The roots of today’s increasingly captured media in India lie deep and go back a couple of decades to the seemingly innocuous newspaper business practices of India’s largest media company, Bennett Coleman & Company, founded in 1838. The resulting, industry-wide cap on newspaper subscription prices in India has, over time, created a very unhealthy, near 100-percent dependence on advertising.
Local reporters have been finding innovative ways to report on the death and devastation caused by India’s devastating second wave of the coronavirus – even as the authorities tried to downplay the severity of the crisis. Bhavya Dore speaks to reporters who staked out the banks of the river Ganges and stationed themselves outside morgues and hospitals to investigate what was really happening.
Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 7 to 13, which tracks the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter each week, focused in on this major investigation by ProPublica, which offers an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of US billionaires. In this edition, we also feature a detailed look at India’s faltering vaccination campaign, a data project exploring Argentina’s news deserts, and an investigation of The Gambia’s water paradox.
Four of the world’s most influential technology companies are based on the US West Coast. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have had an enormous impact on our daily lives. But how did Big Tech get so big? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from April 19 to April 25 found a piece by The Washington Post showing how the success of these behemoths has been fueled by hundreds of acquisitions of smaller companies over the past decade. In this edition, we also feature an investigation into faulty vaccine data publicized by the Indian government, a list of the world’s top 1,000 climate scientists by Reuters, and a look at Europe’s growing rail network.
At GIJN we’re fortunate to come across various books and reports on the state of the news media and great investigative reporting. Here are 12 of the more interesting recent volumes we’ve found that investigative journalists might want to pick up in 2021, as well as a novel written by an investigative reporter for a little light relief.
While female muckrakers are breaking important stories around the world, the obstacles they face in and out of newsrooms can be gender-based, and there are too few networks and resources catering to these issues. So this International Women’s Day GIJN is re-launching an updated version of its guide, “Resources for Women Journalists.”
In this GIJN webinar, we bring together four senior journalists who have investigated the extremist far-right in different parts of the world. They will offer tips and tools on how to track and report on violent organizations and individuals in different contexts, and give guidance on safety.
Secularism in the world’s largest democracy is threatened by a Hindu-nationalist movement that takes pages from the playbooks of authoritarian leaders around the world. In this longread, journalist Maddy Crowell shares the first-hand story of one New Delhi-based magazine that is trying to protect democracy in India when other news outlets fail to hold power to account.
In a GIJN webinar three journalists who have experience reporting on the #MeToo movement and sexual abuse told reporters how to investigate an often-hidden crime. Among their tips are preparing interviewees for the process, investigating the story doggedly, and using alternative forms of evidence to verify your story. Read these and other tips for investigating sexual abuse allegations in GIJN’s latest tipsheet.
At least 462 journalists have died from COVID-19, from 56 countries — with Latin American countries accounting for more than half this grim tally and a recent surge striking India and Bangladesh. One NGO tracking these deaths told GIJN that most journalists who died in the pandemic since October 1 were under the age of 60.
