Databases Investigative Techniques
Guide to Investigating Digital Ad Libraries
Digital investigations expert Craig Silverman offers a short guide to using digital ad libraries to dig through online influence efforts.
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Reporting Tools & Tips
Introducing FBarchive: A New, Searchable Repository of Facebook Whistleblower Documents
The new, searchable database FBarchive is designed to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers better understand and investigate decisions made at Meta about some of the most influential social media platforms across the globe.
News & Analysis Reporting Tools & Tips
Experts Discuss Investigating Social Media Companies Like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok
Investigative journalists intending to cover social media and its societial effects must understand the intricacies of the companies that drive them, and think critically about novel angles of coverage.
News & Analysis
What Happens to Journalism When Social Media Sites Lose Their Relevance?
A panel at the 2023 International Journalism Festival in Perugia explored the implications for journalism of Twitter “dying” and Facebook’s pivot away from news.
Reporting Tools & Tips
New Investigative Tools for Monitoring Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are among the most difficult sites to scrape for data across the internet. A recent session at NICAR23 unveiled several dynamic new tools — including Junkipedia, a possible CrowdTangle replacement — that can perform a wealth of social media monitoring tasks, from tracking down who is behind harmful ads to identifying conspiracy groups or influencers spreading disinformation.
Resource
Editor’s Pick: 2022’s Best Investigative Stories in India
GIJN’s Hindi editor offers his picks for the best investigative journalism stories from India during 2022.
Data Journalism News & Analysis
Data Journalism Top 10: Child Detentions at US Border, Slave Journeys, Aztec Iconography, Facebook’s ‘Broken Promises’
This week, our DDJ Top 10 looks at The Marshall Project’s analysis of child detention at the US border, the Baltimore Banner’s in-depth story on the city’s vacant housing crisis. Plus, we dive into stories using historical data to investigate how slavery broke apart families, a flight analysis on the new destinations of the Russian elite, and a look at Facebook’s “broken promises.”
Data Journalism
Data Journalism Top 10: Tonga’s Volcano, US Congress & Slavery, Mapping Ukraine, British Teeth
Many of the lawmakers who made up the historical ranks of the United States Congress had a personal relationship with slavery with more than 1,700 being slaveowners, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Our weekly NodeXL curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter also features a visualization of the size of the Tonga eruption, an analysis of how Twitter is being used ahead of a high-stakes election in the Philippines, and a critique of some of the maps used to illustrate the situation on the Russia-Ukraine border amid fears of a military incursion.
News & Analysis Sustainability
Saving Journalism, Part One: Finding the Right Funding
In this excerpt from Anya Schiffrin’s latest report on the state of sustainability of journalism, the author discusses how government funding can throw the profession a lifeline in an era where philanthropic efforts to support the press are struggling and Big Tech is increasingly seen as a competitor instead of a platform for news organizations.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Tips for Mining Social Media Platforms with Henk van Ess
Open source reporting expert Henk van Ess has dozens of tricks to find elusive social media information through indirect means, as well as a search app he created. In a recent GIJN webinar on “Investigating Social Media,” Van Ess shared several of these tips.