Jason Walker has been continuously incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice since 2008, shuffled from unit to unit as the threat to his safety grows. He’s made quite a name for himself inside as a muckraker.
Even for journalists who feel they have a good grasp on crypto technology and economics, covering the beat has been undeniably difficult. With over a decade of articles, videos, and podcasts in the rear-view mirror, now is a great time to reflect on some of the hard-learnt lessons of covering the industry.
Clark Merrefield, from The Journalist’s Resource, shares seven tips on how local journalists can better investigate global trade and its impact on their communities.
Based on an interview with Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, ProPublica’s Craig Silverman shares more essential tips on using it, including how to bulk archive pages, compare changes, and see when elements of a page were archived.
It’s increasingly common for criminals to operate across borders. So investigative reporters also need to know how to identify and investigate people whose names use different alphabets, are formed by unfamiliar conventions, or carry unexpected cultural signals. Read these tips from the OCCRP on best practices for investigating names from outside the English-speaking world.
Eunice Magwambo, Purity Mukami, and Juliet Atellah discuss their work and challenges facing data journalists in their home country of Kenya.
The methods and tools that governments employ to censor and control the internet, and the tools and ways to get around censorship, are a constantly shifting battleground. But there is a set of evergreen best practices and helpful software that are useful.
Investigations on topics as diverse as corruption in sports, illegal “pushbacks” of refugees, and the mass internment of Uyghurs in China were recognized at the IJ4EU Impact Awards, the annual prize of the Investigative Journalism for Europe fund.
Mother Jones is a US outlet known for “smart, fearless journalism.” Monika Bauerlein, its CEO, believes that the kind of investigative journalism they do cannot be funded by traditional commercial means. That’s why it operates as a nonprofit with a heavy focus on reader donations as a revenue stream.
Converting text documents like PDFs to spreadsheets is tedious and expensive work. To see how well AI tool ChatGPT can extract data from PDFs, data journalist Brandon Roberts wrote a Python script to convert two document sets to spreadsheets.
