How can you search and analyze collections of documents on your own computers with simple tools? At DataHarvest, Robert Gebeloff and I ran a workshop to answer that question. As people were seemed interested, here’s a write-up of the two key tools we worked with: Apache Tika for content extraction and regular expressions in Sublime Text as an advanced search tool.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for June 10-22: Voting habits of Americans (@nytimes); Eurocup players (@br_data); FT dataviz guide (@digiday); stats for journalists (@ddjournalism); #ddj awards recap (@smfrogers); nursing homes in Germany (@source); & more.
With the growing relevance and popularity of data journalism, it may be easy to prioritize numbers over people, and spend our time emphasizing the data through graphics, maps, charts, and other visual products. But sometimes the faces and names behind the data get lost. Fortunately, we have some guiding lights to keep us on the path of good journalism. Consider these highlights from the panel Humanizing Numbers at IRE16…
When it’s time to start a new investigation, journalists prepare themselves in different ways: from doing the research to pitching the story to building the narrative. It’s not about a single formula, but about integrating different resources and strategies. Here, we present a selection of the tips presented at the 2016 conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors (#IRE16), useful for starting and developing investigations.
The awards luncheon at the annual IRE conference featured a moving keynote address by Columbia University’s Sheila Coronel. Her speech focused on the contagious and empowering spirit of collaboration taking hold among investigative journalists worldwide.
The results from last week’s election of GIJN board candidates are in: electronic voting by GIJN members elected two new board members: Syed Nazakat, representing Asia/Pacific, and Eva Jung, representing Europe. In all, seven seats were up for election, each for a two-year term. Five other board members were re-elected: Anton Harber (Wits University Investigative Journalism Programme), Carlos Eduardo Huertas (Connectas), Oleg Khomenok (Internews), Bruce Shapiro (Dart Center), and Margo Smit (VVOJ).
Ten years ago, when I first moved to New York and gave my first lecture at the Columbia Journalism School, I told students that I believe we are at the dawn of a Golden Age of global muckraking. They were a great class, but they didn’t believe me. But look at where we are now.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for May 31-June 9: EU Swings Right (@NYtimes); #ddj newsrooms (@niemanlab); German commutes (@zeitonline); French police violence (@BuzzFeedFrance); Dataharvest HackDay (#thesponge.eu); Ethnic America (@WashingtonPost); & more.
“In the immortal words of Sir Isaac Newton more than three centuries ago, ‘To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’” In October 2010, Executive Editor Charles Lewis wrote these words for the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s first New Journalism Ecosystem research on nonprofit news organizations in the United States. Those same words summarize the events that led to the launch of the Hungarian nonprofit center for investigative journalism, Direkt36, and many other similar centers around the world.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome to 10 new member organizations. We are particularly pleased to welcome for the first time groups from Ghana, Venezuela, Malaysia, Liberia, and New Zealand. Among the new members are award-winning reporting centers in Serbia and South Africa, online publishers in Malaysia and Venezuela, an African cross-border reporting network, and training groups based in Liberia, Germany, Mexico, and the Netherlands.
In an extract from his book Finding Stories with Spreadsheets Paul Bradshaw explains how to use basic cleaning functions in spreadsheets to make it easier to combine data, including a case study where the same functions were used to speed up a research process for a story.
Before the emergence of digital tools, recording and (especially) transcribing an interview was a tedious affair. The little microcassette tapes were of dubious reliability—and yes, I once had one fail on me during a crucial and contentious encounter. Transcribing was worse, as you’d sit there constantly hitting the “play” and “rewind” buttons, an imprecise process that risked damage to the tape.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are top links for May 23-30: a racist algorithm (@ProPublica); Spain’s female politicians (@elespanolcom); German anti-refugee violence (@Julian_Moe); US election (@ddjournalism); satellite imagery (@webk1d); and more.
A simple WordPress blog named #NoHaceFaltaPapel didn’t exist a year ago. Now it’s a publishing company whose El Español is responsible for the largest crowdfunding campaign for journalism to date. Previously at the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and now working in New York City for Univision Noticias, María Ramírez and her husband Eduardo Suárez launched the blog last April to explore media innovation at the International Symposium of Online Journalists.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 13-24: Best dataviz of the year (@Gizmodo); 85 tools for digital journos (@Journalism2ls); missing women in Mexico (@Univ_Data); how to analyze big leaks (@M_Mandalka); news graphics collection (@marijerr); & more.
Journalist Khadija Ismayilova was set free after her final appeal hearing today at the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan two days before her 40th birthday. Ismayilova, an award-winning reporter who exposed the corruption of the ruling Aliyev family, has been in prison in Baku since her arrest on Dec. 5, 2014. “There was no crime,” Ismayilova told the press upon her release. “President Aliyev and his clique decided to get rid of any criticism against them.”
Alongside the advantages available for criminals of operating on a global scale, making it harder to track them down, there are also disadvantages that the clever journalist or law enforcement official can exploit to expose them. How do we do this? Firstly, through data: more data means more transparency, provided the quality of information is there and supported by tools that allow proper analysis. Secondly, by journalists using advanced techniques.
In 2014, Hungarian investigative journalist András Pethő wrote an exposé about a series of expensive overseas business trips taken by the chief of staff to Prime Minister Viktor Orban for the popular website Origo.hu. Within days of the story’s publication, Origo’s editor in chief, Gergo Saling, resigned – apparently due to political pressure on Origo’s parent company, Magyar Telecom. Pethő and much of the rest of the site’s news staff quit soon afterwards in solidarity. The walkout led to much scrutiny of Origo and Hungary’s press freedom climate, both in Hungary and internationally.
With the aim of contributing to the promotion of data-based investigations and asserting its vision of journalism as an essential service to democracy, OjoPúblico has published “La navaja suiza del reportero. Herramientas de investigación en la era de los datos masivos” (“The Swiss Army Knife Journalist: Digital Research Tools in the Era of Big Data”), a resource for Hispanic reporters who want to become familiar with the world of data journalism and, above all, to understand its meaning and relevance in Latin America and the world.
It was 6 March 1971 when the first edition of the Tempo was published. This year marks their forty-fifth anniversary and over that time the Indonesian weekly magazine has gone through a lot, including a temporary closure under the Soeharto regime. In this interview, Wahyu Dhyatmika, investigative journalist at Tempo, talks about the evolution of the magazine and how they are trying to adapt to the digital age, considering the development of news apps and the creation of specific mobile content.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for May 3-12: #ddj awards (@GENinnovate); China’s EU stereotypes (@foreignpolicy); Atlantic slave trade (@slate); French employment (@Data_Match); Germany’s green cities (@morgenpost); bubble maps (@datawrapper); & more.
Only one-tenth of national data is really open and free, according to the third annual Open Data Barometer by the World Wide Web Foundation. “The open data movement is at a turning point,” the report finds. “If we allow this moment to slip away, however, open data could fade into a ghost town of abandoned pilots, outdated data portals, and unused apps.”
Mauri König is a Brazilian investigative reporter. Last October, at the Global Investigative Conference in Lillehammer, König shared first place in the Global Shining Light Awards for his investigation “Empire of Ashes” on tobacco smuggling in Latin America. In this interview, Konig shares his views on what it’s like to uncover illicit interests involving the president of a country while working in a highly dangerous environment.
The trove of files that make up the Panama Papers is likely the largest dataset of leaked insider information in the history of journalism. For ICIJ’s Data and Research Unit, it offered a unique set of challenges. The overall size of the data (2.6 terabytes, 11.5 million files), the variety of file types (from spreadsheets, emails and PDFs to obscure and old formats no longer in use), and the logistics of making it all securely searchable for more than 370 journalists around the world are just a few of the hurdles faced over the course of the 12 month investigation.
Facebook and Google and their humongous data crunching machines flourish while fine media wilt. How to compete? They take media’s original costly-to-produce-content for free and make it available to users to circulate, anticipating their needs with their intelligent algorithms.
Some of the best tips and techniques come out of the annual meetings by our colleagues in Scandinavia, and this year is no different. More than 600 participants attended the SKUP conference in Tønsberg, Norway, on April 8-10. Among the tip sheets presented was this gem of 25 practical tips that reporters in even the smallest newsrooms can use to good effect, focused on finding great characters and cases to bring your story to life.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for April 26-May 2: Pirated Papers (@sciencemagazine); Panama Papers tech (@ICIJorg); Europe Open Research (@ddjournalism); Water Webinar (@code4africa); 6 Data Story Rules (@DataScienceCtrl); German E-Cars (@BR24); & more.
