An interview with Alexa Vélez, managing editor of Mongabay Latam and the lead coordinator of the Stained by Oil investigative series on oil spills and corporate impunity in the Amazon region.
While food is often covered from a cultural lens, it is increasingly garnering the attention of investigative journalists, who are bringing new scrutiny to the environmental impacts of supply chains, labor conditions, and political influence linked to food.
Our weekly NodeXL curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter features several climate change-related stories: snowless Winter Olympics, a look at the carbon footprint of popular food, how the world’s largest beef producer is fueling deforestation in the Amazon, and a Climate Promise Detector project reviewing the stance of presidential candidates on climate change in Costa Rica.
The Turkish press is enduring a period when the most basic journalism practices are hindered due to the state of emergency, the pandemic, and other issues. Despite this, GIJN Turkish found several praiseworthy stories produced by independent journalists this past year. Here we highlight eight stories chosen for their significance, public interest, their use of investigative tools, data sources and techniques, and their commitment to social accountability.
In a GIJC21 session on using maps and satellite imagery for investigations, three experts explained their approaches to analyzing satellite and drone images, and using open source tools. One of the innovative techniques described led to a Pulitzer Prize this year — for exposing China’s network of Muslim detention centers — while another exposed government deception about fires in the Amazon, and a third literally put a vulnerable community in Africa on the map.
Networks of business interests, government officials, and criminal groups run illegal operations that harm the environment in multiple ways. They drive worldwide illegal trafficking in wildlife and seafood, timber, minerals, hazardous waste, and toxic chemicals. Such environmental crimes are sometimes connected with other criminal activity, such as drug trafficking and money laundering.
In March 2020, environmental journalist Helena Carpio, leaned out of her window to see Caracas filled with smoke. Something was burning, but no one knew where and there was no official news on what was happening. She started to investigate, and the resulting project analyzed two decades of satellite data on hotspots to explore the when, where, and why of forest fires in Venezuela and across Latin America.
Our NodeXL mapping from July 19 to 25, which tracks the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter each week, found imaginative data-driven coverage of the Olympics by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets. In this edition, we also feature a piece by Reuters Graphics on how a Chinese lake has been decimated by sand mining, a cross-border investigation into the billion Euro business of elder care, and a deep dive into TikTok’s secretive algorithm by The Wall Street Journal.
For our “My Favorite Tools” series, we spoke with Brazilian journalist Gustavo Faleiros, editor of environmental investigations at the Pulitzer Center where he leads the Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN), about mapping deforestation and using data to chart what is happening in global forests.
Satellite are being used by journalists to report on conflicts, climate change, refugees, forest fires, illegal mining, oil spills, deforestation, slavery and many other topics. GIJN’s resource page provides official sources for free satellite images and links to experts who can advise on finding images, using them, handling technical issues and more.
