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.
GIJN social media editor Holly Pate looked into best practices for increasing impact and audience engagement of investigative stories, gathering real-life examples from journalism sites around the world.
A recent Reuters Institute webinar dug into a highly embarrassing, retracted investigation by India’s The Wire and also laid out best practices for investigative newsrooms to avoid both deliberate and unintentional source errors.
Reporters at the OCCRP are used to cataloging shell companies and trawling through bank records in search of assets. But when they received a tip-off about show jumping horses linked to the oligarchs, they decided to dig into the subject as part of the Russian Asset Tracker project.
At first glance, public procurement may not seem like the most Instagrammable subject. But what it lacks in visual appeal, it makes up for in scandal. So when journalist Jamilya Maricheva started posting stories about contracts and procurement in Kazakhstan, she soon amassed thousands of followers.
Outriders, the Polish journalism nonprofit, decided to postpone their membership launch and begin with a newsletter-first editorial strategy, boosted by Instagram influencers, to grow their audience and build a strong foundation for membership. And it’s working.
Despite its overt political objectives, the research section of FBK — an anti-corruption nonprofit founded by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny — has emerged as a potent investigative team that recently attracted 110 million YouTube views for a video that exposed massive corruption at a Black Sea palace. FBK’s head of investigations told GIJN about the methods the team uses for these investigations, and what professional journalists can learn from their approach.
In a recent GIJN webinar, open source reporting expert Henk van Ess shared several online search tricks. But he explains that these work-arounds are merely tools for a new approach to online research that he calls “thinking visual,” which invites reporters to think of keywords like a search engine, rather than a person.
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 a GIJN masterclass webinar presented to 700 journalists from 94 countries, BBC internet research expert Paul Myers described the open source tools, syntax tricks, and search techniques that can help unearth elusive content, images, and social media posts. Myers cited searches for information on COVID-19 in numerous examples, and stressed the need for logical thought in order to unlock the power of advanced search tools.
