It is vital for journalists to shield their sources, and at a dedicated workshop at GIJC21, two security experts gave practical examples of how reporters can reach out to sources in a way that protects the individuals and wins trust for both journalists and their organization.
After more than a year of living with a pandemic that shut down the world, lockdowns are beginning to lift for many across the globe. But for many journalists – a number of whom are already struggling with traumas of their own in a beleaguered industry known for its hostile and pressure-cooker environments – concerns are mounting about an impending mental health crisis brought on by a year of mass isolation, uncertainty, and endless dread.
No law enforcement agency announced any criminal investigation into the attempted murder of Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, after he was poisoned with a chemical weapon in Russia last year. Instead, investigative journalists stepped forward. In a GIJN webinar, journalists from Bellingcat and Russia’s The Insider explained how, and why, they used black market data to help expose the true culprits behind that attack.
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.
In this week’s Friday 5, where we round up key reads from around the world in English, Journalism.co.uk lines up six new podcasts for journalists, the Guardian rings in on the needs of the Instagram news generation, and the Online News Association takes a look at the ethics of immersive storytelling.
In interviews with GIJN, six leading photojournalists from around the world described six very different approaches for dealing with the safety, access, and technical challenges of shooting the pandemic. From using bulletproof vests and embedding strategies to projected images and screenshots of Zoom meetings, these photographers detailed some of the creative thinking needed to document a world in lockdown.
If current trends continue, the old debate about whether journalists can ever be truly objective may fade away, say Mark Lee Hunter and Luk N. Van Wassenhove. Objectivity, they argue, is morphing into a radically new form.
Fraudulent, plagiarized or otherwise shoddy research is an increasing problem across all scientific disciplines — particularly in China — and can catch like wildfire. Australian Professor Jennifer Byrne and her French colleague Cyril Labbé, as well as projects like Retraction Watch, are fighting back.
Given all the trash, half-truths and outright lies published on digital media, people are placing a higher value on media that verify information and demonstrate high ethical standards. Paul Steiger, founder and executive chairman of ProPublica, tells of a major donor to his online publication who “absolutely hated” an investigative story that they had published about a group “near and dear to the donor’s heart”. Steiger told the donor that the information was verified, and the story was fair. “We will just have to agree to disagree,” he told the donor.
Web scraping is a way to extract information presented on websites. As I explained it in the first installment of this article, web scraping is used by many companies. It’s also a great tool for reporters who know how to code, since more and more public institutions publish their data on their websites.
With web scrapers, which are also called “bots,” it’s possible to gather large amounts of data for stories. But what are the ethical rules that reporters have to follow while web scraping?
