“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.
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.
The fifth edition of DIG Festival, the annual international conference that celebrates and awards the best investigative documentaries in the world, is fast approaching. The jury, chaired this year by Naomi Klein, will pick and announce the winners in Riccione, Italy during the festival, from May 30 to June 2.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 13 to 19 finds a preview snippet on sensible charts from @albertocairo’s upcoming book “How Charts Lie,” @ladatamx’s report on homicides in Mexico, @RepublikMagazin’s analysis on the changing ideologies of political parties in the European Union, and a recap of the Data Journalism UK conference by @paulbradshaw.
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.
With just a spreadsheet, a journalist can let the software do the counting and calculating, allowing them to concentrate on the purpose and result of their inquiry. It also opens the door to understanding more advanced statistics, and the use or misuse of statistics by governments and businesses.
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.
Being struck by lightning is often used as an example of heavenly retribution because it is so unlikely. Fatalities due to lightning are statistical outliers, since most people struck by lightning survive. So what is the best way to avoid becoming one of these outliers? The following is a step-by-step set of instructions for unpacking a dataset – and being careful about the conclusions we draw.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 6 to 12 finds @SteveFranconeri’s chart chooser based on data formats instead of visualization functions, @daswasfehlt’s examination of Austrian politicians’ weak email passwords in the wake of a major data leak, @NZZ’s look at whether wolves are really a nuisance in Switzerland and @wihbey’s research into the data competence and partisanship of journalists.
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.
