Despite numerous press freedom threats, Pakistani journalists continue to publish high-impact investigations — and offer lessons for reporters navigating restrictive environments worldwide.
Our annual best-of list features stories on Pakistan’s sanitary workers, links between politicians and sugar mills, and the endless construction of a Balochistan road.
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.
