT’s analysis of a politically diverse European parliament, and a quick beginner’s guide to learning data visualization by @AlliTorban.
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.
