When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold last year, editors scrambled to rapidly assemble teams to cover the crisis. Steps ahead were the outlets already dedicated to investigating health as a subject who knew how to source and build networks of public health and vaccine experts, and crucially, how to investigate both the science and the politics behind the pandemic response.
In this GIJN webinar, we bring together two of the authors of the investigation that revealed the names and ranks of officers in the Russian intelligence agency allegedly involved in the poisoning of opposition figure Alexey Navalny and an expert on media ethics. They will discuss the way the investigation was carried out, and how far journalists should go when there is evidence suggesting a crime may have been instigated or committed by government authorities.
For data journalists there is a balancing act between publishing information vital to a story and protecting the person behind that information. Vojtech Sedlak explains the pitfalls and offers tips on how journalists can protect the people that feature in the data without compromising the story.
With traditional media funding models in disarray, membership offers news outlets an alternative way of ensuring their profitability or survival. GIJN spoke to the Membership Puzzle Project’s Ariel Zirulnick about their latest guide and her top tips for organizations considering going down this route.
The democratization of satellite technology and the entry of private companies into the field of space means it’s now possible to have access to high spatio-temporal data at a very minimal cost, leading to interesting investigative stories. In the coming years as the democratization of satellite technology gathers pace, more and more cases that had been undocumented or unreported will see the light of the day.
There is widespread concern that corruption will affect the use of international funds being rushed out in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. GIJN has created a guide to using World Bank documents online to track the use of the Bank’s projects in more than 100 countries.
When a team of student journalists realized that thousands of New Yorkers had died due to COVID-19 but had been left out of the obituary pages, they teamed up to create Missing Them, an ambitious collaborative journalism project working to memorialize everyone that died due to COVID-19 in one of the hardest-hit cities in America.
With the help of two former students, Brazilian data journalist Marcelo Soares collected data showing that deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil’s cities were far higher than authorities claimed. Check out how he did it.
In a filing to the Supreme Court in the United States, a raft of media organizations including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Associated Press, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Daily Beast, Dow Jones, VICE ,and The Washington Post, have argued that the interpretation of the country’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act needs to be narrowed to avoid “serious constitutional concerns.” In the document, which can be read in full here, the organizations argue that an interpretation of the law by the court of appeals “chills ordinary journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment.”
The investigative team behind a story in The Washington Post that focused on two military helicopters that roared over demonstrators in Washington, DC on June 1 shared the exploratory scripts used to analyze and visualize flight data for the aircraft which monitored protesters in the city that day.
