At the plenary session of GIJC21, an all-star team of five watchdog editors defined the front lines of a battle among investigative journalists for both democratic ideals and the survival of an independent press. The conference brings together 1,800 editors, reporters, and civil society leaders from 148 countries for an online, five-day event.
At first glance, the COVID-19 story appears overwhelming at every professional and personal level for individual reporters, from psychological trauma and shelved investigations to the health risks to their families. But experts say planning and daily habits can make the work manageable — and that the work itself, and the sense of making a difference, represents a coping strength that reporters can exploit.
GIJN asked investigative journalists around the world to look ahead at what’s in store for 2020. Here are the trends, key forces, and challenges they expect will affect investigative and data journalism in the coming year, as well as the new skills and approaches we should be thinking about.
The ever-evolving threats to media freedom and independence worldwide is challenging journalism to redefine itself and find ways to survive. Open Society Foundations’ Maria Teresa Ronderos talks about how journalism needs to reinvent itself and maintain its relevance in today’s society.
The recently published paper, Bridging the Gap, Rebuilding Citizen Trust in Media, probably offers the most complete list of the current projects around media and trust. But those interviewed for the project viewed trust — and the way publications can gain and sustain it — differently. However, all initiatives seem to rely on two principles to optimize trust: transparency and participation.
From time immemorial, media, both good and bad, have published false official “truths” dictated by authoritarian governments and propaganda by private interests. Now, what is even more a threat to journalism is the increasing shady interests committed to news forgery. There are no easy solutions but journalism is fighting back with new fact-checking initiatives, new media alliances and the creation of new platforms to check sources.
This is a list of winning stories drawn from 16 major global or regional journalism awards given in 2016, which hopefully might serve as a source of inspiration for you to find original stories, to innovate in how to tell them, or to find a thread to develop a fresh angle. Take heart that the quality of work by solo reporters or fledgling investigative teams can sometimes stand out as much as that of huge media outlets.
From a media outlet that pays citizens to report from remote areas of Kenya to a portal that uses humor as its main strategy to inform Russians, journalism faces different challenges in different cultural and social contexts. Creativity, however, seems to be a common skill that media entrepreneurs shared in addressing their problems at the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) on Saturday, April 16.
