Thanks to so many of you for following our weekly Top Ten #ddj, which uses NodeXL to do a social network analysis on data journalism tweets. Here’s our summary of the year’s best: the most popular hashtags, the most searched domains, and the top mentions. As we have through the year, GIJN sends big thanks to the great Marc Smith of Connected Action for gathering the links and graphing them.
As 2015 nears an end, we’d like to share our top 12 stories of the year — the stories that you, our dear readers, found most compelling. The list ranges from free data tools and crowdfunding to the secrets of the Wayback Machine. Please join us in taking a look at The Best of GIJN.org this year.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Dec. 8-13: New book on ddj in newsrooms (@NiemanLab); a guide to bad data (@qz); persons of interest database (@pudo); US mass shootings (@washpost); terrorist attacks since 1970 (@datenblog); ddj en Ecuador; & more.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is out with its annual census of journalists in prison, and, as always, the report makes for grim reading. Check it out, anyway — it’s important our community knows what’s happening to our colleagues around the world. Here’s the quick and dirty: Globally, CPJ found 199 journalists in prison because of their work on December 1, 2015, a modest decline from record highs of the past three years. (There were 221 in 2014.) CPJ’s list does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year.
We’re pleased to run this excerpt from the recent report, Propaganda and Freedom of the Media, produced by the Office of The Representative on Freedom of the Media at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “These are trying times,” said the Representative, Dunja Mijatović, at the November 26 roll out of the report, during which she branded propaganda “an ugly scar on the face of modern journalism” and called on governments “to get out of the news business.”
OGP needs a new organizational structure with new methods for evaluating national commitments. There aren’t enough support unit resources to manage the expansion. We have to rethink how we manage national commitments and how we evaluate what it means to be an open government. It’s just not right that countries can celebrate baby steps at OGP events while at the same time passing odious legislation, sidestepping OGP accomplishments, buckling to corruption, and cracking down on journalists.
Arab journalists work amid some of the world’s most challenging environments. Terrorists and militias, arbitrary arrests and harassment, autocratic governments, and a lack of documents and data are just a few of the challenges they face on a daily basis. And yet, despite these conditions, extraordinary work is being done by investigative journalists in the Arab world.
Journalism is under threat. Investigative reporting, in particular, is under attack as never before, and we need your help. For 15 years, the Global Investigative Journalism Network has trained and supported the world’s most determined reporters as they’ve dug into corruption and abuses of power. We’ve helped bring watchdog reporting to the far corners of the Earth, and today investigative journalists are in more countries doing tougher reporting than we ever imagined.
Spotlight is without a doubt the most compelling, most insightful movie on investigative journalism since All the President’s Men, the 1975 classic on the Watergate Scandal. This is great story-telling that takes viewers inside the Spotlight investigative team at The Boston Globe as it dived into one of the more notorious crimes of our time – the systematic tolerance and cover-up of thousands of cases of pedophilia by the Catholic Church. At a time when investigative journalists are under fire around the world, here is a public tutorial on why in-depth, watchdog reporting is so important to social accountability and democracy.
Hundreds of what appear to be Twitter bots are artificially inflating the retweet and favorite counts of tweets with links to articles from some of Russia’s top news agencies. Lawrence Alexander discovered that these same fake accounts have previously mass-posted links to scores of pro-Kremlin LiveJournal blogs—themselves part of a network of thousands. In this piece, which originally appeared on Global Voices, Alexander walks us through his research process.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 23-29: the beneficiaries of the refugee crisis (@br_data); attacks on asylum housing (@RechtesLand); job opportunity at Code for Africa (@code4africa); gender violence in Catalonia (@naciodigital); and more
In an era of increasing hostility to independent media, one of the bright spots is the rapid expansion of journalism nonprofits around the world — training, promoting, and reporting on stories that otherwise would never see the light of day. But a dangerous trend now threatens the progress our colleagues have made on press freedom and watchdog reporting: a crackdown on nonprofit organizations. Restrictions on international funding account for more than a third of the measures since 2012. With that in mind, we are pleased to reprint this important story from the Journal of Democracy, detailing the global scope of the backlash.
The seventh Latin American Investigative Journalism Conference ended on Monday, bringing together 150 journalists from some 15 countries in Lima, Peru. The conference, held November 20-23, presented awards to an impressive array of stories from across the region. Noting the quality of the awards submissions, veteran journalist Gustavo Gorritti declared, “El periodismo de investigacion se ha salvado.” (“Investigative Journalism has been saved.”)
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 17-22: ISIS killings mapped (@wireditalia); 50 years of #ddj (@gijn); Airbnb’s Spain limbo (@elespanolcom); traffic accident black spots (@AalenerNachr); and Kickstarting Tanzania ddj (@Code4Africa).
Gone are the days of complaints about information operations and psychological operations (PSYOPS) undermining media development being pursued by USAID and its contractors. But those have been replaced by broader concerns that the U.S government overall may now be too focused on counter-messaging at the expense of independent media development. “We are concerned that there is an increasing shift away from supporting genuinely independent media towards what might be termed counter-propaganda and promoting counter narratives,” says James Deane, director of policy and learning at BBC Media Action.
For the first time ever journalists representing all European member states have teamed up to file complaints with the European Court of Justice against the European Parliament (EP). The institution refused to grant the journalists’ requests for access to information related to how the 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) spend their allowances. Journalists filed complaints with the Court of Justice on 13 November.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Nov. 9-16: James Bond’s Brands (@BIQdata); 50 years of #ddj (@gijn); Google News Lab Fellowship UK (@googlenewslab); the Journalist-Engineer (@matthew_daniels); Sparklines (@EdwardTufte); and data literacy (@KirkDBorne).
Cross-border cooperation was the big takeaway from a three-day meeting of investigative journalists from 17 countries in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 4-6. Billed as “The First Caribbean Meeting of Investigative Journalists: Tracking the Stories that Connect Us,” one aim was to create a counterweight to the power of organized crime by cooperating across borders, according to Carla Minet of the Center of Investigative Journalism of Puerto Rico.
A year ago I wrote an article about digital media startups around the world and attempts to categorize and analyze them. Some of that material is now a bit dated, and I have come across some other analyses and lists that have good road maps for media entrepreneurs.
It started with trying to predict the outcome of a US presidential election. More than six decades later, computer-assisted reporting is at the core of investigative reporting globally.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Oct. 29-Nov. 9: visualizing the refugee crisis (@lucify_); MOOC: infographics & dataviz (@utknightcenter); learn timelines and timemaps (@SchoolOfData); #ddj Arabic handbook (ddjournalism); Slopegraphs (@EdwardTufte).
More than 30 journalists were honored Friday night as award-winners and finalists in Argentina’s annual investigative awards competition. The awards were sponsored by the Argentinian Journalism Forum (FOPEA), the only member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network in that country.
On the occasion of International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, UNESCO is releasing a new study today, World Trends In Freedom of Expression and Media Development. Of particular note is the chapter Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age. We are reprinting below that section’s key findings and recommendations, which add another important voice calling for stronger measures to protect sources.
Here’s the annual map of global Internet freedom, drawn from Freedom on the Net 2015, released this week by Freedom House. The news is not good: Internet freedom worldwide declined for the fifth straight year in 2015, with more governments censoring information of public interest while expanding surveillance and restricting privacy tools, the report found. More than 61 percent of Internet users reside where criticism of governments, militaries, or ruling families have been subject to online censorship. A striking 58 percent live in countries where people have been imprisoned for posting political, social, or religious content.
