More and more power in the hands of President Aleksandar Vučić, mainstream press too friendly with power, growing difficulties for independent journalism. This is what Serbia’s media looks like today, according to Stevan Dojčinović, the editor-in-chief of the country’s KRIK investigative group.
It’s been an exciting year of great content and record traffic on GIJN. What follows is a curated list we’ve put together of the top pieces published on gijn.org in 2018 — from the deep web and deep fakes to design thinking and dataviz. See you next year!
It’s been a great year for data journalism and visualizations. GIJN’s Top 10 #ddj series captured snapshots of what’s popular on Twitter among the global data journalism community for 46 weeks in 2018. For this edition, we asked NodeXL to map 2018’s most popular #ddj tweets from January 1 to December 11 and the results are in. This year’s most popular tweets include @FinancialTimes’ ever-popular Visual Vocabulary chart, @Google’s Dataset Search, @hnrklndbrg’s eclectic visualizations, and @SZ’s analysis of Germany’s parliamentarians using laughter as a debate weapon.
It’s not difficult to figure out if your story is understandable — if your grandmother can’t understand it, you have failed. At this summer’s MezhyhiryaFest, the annual investigative journalism festival in Kyiv, the OCCRP’s Ilya Lozovsky offered up some tips to help investigative journalists tell better stories. GIJN’s Olga Simanovych pulled them together.
A suspect in the brutal rape and murder of a Bulgarian journalist has been apprehended. But questions remain about whether Viktoria Marinova’s coverage of a procurement scandal was the real reason for her killing.
When it comes to doing investigations using online tools, there is no one tool that will answer all of your questions. Instead you’ll most likely need to build slowly towards the answer using a jumble of jigsaw pieces — a name here, a connection there. The good news is that there are dozens of tools that can be used to find the pieces to your puzzle. GIJN’s Alastair Otter has pulled together tools that can be used to help build a profile of someone — or their business.
Miranda Patrucic has led numerous cross-border investigations and successfully uncovered intricate money laundering networks, billion-dollar bribes and the murky business dealings of oligarchs in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. She spoke with GIJN on how she does it.
Investigative journalism is dangerous because it exposes those in power. In the past six months, it has taken the lives of two journalists working within the EU’s borders. Forbidden Stories is showing its strength in picking up where the slain journalists left off.
As protests grip Slovakia in the wake of the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and harassment of his colleague Pavla Holcova, the Global Reporting Centre’s Peter W. Klein writes this open letter to the Prime Minister of Slovakia urging him to respect press freedom and the rights of Holcova and all the journalists who are doing their jobs.
There are hundreds of stories in business registries and court documents around the world just waiting for a journalist to uncover them. Emmanuel Freudenthal shares his five tips on finding open-source secrets in Africa with GIJN — helpful guidelines which can be used around the world.
