On the evening of August 4, 2020, a devastating blast at the port in Beirut shook the Lebanese capital. It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. GIJN spoke to three outlets whose investigations all played a pivotal role in understanding what led to the explosion and why a ship and its deadly cargo were stuck at the port for so long.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up interesting journalism news in English from around the world, we read about Glenn Greenwald’s resignation from The Intercept, a data journalism collaboration on COVID-19 data which reaches across eight newsrooms, and Bellingcat’s already excellent, and now updated, Online Investigation Toolkit.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the world in English, includes a toolkit for journalists on systems thinking from The New School, freelancer tips from the Pulitzer Center, and Bellingcat’s latest guide on tracking the locust swarms affecting East Africa.
The excessive force used against anti-racism protesters around the world, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in the US, reveals the need for more visual forensic skills in newsrooms to hold police to account. GIJN identified 12 tools and 12 methods that proved effective in several recent investigations that exposed harm done by security forces.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a Bellingcat post on what to look out for when reporting on Russian disinformation, how Documented is using WhatsApp to maximize reporting and audience reach, and the Oxford research group’s global effort to gather publicly available data on the coronavirus.
With the extraordinary measures being taken to counter the coronavirus outbreak, the work of investigative journalists scrutinizing abuses of power and exploitation of the vulnerable has never been more vital. Amid the fast-unfolding crisis, where should investigative reporters begin? GIJN asked leading journalists in our community for their advice to investigative reporters around the world.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes tool from Bellingcat on investigating mis/disinformation during the pandemic, the Journalist’s Resource on what you need to know about referencing biomedical research preprints, and Oxford’s new Government Response Tracker, a project which is is collecting and aggregating publicly available data on government responses to COVID-19.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 25 to December 1 finds The New York Times profiling Bellingcat and its use of OSINT techniques; the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Stanford University collaborating to employ artificial intelligence to solve a journalistic problem; and the Science Communication Lab creating a beautiful interactive scientific poster to explore the world’s oceans.
A fugitive convict from the Netherlands has taunted Dutch police with provocative pictures and videos from Iran, playing a game of “catch me if you can” on Instagram. Investigative reporters from Bellingcat were able to reveal the last known location of the criminal with the help of over 60 Twitter users. Here’s how they did that.
Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, was recently named one of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers for 2019. The New Arab recently talked to Higgins about what motivated him to start the website and the role of developing technology in countering disinformation and fake news.
