Stories
Reporting Tools & Tips
Solving a Journalist’s Murder — The Making of “Killing Pavel”
In a recent training session in Kyiv, producer Matt Sarnetski and journalist Anna Babinets talked about how they created Killing Pavel, a documentary about the murder of the well-known journalist Pavel Sheremet. GIJN has rounded up the key takeaways.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Innovative Visualization, Data Fellowships and the Dark Side
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 23 to 29 finds @thetimes’ interactive which will determine whether you will join the dark side, @albertocairo discussing precedents to innovative visualizations and @srendgen talking about the technological revolution encouraging data journalism.
News & Analysis
World Press Freedom Day — “No Democracy without Investigative Journalism”
At a time when the news media is under unprecedented attack, and the need for watchdog reporting has never been greater, we hope you will join GIJN today in marking World Press Freedom Day (#WorldPressFreedomDay). This is the 25th celebration of WPFD, but despite the years of meetings and proclamations by its sponsors UNESCO and others, conditions are getting worse, not better, for journalists around the world.
Meet the Watchdog Scientists Battling Dubious Scientific Research
Fraudulent, plagiarized or otherwise shoddy research is an increasing problem across all scientific disciplines — particularly in China — and can catch like wildfire. Australian Professor Jennifer Byrne and her French colleague Cyril Labbé, as well as projects like Retraction Watch, are fighting back.
Case Studies
How They Did It: Tracking the Copious Travels of Cameroon’s President
The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Dig into the Open Source Database of Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria
A Berlin-based group of researchers has launched the world’s first publicly accessible database of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Aimed mainly at human rights organizations, it could also help investigative reporters in some potentially surprising ways. A GIJN original.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Democratic Data, Berlin’s Bicycles and Cricket Crazy
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 16 to 22 finds @camellia_will debating the future of data portals, @DLeonhardt using hard data to show whether Democratic or Republican presidents have been more fiscally responsible and @morgenpost mapping bicycle thefts hotspots in Berlin.
101 Reporters Connects Journalists Across India with Media Organizations
Journalist Gangadhar Patil’s impressive idea of supporting independent journalists, helping with their edits and then matching them with mainstream publications has taken off in India — and landed its journalists in publications like CNN International, The Asia Times and The New Indian Express.
Pactio: Where Loyal Readers Follow — and Fund — Their Favorite Reporters
There’s a new funding strategy in the works, built around the idea that quite a few reporters have loyal followings and their readers just might be willing to chip in a few bucks to keep them in the news business. But as more organizations turn to reader support for revenue — whether framed as memberships or as subscriptions — they might face stiff competition for their individual crowdfunding model.
Reporting Tools & Tips
We Had Four Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns. Here Are 10 Tips for Your Newsroom
Raising money for your news organization via crowdfunding is difficult and can be stressful. Hungary’s Direkt36, which has run four successful crowdfunding campaigns so far, offers 10 tips from their experience to help you plan a good campaign. A GIJN original.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Ethics, Awards and Open Source for IJ
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 9 to 15 finds an ultra useful data visualization tool that is perfect for non-programmers by @Adobe and @GeorgiaTech, a list of 99 amazing data journalism works by @GENinnovate’s Data Journalism Awards nominees and @CARTO shares 50 experts on location intelligence to follow.
Data Journalism
How Pakistani Journalists Subvert Danger — and the Narrative — with Data
Journalists exposing corruption in countries with limited rule of law face enormous risks and their stories may not necessarily make things better for anyone. In Pakistan, journalists have employed a different — and safer — approach to trigger positive change by avoiding front-page corruption exposés and using data journalism to expose flaws in the system instead. A GIJN original.
News & Analysis
Historian: Why Reporters Are Heroes of Our Time
The real heroes are reporters who are out there taking risks by reporting the truth, says US historian Timothy Snyder. Support them by subscribing to newspapers and reading and sharing good journalism. And next time you meet a journalist, try thanking them for their service.
News & Analysis
Who Maps the World?
OpenStreetMap is the self-proclaimed Wikipedia of maps. It’s a free and open-source sketch of the globe, created by a volunteer pool that essentially crowdsources the map, tracing parts of the world that haven’t yet been logged. But despite its democratic aims, it’s still much like the mapping world overall — overwhelmingly dominated by male cartographers. That’s starting to change.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Rio’s Militias, OCCRP’s Database and Brexit’s Brits
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 2 to 8 finds an alarming piece by @iamdylancurran on how much data Facebook and Google have actually gleaned from us, @OCCRP’s powerful database of public records and leaks, @davidottewell’s take on the evolution of data journalism and an investigation by @TheInterceptBr into the militias in Rio de Janeiro.
Data Journalism
Data in the Desert: 4 Projects from the Middle East that Are Digging In
Representatives from several data projects in the MENA region made their way to Cairo last month to attend the first Arab Data Journalism Conference. They were there to share their initiatives to help data other Arab journalists — as well as academics and researchers — access reliable data that’s easy to find and delivered in usable formats. A GIJN original.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Beyond Page Views: How to Use Metrics that Matter
There are lots of different tools to measure analytics in the newsroom, but Google Analytics is one of the most widely used. Plus it’s free. Here are some ideas to help those working in organizations that don’t have access to expensive audience monitoring services to move beyond page views to measure the success of their digital content. A GIJN original.
Member Profiles
Brazil’s Agência Pública: Where Journalists Innovate and Collaborate
Since its creation five years ago, Agência Pública has promoted a revolution not only in Brazil, but around Latin America. It is one of the main drivers of a regional scene that brings together digital native-media founded and led by journalists.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Document of the Day: US Blacklist of Russian Oligarchs
The US Treasury Department hit Russian oligarchs and their companies with a host of new sanctions today, zeroing in on the country’s energy sector and cronies of President Vladimir Putin. Among those blacklisted: seven oligarchs, 12 companies and 17 senior government officials, including metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is tied in media reports to Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. Here’s a look at the actual documents.
Data Journalism
GIJN’s Data Journalism Top 10: Donut Holes, Turkish Data and Cop Shootings
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 26 to April 1 finds @washingtonpost on fatal police shootings, @decodeurs mapping Europe’s terrorist attacks, @DagmedyaVeri’s open data resources for Turkey and an undated chart of shrinking donut holes from the @smithsonian archives.
Case Studies
14 Independent News Sites Changing Cuban Journalism
Non-state media in Cuba defy the constitution of the country, which explicitly prohibits the existence of private media in Article 52. But that hasn’t stopped these 14 independent media houses – most of which started up after 2014 – from winning international awards.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Journalism’s Deep Web: 7 Tips on Using OCCRP Data
OCCRP Data, part of the Investigative Dashboard, offers journalists a shortcut to the deep web. It now has over 170 public sources and more than 100 million leads for public search – news archives, court documents, leaks and grey literature encompassing UK parliamentary inquiries, companies and procurement databases, NGO reports and even CIA rendition flights, among other choice reading.
Meet the Startup Fighting for the Future of Russian Media
The Bell illustrates a growing trend in which Russian journalists and media managers are finding ways of building news organizations that are not financially dependent on rich businessmen vulnerable to Kremlin pressure.
Data Journalism
This Week’s Top 10 in Data Journalism
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 19 to 25 finds a sobering study on income inequality between black and white males visualized by @nytimes, a cool time-lapse graphic of snow fall in the United States by @PostGraphics and peak baby-making seasons by country by @VismeApp and @ddjournalism.
Case Studies
War and Peace: 3 Colombian Journalism Projects Using New Narrative Strategies
Traditional war reporting, which mostly focused on revealing the brutality of the conflict in Colombia, is being replaced by new storytelling techniques using alternative narratives and creative digital tools. Here’s Proyecto Coca, Rutas del Conflicto and 4 Ríos.