Due to her tenacity in scrutinizing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s family’s transactions, reporter Juliana Dal Piva is a constant target of attack by the president’s supporters. Here, she describes the security measures, collaboration, and persistence needed to keep the spotlight on autocrats in repressive environments.
Data reporter Melissa Lewis is interviewed about a recent podcast for Reveal, which investigated what happens when local residents call police on unhoused people in their neighborhood, analyzing arrest data across six major US West Coast cities with large homeless populations.
While there is no single service that meets all of our data privacy needs, here two experts unpack security and privacy practices for popular transcription services, weigh when journalists should use remote transcription services, and explore how to minimize risk when working with sensitive audio.
Among the most frequently used forms of legal coercion against investigative journalists are SLAPPs (“strategic litigation against public participation”), which aim to intimidate reporters into abandoning their investigations. The practice of abusing legal systems by those in power to silence critics has reached global proportions. Its damage is far-reaching and curbing it is an imperative for democracy and maintaining peace.
In this edition of GIJN Toolbox, we profile three brand new — or newly expanded — tools to dig into financial secrecy and hidden gains from corruption or crime. Our list includes a user-friendly database to search for sanctions and conflict-of-interest red flags, a site that uses an algorithm to detect hidden bank accounts, and a newly expanded database on the true owners of offshore companies.
If you’re a word puzzle addict and active on Twitter, you’ll have come across the latest craze — Wordle. Al Jazeera Labs analyzed the puzzle’s word bank to give tips on how to tackle the game strategically. Our weekly NodeXL curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter also features an analysis of shopping habits during the pandemic, an examination of vaccination rates among elite athletes, details on the scandal shaking UK politics, and an interactive mini-golf game illustrating how gerrymandering — the manipulation of electoral boundaries — plays out in various US states.
Investigative journalists face extraordinary challenges, with legal and physical threats, growing surveillance, online trolls, and a financial model that’s all but collapsed. Now add to that a global pandemic and a backlash against democracy and independent media, and you can see our field is under tremendous pressure.
In this second excerpt from a report on the state of sustainability of journalism, the author discusses the African press, how the coronavirus pandemic impacted reporting in the region, and the proposals to ensure the media not only survives, but thrives, in the future.
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.
Investigative journalists went all out last year in covering surveillance issues. From a deep-dive into the dark side of pandemic tech in Singapore’s techno-utopia to an in-depth look at how schools are spending thousands on unreliable “aggression detectors” in the name of student safety, global reporters have been holding Big Tech accountable for its role in fueling authoritarianism worldwide.
