“Hello,” wrote the anonymous source to a German newspaper, “this is John Doe. Interested in data?” Thus began what would soon become an international financial investigation into what are being called the Panama Papers—an investigation so massive that even whistleblower Edward Snowden, on Twitter, called it the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism.”
We do agree with Ramon Fonseca about one thing: that “Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar.” But that’s where our commonality with co-founder of disgraced Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca ends. This scandal isn’t about privacy. If anything, it’s about the need for transparency about how the powerful wield their power.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 20- April 1: ddj without borders (@Maid_Marianne); time-lapses basics (@vimeo); Berlin bikelanes (@morgenpost); data ebook (@jonathanstray); North Korea missiles (@bbc); death penalty stats (@guardian); and more.
GIJN and its partners are excited to officially open registration for Uncovering Asia — the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference, to be held in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 23-25. Our keynote speaker will be Walter “Robby” Robinson, who led the Boston Globe Spotlight team’s Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Robinson was played by actor Michael Keaton in the movie Spotlight.
At a recent meeting of the Institute for Nonprofit News – for my sins, I now sit on INN’s board – we learned an interesting statistic: About half the organization’s members have a strategy to drive readers to their own sites/destinations, and the other half count on distributing their content via other platforms. Does it matter how we reach readers? And should we care?
A Round-up of Recent Debates about Community Support and Culture Change in Newsrooms. A study released earlier this month suggested that 40% of Americans would buy digital newspaper subscriptions if they were presented with a persuasive argument. It is worth spending a minute unpacking what that “persuasive argument” might look like.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for March 14-21: undercovered stories (@JigsawTeam); NICAR links (@MacDiva); Madrid conference (@JPDatos); podcasts (@carlapedret); GEN Awards (@GENinnovate); R for annotations (@hrbrmstr); German elections (@zeitonline).
We gather for the 10th time to pay tribute to journalists who spend their time digging and probing – and often risking their lives for little reward – to expose wrongdoing. Investigative reporters have been derisively called “muckrakers”, but we embrace that label to say that we are proud of those who play such an important role in our society by digging around in the dirt to hold the powerful to account.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network, an association of 128 organizations in 58 countries, deplores recent attacks on the character and work of Stevan Dojčinović and the KRIK investigative reporting center in Serbia. We call upon the government of Serbia to take all measures to protect the security of Mr. Dojčinović and his staff, and to respect their freedom to conduct independent journalism.
It’s not unusual for investigative reporting to lead to huge fines. Exposés of foreign bribery, money laundering, and tax evasion have led to billions of dollars recovered by governments worldwide. What is shocking about these numbers is how they compare to the paucity of foreign aid to investigative journalists where it is most needed — in developing and transitioning countries.
Writing has been my life’s passion and my curse too. In my teens, I was bullied for being an avid reader and for wanting to express my opinions as informed by my readings. I vividly remember being taunted with the idea that “too much reading will bring you madness, and disgrace.”
Podcast are a great way to find out stories and to be entertained. However, have you ever thought about using them to learn data journalism? In this list, I have collected some of the best podcast about data. Some are specifically about data journalism, whereas others approach data from an innovative perspective.
Data journalism is thriving worldwide, but is American journalism education keeping up? Funded by the Knight Foundation, our research team set out to survey and analyze the state of data journalism education in the U.S. today. The results are being published and available online as a free report, Teaching Data and Computational Journalism, that provides model curricula for a range of computational and data journalism courses.
There are things that happen with such regularity and predictability that journalists have simply ceased to recognize their news value – not least if those things are least likely to happen to the people most likely to be journalists. That much of what we have come to accept as commonplace has dulled our curiosity to why so much of what is commonplace is unacceptable; that given the prevailing and escalating inequalities and inequities, we simply do not occupy the same worlds we portend to cover – even when those worlds are right on our door step.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Mar. 3-8: designing lists (@edwardtufte); Zurich streets (@NZZ); Lesbos journey (@washingtonpost); Google Maps storytelling (@GoogleNewsLab); German bridges (@SPIEGELONLINE); data science guides (@KirkDBorne); and more.
In part one of this blog I discussed the need for journalists to save evidence they find online and some of the techniques for recording that information. In part two, I’ll focus on some of the issues journalists face when it comes to saving information from social media and mobile devices.
This is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers to traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family.
GIJN lent a hand to the Thai Broadcast Journalists Association last month, helping train 60 journalists in the fine art of muckraking in Thailand. “The ending workshop was quite amazing,” Hanson says. “They worked with an intensity that was really impressive, developing story ideas they had generated the first day… “I believe some of these stories will be published!”
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Feb. 23-Mar. 1: earthdata search (@ddjournalism); Hyblab #ddj projects (@hyblab); Is data journalism for everybody?; a city transformation in 3D (@LeTelegramme); Spanish data presentation (@cabralens); & more.
The movie Spotlight, based on the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting into pedophilia inside the Catholic Church, won best picture and best screenplay at the 2016 Academy Awards late Sunday. “We would not be here today without the heroic efforts of our reporters,” declared producer Blye Pagon Faust as she accepted the award. “Not only do they effect global change, but they absolutely show us the necessity of investigative journalism.”
Sustainable Development Labs can bring the benefits of Technology and Innovation to the poorest communities in our cities and nations, providing education, jobs, and growth by channeling IT projects to work with and for the people in those communities.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Feb. 16-22: terrorism & tourism (@SPIEGELONLINE); time-series (@edwardtufte); fellowships (@schoolofdata); ISIS’s cultural destruction (@wef); profiling refugees (@data_match); French agri-crisis (@LeTelegramme); & more.
It was February 2013 when the police knocked on the door of Anuska Delic’s mother. The two officers had arrived at the house in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana at 8am to speak with her daughter concerning a criminal investigation. Delic, a journalist for the well-respected daily newspaper Delo, was being charged for revealing alleged connections between the ruling right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) and the controversial neo-Nazi movement Blood and Honour.
The idea of “the one percent” has become a popular way to discuss the gap between the fantastically wealthy—the one percent of Americans who control more than 20 percent of the country’s wealth—and the rest of us. But the one percent is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1900, they were known as the Robber Barons, and at the top sat John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil. But the Robber Barons had a corrective: Ida Minerva Tarbell.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Feb. 10-15: refugee crisis (@EJOnews); Africa ddj academy (@code4africa); School of Data fellowships (@schoolofdata); data sketching (@jawalnut); visualizing femicides (@ddjournalism); Nigeria data site (@budgitng).
The BBC has more journalists than any other media outlet in Britain, but out of those 4,000 men and women, yes 4,000, precisely none of them work in an investigations unit. The Sunday Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Mail have far less journalists between them but they all maintain centralized investigations units.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Feb. 3-9: 5 great dataviz (@neilhalloran); regression analysis (@schoolofdata); guessing correlations (@omarwagih); csv datasets (@gilleti); HybLab Datajournalisme (@HybLab); Madrid pollution (@eldiarioes); & more.
