Brazilian journalist Rafael Soares discusses his favorite reporting methods and tools for investigating police misconduct and abuse of power in Rio de Janeiro.
At a time when newsrooms in Africa are increasingly struggling with shortages of cash and threats to press freedom, the level of investigative journalism that emerged from sub-Saharan Africa in 2021 was remarkable. Here, we share 10 outstanding examples from the region.
In 2021, as the mainstream Indian media continued to transform into the propaganda arm of the ruling party, intrepid digital platforms, mainly from the English-language press, have published some groundbreaking investigative stories and forced the rest of the legacy media to follow their lead.
For inmates in Canada, risk assessments can determine which type of prison they are sent to and their chances of successfully reentering society. But an investigation by The Globe and Mail revealed that these assessments are biased against Indigenous and Black inmates. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from May 24 to 30 also found an interactive project by The New York Times recreating the Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma destroyed in 1921, and data-driven reporting on the influence of big money in soccer, the cost of Italy’s vaccination campaign, and police violence during the recent protests in Colombia.
Colombian media outlet Cerosetenta joined the international collective of journalists and researchers Bellingcat and research agency Forensic Architecture to map police violence during ongoing protests in Colombia and, in a second step, to reconstruct crimes committed in this context.
Four news outlets teamed up to reveal that police dogs bite and maim thousands of people a year, an investigation that was one of five finalists for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize. Here the journalists involved explain how they overcame some of the biggest challenges in reporting the series, and give tips for journalists creating databases for their own investigations.
In this review of the best investigations in Russian and Ukrainian last year, the GIJN Russian team selected the stories that shed light on systemic societal problems in many countries in the region, and those which may inspire journalists in other parts of the world to investigate corruption, money laundering, and other topics using the same investigative methods and tools.
For those unfamiliar with GIJN’s Top 10 Data Journalism roundup, each week we select the most popular data journalism items on Twitter. We do this by using NodeXL to map use of the terms #ddj and data journalism, and then add a bit of old-fashioned human curation to highlight the most compelling items. At the end of the year, we survey the entire period and pick the best from hundreds of tweets. This year — the year of the pandemic — in which the coronavirus dominated public conversation and news headlines, our mapping reflects that reality.
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, in the United States has reignited national unrest just months after the death of George Floyd. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 24 to 30 finds ProPublica documenting police violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and tracking police accountability. The New York Times shows how the process of redlining, or denying mortgage finance to predominantly Black neighborhoods from the 1930s onwards, has resulted in heat disparities among cities, and BuzzFeed News uncovers scores of new internment camps in Xinjiang, China, by analyzing satellite data.
For several weeks after the Yellow Vest protest movement took off in France, most major media outlets failed to report on the violent police repression of protesters. This troubling silence was shattered by the work of David Dufresne, an independent journalist who has become the main chronicler of police violence against Yellow Vests through his ongoing project “Allô Place Beauvau.” He explains how it all started with a tweet.
