The American conservative movement is redefining the practice of investigative journalism to support its objectives. The movement’s key tool is undercover work, penetrating liberal organizations to collect and report embarrassing material, then feeding it to social and political adversaries of those organizations.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Jan. 26-Feb.2: The NBA’s Curry (@fivethirtyeight); search Google like a Pro (@theguardian); gov’t black boxes (@El_Universal_Mx); Spain’s state cars (@elespanol); crimes by foreigners (@Datenblog112); and more.
Given all the trash, half-truths and outright lies published on digital media, people are placing a higher value on media that verify information and demonstrate high ethical standards. Paul Steiger, founder and executive chairman of ProPublica, tells of a major donor to his online publication who “absolutely hated” an investigative story that they had published about a group “near and dear to the donor’s heart”. Steiger told the donor that the information was verified, and the story was fair. “We will just have to agree to disagree,” he told the donor.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Jan. 18-25: Inside the Tennis Racket investigation (@buzzfeed); Mapping Berlin (@morgenpost); Africa grants (@impactAfrica); automated journalism (@towcenter); Amazon deforestation (@infoamazonia); teaching #ddj in EU.
Last week, the Pew Research Center released Crowdfunded Journalism: A Small but Growing Addition to Publicly Driven Journalism. The report highlights that, while contributions to crowdfunding journalism are modest compared with other categories, it is indeed a growing trend. The report found that crowdfunding represents a new, niche segment of nontraditional journalism, gives voice and visibility to efforts that otherwise would likely slip under the radar, provides new sources of sustainability, and contributes to public engagement.
A data-driven investigation that exposed the human cost of school re-segregation in central Florida is the first-place winner of the 2015 Philip Meyer Journalism Award. Investigations that explored the growth of diversity in American cities and revealed the small cadre of attorneys who dominate the U.S. Supreme Court docket are also top winners. The Meyer Award, given annually by Investigative Reporters and Editors, recognizes the best use of social science methods in journalism.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to welcome to 12 new member organizations this week. Among them are an Indian newsroom famed for its undercover work, a Peruvian data journalism pioneer, a Transylvanian muckraking nonprofit, and the training arm of a top Nigerian investigative daily. We are particularly pleased to welcome for the first time groups from Botswana, in southern Africa; the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan; and Vietnam in Southeast Asia.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Jan. 11- 17: Eleven common situations with data (@LocalFocusNL); 2015 in charts (@nytimes); Quartz guide to bad data (@gijn); text document extractor scripts (@pudo); DW Akademie trainees (@dw_akademie); and more.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top links for Jan. 5- 11: Awesome public datasets (@github); 20 ways to find data (@journalismnews); 19th Century big data (@ddjournalism); tilemaps & dataviz in Switzerland (@rastrau); Carnival in Germany (@Schwaebische); and more.
Attention: Investigative journalists in Asia — mark your calendars! Join us at the second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, on September 23-25, 2016. We will be featuring an all-star line-up of top investigative and data journalists from around the world.
Confiscati Bene, released in mid-December in Europe, is a pioneering data journalism collaboration that digs into the $4 billion of goods in the EU confiscated from criminals by European authorities. An international team of journalists and their allies sought to create a European database of seized assets and answer troubling questions about the accountability of the process. Confiscati Bene (literally, Well Confiscated) received support from GIJN member JournalismFund.eu; the main project can be seen at http://eu.confiscatibene.it.
A boom in investigative journalism in South Africa seems to be winding down as media houses slash budgets to balance their books to continue to pay dividends to shareholders. “South Africa has had something of a golden era in investigative reporting, with as many as four teams at different institutions dedicated to it,” said Professor Anton Harber, head of the journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
What’s the data-driven journalism crowd tweeting? Here are the top ten links for Dec. 23- Jan.4: NYT’s best graphics & visual stories (@NYT); programmers’ StackOverflow questions (@jbkunst); AI & disaster reporting (@ddjournalism); New Year’s tweets (@tomaspetricek); 2015 top #ddj tweets (@gijn).
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
