GIJN’s Top Investigative Tools of 2024

While the most important assets for investigative journalists in 2024 remained curiosity, courage, and collaboration, innovative digital tools provided leads and evidence for accountability stories on every continent.

And there were several investigations that were only possible thanks to new open source tools, such as the UK-based i-paper’s revelation of civilian harm from Israel’s weapon-of-choice in Gaza, and stories from Brazil and central Africa that used new databases to track the private and government investors behind companies responsible for deforestation in the Global South.

This past year was, of course, a seismic moment for both helpful new AI tools and dangerous new AI threats, and GIJN has been careful to highlight those AI tools that help reporters at the front-end of investigations — as sources of leads, rather than evidence — along with expert insights on the ethics and verification steps required.

Some important work this year involved digging deeper into major journalism tools themselves, such as DocumentCloud and Pinpoint, as reporters learned to use additional features through practice, experimentation, and tips. For instance, more reporters already familiar with OCCRP’s Aleph hidden money database began to use its powerful cross-reference features, as its chief data editor Jan Strozyk explained in this GIJN tips story.

While readers are encouraged to browse digital resources that might fit your investigation under Reporting Tips and Tools, Data Journalism, and other categories on GIJN’s website, below we have curated a list of eight notable tools that were either new or newly impactful for watchdog reporters in 2024.

Bellingcat’s Online Investigations Toolkit

Illustration: Ann Kiernan for Bellingcat

In one of the most important gifts to investigative reporters in 2024, open source investigative nonprofit Bellingcat opted to publicly release its comprehensive and collaborative dashboard of largely free digital investigative tools, which was based on the surveyed needs of journalists and researchers.

The Online Investigations Toolkit features hundreds of cutting edge open source and proprietary tools for everything from geolocation and money tracking to social media digging and environmental  monitoring. Importantly, it is presented in a user-friendly portal that shows which are “free,” “paid,” or “partially free.”

The resource will also be periodically updated, and invites new tool contributions from the open source research community. It also includes a form where reporters can describe needed tools that aren’t in the archive. Brief descriptions of each tool help reporters understand whether they need command-line and Github-type coding knowledge, or no special computer skills at all.

As the portal’s designer, Johanna Wild, wrote in Bellingcat’s announcement post: “Do you know the feeling of spending hours trying to figure out how to use a tool just to realize that the key features you are interested in are not working anymore, or that the previously free product has turned into a paid one that is more expensive than you can afford? Our new Online Investigations Toolkit not only helps you discover tools in categories like satellite imagery and maps, social media, transportation or archiving, but is also designed to help researchers learn how to use each tool.”

Open Source Munitions Portal

Open Source Munitions Portal. Image: Screenshot

This database gives journalists a new method to hold accountable the actors behind the bombing of civilians.

Created by UK-based nonprofit watchdog group Airwars and the technical intelligence consultancy Armament Research Services (ARES), the Open Source Munitions Portal (OSMP) helps identify spent bombs and missiles from images via social media and NGOs, with the help of munitions experts and Ukrainian and Arab-speaking researchers.

Reporters were already able to access comprehensive digital resources for identifying military ordnance, such as the excellent CAT-UXO archive. But what makes OSMP so helpful is that it identifies bombs and missiles the way reporters and their sources typically encounter them: as charred steel remnants near bomb craters in conflict zones.

While its archive is still in its early stages, with some 600 assessed images of spent munitions mostly found in Ukraine or the Palestinian territories,  it is growing fast and has already been used in two major investigations.

As GIJN reported in October: independent outlet Danwatch was able to document that Danish-equipped jet fighters had conducted airstrikes in Gaza using resources from the OSMP.

NINA

NINA is a collaborative database of every kind of public document, contract, and dataset in Latin America, created by EL CLIP, the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism. Unlike traditional cross-border databases, this one connects in real-time to partner databases, which allows reporters to use a single interface to search across multiple data sources — including tools such as Open Sanctions, Aleph, the Offshore Leaks Database, and OpenCorporates. The innovative platform requires no coding or special computer skills, and is set up so that newsrooms in Latin America, in particular, can easily upload, index, search, and share their own datasets. Remarkably, it also uses AI to make sense of unstructured data. The tool has been key to major recent investigations, such as CLIP’s revelation of conflicts triggered by the lithium boom in Chile and Argentina, and an investigation into election abuses in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Ecuador.

Rigoberto Carvajal, a data architect at EL CLIP who led NINA’s development, told GIJN: “We have already received significant praise for this tool from [newsrooms] — and it has become a tool that should be visited constantly for any investigation.”

Perplexity AI 

While many AI chat tools are fraught with potential bias or inaccurate information, several veteran journalists at the NICAR24 data journalism summit in the US told GIJN that the Perplexity.ai “answer engine” can really help investigative reporters working on complex or unfamiliar topics.

The free tool serves as an instant briefing resource for journalists by providing concise responses to complex investigative questions, alongside lists of mostly authoritative sources and insightful suggested follow-up questions. The facts it offers up must always be verified, however, and it works best as a source of useful leads, rather than reliable evidence. Its answers often act like the kind of background interviews reporters conduct with university experts at the outset of new investigations — except that those information dumps are presented in mere seconds. Asked, for instance, “How does timber trafficking in the Amazon work?” Perplexity offered a detailed and contextual summary — with citations of work by Mongabay, Earth Restoration Service, and Corporate Accountability Lab.

Reporters note that, unlike many other chatbots, onward searches using Perplexity tend to take you where you want to go, rather than where it wants to take you.

“It’s a very useful tool for quickly getting up to speed,” said Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York. “Anyone can search Google, which will give you a hundred links. But Perplexity gives you the ability to understand complex questions, with citations and relevant onward questions.”

Sayari and RuPEP, with the Big Hidden Money Databases

Major free databases such as ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database, OCCRP’s Aleph, and OpenCorporates continue to be the engine room tools for money laundering, shell companies, and hidden assets investigations around the world.

However, given the sheer diversity of legal jurisdictions and the cunning of the enablers who serve oligarchs and other shadowy “ultimate beneficial owners,” hidden money investigators like ICIJ’s Karrie Kehoe say reporters need to experiment with names, and variations of names, across diverse databases to map illicit empires.

One tool that can find links that don’t appear in the big open source databases is the Sayari corporate risk platform. It is subscription-based, but has some free trial access. Due to the time-intensive slog involved with shell company research, Sayari is also valued by reporters for its at-a-glance features, including red flag icons to show sanctions listings and national flags to show countries associated with listed directors. Orbis and Factiva are also useful paid-for tools.

Meanwhile, because Russian oligarchs are the masters of hiding assets — and because they frequently register relatives and girlfriends as directors of their companies — reporters on their trail should check out a new tool called RuPEP, which profiles the relatives and personal contacts of thousands of “politically exposed persons” in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Open Measures

An example of a timeline search result for the term QAnon on the Open Measures site. Image: Screenshot

Award-winning reporters on the far-right extremism beat note that there is no substitute for reading, listening to, or searching what extremists say — whether on fringe social media, in podcasts, or in the streets — when investigating these groups. However, beyond the personal safety concerns,  this reporting approach is problematic because the content is often deeply unpleasant and it takes inordinate amounts of time to trawl through masses of bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories. One under-used open source tool for streamlining your reporting is Open Measures, which can automatically search and pull data from channels on fringe or less popular social media platforms, including 8kun, Bluesky, BitChute, Odyssey, and many others. Another, paid-for AI tool that reporters increasingly use in parallel is Pyrra, which zeroes in on posts involving hate speech and potential violence. Tools are also emerging that can automatically transcribe and search right wing English-language podcasts, including the audio feature on Junkipedia.

Google’s Rapid Fact-Check Tools

Digital misinformation and image fakery are now so widespread that the core need for reporters and fact checkers is often speed of detection, rather than detailed analysis. The Google News Initiative recently released three tools that can flag fake or toxic content in seconds.

• About This Image is a new feature that can help journalists check the general history of an image in a few simple steps. Having selected a picture in Google Images, simply click on the image, then click on the three vertical dots alongside, and then select the new “About this image” tab. The tool immediately shows roughly how long the image — or a similar one — has lived on Google, and can immediately debunk claims that it was newly captured. It sometimes also offers useful information from metadata, including notes on any AI enhancement.
• Fact Check Explorer shows whether a suspicious claim or image you’ve encountered has already been verified or debunked by a vetted fact-check organization. It’s a search engine exclusively for verified fact checks and allows reporters to get a quick summary of a verdict as well as a link to the original verification report.
• Image Search Beta and Google Image Context. Reporters can fill out a simple form to apply for access to this tool, which pulls up all fact-checks done involving the picture you upload. It works on the image itself, rather than the metadata — so even uploaded screenshots of a suspicious image can work. Better still, its Image Context feature tells you the exact day the image was first indexed, as well as other details of its origins.

EO Browser

A satellite image showing a close-up of part of the Gaza Strip — reporters can zoom in close enough to identify individual streets. Image: Screenshot of an image taken on 25 November 2024

This is one of those powerful, free, multi-purpose investigative tools that seems too good to be true, but — as newsrooms are increasingly finding — really is freely available, without any catch or the need for special coding skills.

Provided by Sentinel Hub, the EO (Earth Observation) Browser is an easily searchable archive of images from several satellite constellations, including Europe’s Sentinel suite, which reporters can simply filter and download. You don’t need to worry about selecting the appropriate satellite database for most searches, as it defaults to the excellent, medium-resolution Sentinel-2 network, which images the same spots on the Earth’s surface about twice a week. Importantly for newcomers to remote sensing evidence, the browser now includes wonderfully user-friendly features, such as a slider bar you can simply click on to eliminate images with significant cloud cover. There are also icons that let you overlay roads and towns to orient users. You can see the dates when images of the location you’re investigating were taken on its digital calendar, and you can even create time-lapse clips to embed in your story just by selecting a date range and making a few clicks. While truly high-resolution images are only available from private providers, and more complex features from portals like NASA Worldview, experts say EO Browser and the more familiar Google Earth Pro are likely now all you need for most satellite photo reporting requirements.

Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.