Despite challenging circumstances, international news outlets still broke major political stories and local journalists continued to push boundaries.
Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital, but it is also a place with the dubious reputation of being one of the most unlivable cities in the world. These challenges provide fertile ground for investigative reporting and some of the country’s best stories.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ World Press Freedom Day, GIJN shares some experiences of investigative journalists facing the biggest challenges and threats around the world.
GIJN’s Urdu editor, Amer Ghani, offers her editor’s picks for the best investigative reporting from Pakistan in 2022.
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.
Attacks on reporters and a downward trend in transparency in Pakistan in recent years have had a notable impact on the press climate, but despite this, journalists are using the resources available to them to continue investigating. Using traditional shoe-leather reporting and relying on communities to access information and even, at times, for data, this year journalists have dug into rape statistics, alleged police brutality, and human smuggling, alongside other stories.
Sujag, a long-form digital investigative journalism platform in Pakistan, is committed to highlighting voices from the margins. With recent stories on child marriage, acid attacks, and why women from poor communities are finding it so difficult to access coronavirus vaccinations, Sujag’s editors proudly say their journalistic ethos prioritizes “siding with the marginalized” over neutrality.
What happens to the clothes we donate to charity? Or the clothes we buy online, try on, and then return? Two Finnish journalists used tracking devices in order to investigate these post-consumer supply chains, finding that many items make their way on a complex journey to Africa and the Middle East before sometimes ending up in landfill.
In this week’s Friday 5, where we round up key reads from around the world in English, one journalist from Zimbabwe and another from Pakistan were abducted and detained, the Reuters Institute report on Race and Leadership in the News Media was released, and NPR’s Terry Gross and The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro offered up some tips on interviewing.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Katherine Eban, who has won awards for her work on gun trafficking, pharmaceutical counterfeits, and CIA interrogations. She described some of the low-tech tools and old-school strategies that have helped her break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic.
