Governments have already spent more than 40 billion dollars to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, so how can journalists investigate how the money is being used and who is getting the contracts? GIJN’s latest webinar, Tracking Billions in COVID-19 Contracts, focuses on how to investigate the contracting process, what red flags to look out for and how to find out where the money is going.
The devastating consequences of the coronavirus pandemic can get lost in the mass of numbers presented. Journalists are working hard to humanize the data. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 18 to 24 finds The New York Times with a moving tribute to lives lost to COVID-19; Schema Design, the Google News Initiative, and Axios visualizing coronavirus-related Google searches; and The Atlantic revealing the US CDC conflated results of two types of coronavirus tests.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Katherine Eban, who has won awards for her work on gun trafficking, pharmaceutical counterfeits, and CIA interrogations. She described some of the low-tech tools and old-school strategies that have helped her break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around the world, official death tolls from the pandemic have been compromised by data lags, lack of testing, and sometimes deliberate distortions, leading to significant undercounts. In response, investigative reporters are using new tools and creative approaches to provide a clearer picture of direct and indirect deaths associated with the pandemic, and to hold governments accountable for inadequate responses.
Reporting on the ground and interviewing people face-to-face have become high-risk activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are ways to continue investigative work using your computer and cutting-edge online techniques – critical skills at all times. Join us for this GIJN webinar, Online Research with open source sleuth Paul Myers, part of GIJN’s series Investigating the Pandemic.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes Abraji’s report on the investigation into the murder of journalist Léo Veras, a guide to decoding Chinese state propaganda on Twitter, a study into bot-generated coronavirus activity on Twitter, and Hostwriter’s tool to help connect editors to local journalists worldwide.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen heated debate on whether to best solve the health crisis through “herd immunity” — the indirect protection that occurs when much of a population becomes immune to infection. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 11 to 17 finds FiveThirtyEight creating a simulation calculator which shows that getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t quite that simple; The Marshall Project tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths in prisons across America; the BBC’s Media Show highlighting data journalists as the media’s latest rock stars; and Istories and MediaZona examining elder abuse in Russia, which experts fear may worsen during the pandemic with so many people staying home.
Africa’s investigative journalists are playing a critical role in unpacking the continent’s expanding pandemic and have already snapped some governments out of their early complacency on COVID-19 preparedness. However, amid warnings about the potential impact of the virus on the continent’s 1.1 billion citizens, four leading African journalists shared strategies for coverage in this critical time in a webinar attended by reporters from 57 countries.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes Meduza’s report on Russian editor Roman Badanin’s Pulitzer-charged rant against The New York Times, ProPublica’s sober response to the “Plandemic” viral video, and Poynter’s point about an ethics policy that includes guidelines for pre-publication source review.
This webinar on COVID-19 Supply Chains, the ninth in GIJN’s series Investigating the Pandemic, focuses on how to follow vital products from their origin to where they are needed. Two extraordinary investigative journalists will share their strategies and tips on how to follow the supply chain trail, and explain why some of the most vulnerable people in society are at risk.
