How do you tackle a fraudulent blue-chip corporation that has the means to deploy teams of lawyers, private investigators, hackers, and even foreign spies to stop your investigation? Dan McCrum, an investigative reporter at the Financial Times, told GIJN how he took down a fraudulent $30 billion company, and offered tips on how reporters can tackle bad actors with almost unlimited resources.
Megha Rajagopalan has reported from over 23 countries in Asia and the Middle East, on stories ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the peace process in Afghanistan. Her team’s investigation into prison camps in Xinjiang, China won a Pulitzer Prize. In this podcast, she discusses how she got into investigative journalism and gives her tips for speaking to vulnerable sources.
Open source tools like the Yemeni Archive have allowed investigative journalists to track the impact of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in the Yemen civil war as well as identify Western allies’ role in possible war crimes or abuses.
How Greenpeace’s investigative site, Unearthed, used satellite imagery and database mapping to reveal hundreds of fires on environmentally protected land in the English moors – including dozens that could be illegal.
Speaking at IJF22, Centre for Information Resilience investigations director Ben Strick offered 10 tips for integrating geolocation and open source data in investigative journalism.
GIJN spoke with International Symposium on Online Journalism founder, Rosental Alves, about the growing backlash against independent media in Latin America.
There is one key reason why reporters should start learning about cryptocurrencies, according to the OCCRP’s Jan Strozyk, and that is because their investigative targets are already using them to hide their crimes and finance their future operations.
Shutting down the internet has become an increasingly common tactic of governments and regimes looking to prevent civil society and free media from operating. Here, experts in privacy and security give their advice on the tools and tactics for skirting internet blackouts.
To share best practices from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. This latest installment focuses on investigative tips and tools for using satellite imagery, flight tracking, and exposing disinformation.
Many autocracy-displaced media have managed to navigate surviving outside their home country with varying degrees of success. In a series of interviews with GIJN, exiled news leaders from around the world offer some best practices and lessons learned from their own experiences.
To share best practices and other lessons learned from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. This latest installment focuses on reporter safety, digital security, and source protection.
Two Washington Post reporters discuss how they overcame obstacles, talked to hesitant sources, and built their own datasets to investigate failures at the agency that manages disasters in the United States, offering their tips for other reporters in the process.
In an era when an investigative reporter’s contacts are often all stored on their smartphone or in the cloud, digital security best practices are paramount to protect your sources.
To share best practices and other lessons learned from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. This latest installment focuses on key issues like health and medicine, women’s leadership, investigative podcasts, and Indigenous reporting.
To share best practices and other lessons learned from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. The second installment focuses on how investigative reporters can better utilize data tools and visualization techniques.
Speaking during GIJN’s Tips and Tools from Women Investigators webinar, reporters from Germany, Kenya, and Turkey recounted their experiences dealing with court injunctions, going undercover, and investigating under-reported stories.
Satellite imagery provides information that can enhance the ability to write compelling narratives about the state of our planet, cutting across multiple beats. But such a tool tends to be complex and out of the reach for many journalists, so this guide offers a process that reporters interested in covering the climate crisis can use for story projects.
Katie McQue, a British freelance journalist that spent five years reporting from Dubai covering human rights and migration alongside her “business” beats of energy, healthcare, and finance, speaks to GIJN about her work and the best practices reporters can adopt when covering forced labor and human trafficking in the region.
Data reporter Melissa Lewis is interviewed about a recent podcast for Reveal, which investigated what happens when local residents call police on unhoused people in their neighborhood, analyzing arrest data across six major US West Coast cities with large homeless populations.
Among the most frequently used forms of legal coercion against investigative journalists are SLAPPs (“strategic litigation against public participation”), which aim to intimidate reporters into abandoning their investigations. The practice of abusing legal systems by those in power to silence critics has reached global proportions. Its damage is far-reaching and curbing it is an imperative for democracy and maintaining peace.
In this edition of GIJN Toolbox, we profile three brand new — or newly expanded — tools to dig into financial secrecy and hidden gains from corruption or crime. Our list includes a user-friendly database to search for sanctions and conflict-of-interest red flags, a site that uses an algorithm to detect hidden bank accounts, and a newly expanded database on the true owners of offshore companies.
Can Snapchat, an outlet famous for avatars and disappearing videos, be used by investigative journalists as a reporting tool or as a publishing outlet? How can they use it? And what are the best ways to approach it?
In a lightning round session at #GIJC21, a panel of leading reporters and editors needed just five minutes each to outline new tools and databases that any reporter can use to gather hard-to-find facts.
In a session on high-level corruption at #GIJC21, a panel of reporters from Liberia, Ukraine, Sudan, Russia, and Lebanon suggested a series of strategies that can pry facts from obstinate government agencies, find whistleblowers, and deliver alternate forms of accountability for officials seemingly above the law.
At GIJC21, hard-hitting investigations journalists shared some great story ideas that could be replicated by reporters across the globe to bring about changes in their society.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists worldwide were suddenly thrown into the public health beat, trying to make sense of competing claims, and a science that seemed to change by the day. A session at the GIJC21 walked reporters through the COVID-19 pandemic, offering tips on covering the drug development and approval processes, evaluating scientific studies, unearthing conflicts of interest, and exposing fraud and malpractice.
In an expert panel on visual investigations at #GIJC21, three members of the New York Times’ pioneering team showed that it is now possible to report exactly who did what, and when, at various incidents.
In a GIJC21 session that focused on stories across the Asia/Pacific region, investigative journalists discussed best reporting best practices and how telling great investigative stories requires a range of skills and determination to uncover the truth.
