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Global Shining Light Award Nominations Open
In October 2013, the Global Investigative Journalism Conference will again present the Global Shining Light Award, a unique award which honors investigative reporting in a developing or transitioning country, done under threat, duress, or in the direst of conditions. The winner receives an honorary plaque, US$1,000, and a free trip to the Global Conference in Rio de Janeiro.
News & Analysis
Why We Need To Tell Stories
So you’ve amassed terabytes of data, reams of documents and hours of expert testimony, all backing up your conclusions. What’s the best way to convince people you’re right?
Tell them a story.
Ideally, a compelling, colorful tale weaving in memorable anecdotes and striking details. Printed in a clear, legible font. Oh, and it helps – no kidding – if it rhymes.
At least according to Nobel-prizewinning economist Daniel Kahneman, author of the outstanding Thinking, Fast and Slow, who’s made a career out of understanding – experimentally – how our brains take in information and make decisions. It isn’t always pretty, but it does help explain why storytelling is a centuries-old means of passing on information.
News & Analysis
Muckraking in Putin’s Russia
News & Analysis
South African Awards Highlight World Class Reporting
High quality investigative journalism is spreading around the world. One country where it has put down strong roots, despite an often hostile environment, is South Africa. The depth of reporting can be seen in the just announced Taco Kuiper Awards, that country’s highest prize for investigative journalism. In the awards announcement speech last weekend, which GIJN is pleased to reprint here, Wits University Journalism Professor Anton Harber salutes the finalists for work on extraordinary stories ranging from police death squads to government waste, fraud, and abuse of the public trust.
Big Data in Need of Analytic Rigor by Journalists
Kate Crawford, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, recently warned about failing to closely scrutinize the results of big data analysis. In a keynote speech at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, she called on “data scientists” to use the methods of social science in examining data to avoid wrong conclusions and misinterpretations. We decided to seek the thoughts and comments of award-winning journalists Jennifer LaFleur and David Donald.
Methodology News & Analysis
ICIJ’s Offshore Exposé: Bigger than Wikileaks’ ‘Cablegate’
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.
News & Analysis
Why Open Data Isn’t Enough
Hacks and hackers meetups. Open government initiatives. Hackathons and datafests. The media development world has discovered big data, and it is embracing it big time. Donors like the Knight and Omidyar foundations are focused almost exclusively on tech fixes to what ails the media. As one prominent donor told a nonprofit newsroom executive, “We no longer fund content.”
Data Journalism Methodology
The Scarecrow and the Watchdog
Sounds like the title of a cheesy TV series; but this is a riff off the Tow Center at Columbia University’s excellent report on Post-Industrial Journalism.Scarecrow
In it, the authors talk about the need for both steady, incremental, regular coverage of issues – “scarecrow”‘ journalism that discourages wrongdoing via the potential threat of exposure – as well for more episodic, deeper, investigative reporting that uncovers actual wrongdoing – “watchdog” journalism.
News & Analysis
Mulvad: Huge Need for Cross-Border Investigations in Europe
News & Analysis
Business People: Investigative Journalism Best Against Corruption
In a never-ending fight for resources – with editors, owners, donors, and developers – we investigative journalists need to make our case more effectively than ever before. Despite knowing that what we do makes a difference, we often don’t marshal the data and arguments that show why investigative reporting is worth the investment.
Safety & Security
A Digital Security Primer
A concise guide to digital security for investigative journalists, including email, passwords, logins, and malware, with links to tipsheets and tutorials.
News & Analysis
Is Investigative Reporting in ICU?
Hit by the twin blows of economic crisis and collapsing business models, newspapers and TV stations eliminated or downsized their investigative units. Yet at the same time, the muckraking spirit remains alive.
News & Analysis
SCOOP Celebrates 10 Years
Longtime GIJN member SCOOP, based in Denmark, is a cross-border network of investigative journalists who help fund projects, connect reporters for collaboration, and organize conferences and trainings. On SCOOP’s 10th anniversary, our colleagues there put together an impressive list of activities, awards, and events, which we’re reprinting here in full.
News & Analysis
Disclosing Tax Data
Around the world, many governments are proposing painful solutions to the problem of public debt and imposing heavier tax burdens on citizens. As government services are cut because public coffers are bare, public attention is shifting to the taxes paid – or not paid – by the wealthy and the privileged.
News & Analysis
ARIJ honors investigations from Mideast, North Africa
Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) honored reporters from across the region during its annual congress in November, attended by a record 300 journalists from 24 countries.
News & Analysis
Russia Bars Ukrainian Journalist for 5 Years
News & Analysis
How To Do Investigative Reporting in Pakistan
When journalist Umar Cheema launched the Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan (CIRP) last week, he did so with a bang: A blockbuster story that hit the headlines around the world. Two-thirds of Pakistani MPs, his report said, do not pay their taxes. Neither did President Asif Ali Zardari – famous for his spending sprees, polo games and luxurious country estates – and more than half the Cabinet.
News & Analysis
Extortion Arrests Fuel Credibility Crisis for India Media
India’s best journalists are producing impressive investigative reporting these days. But the unprecedented arrests last week of two journalists for extortion highlights a troubling problem for the country’s free-wheeling media: widespread payoffs and a worrisome lack of credibility. Veteran Delhi-based journalist Shantanu Guha Ray reports on what one prominent editor calls “our News of the World moment.”
GIJN Members Protest Russia Entry Denial to Scoop’s Khomenok
On October 29, our Ukrainian colleague Oleg Khomenok was refused entry to Russia for unexplained reasons. A long-time trainer for GIJN member Scoop, the Denmark-based investigative reporting network, he was invited to Russia by the group’s St. Petersburg-based partner, the Regional Press Institute, to give a lecture at a seminar on investigative reporting in Kaliningrad. At the airport, he was barred from entry by border officials, without explanation, and deported on the same plane in which he had arrived.
News & Analysis
Gutsy Exposés, Undercover Work Win Top Honors at 2012 African Investigative Journalism Awards
A courageous effort by the Sunday Times in South Africa into the operations of a police death squad won the top prize in the 2012 African Investigative Journalism Awards.
News & Analysis
Global Network News — October 2012
The GIJN warmly welcomes six new member organizations, extending the global network to 74 groups in 35 countries.
Journalists from Brazil, Peru Top List of 2012 Latin American Investigative Journalism Award Winners
Impressive, world-class reporting was honored this week at the 2012 Latin American Investigative Journalism Conference (COLPIN) in Bogota, Colombia. Here’s a look at the winners, drawn from the announcement by the award’s sponsors, the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute, or IPYS) and Transparency International.
News & Analysis
Investigative Journalism’s Key Role in Deterring Fraud
For five-and-a-half-months, a team of European journalists has researched, at the behest of the European Parliament, the critical role that investigative journalism can play in deterring fraud in the European Union. Their nearly 300-page report, released today in Brussels, is a landmark study that makes a powerful case for the contribution that investigative reporting makes “to greater transparency on this issue, tracking irregularities, fraud and corruption, and uncovering misspending on different levels and scales in the EU member states and the EU institutions.”
Global Network News — Sept. 2012
GIJN is growing! Since July the Global Network has expanded by 30 percent–we now represent 60 groups in 35 countries. Our membership includes investigative reporting centers, professional associations, and grant-making bodies.