A small but violent American neo-Nazi group targeted journalists who covered their activities by sending threatening messages to their homes and making fake calls to law enforcement. The harassment and intimidation campaigns were detailed by prosecutors in charges against five men announced last week.
Increasingly, the most ambitious data journalism projects are fueled by collaborations. But these take a lot of planning. Before you embark on a collaboration, check out ProPublica’s playbook.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for journalism. It can help fuel reporting, provide answers, and engage community participation. Jess Ramirez, who works as an engagement reporting fellow at ProPublica, lists the questions you can ask yourself when approaching an engagement project.
When ProPublica Illinois realized that readers had lots of questions about what goes on behind the scenes in their newsroom, its editors invited them to submit questions. They then created a regular series in which reporters take turns answering questions ranging from how anonymous sources are vetted to why journalists compete and sometimes collaborate.
Private records can be just as illuminating as public records. A team of ProPublica Illinois journalists used an unusual private record — a mother’s diary — as the primary material in an investigative narrative that exposed the human impact of a clinical drug trial of children with bipolar disorder.
Journalists and data experts were busy last year attempting to quantify and analyze the criminal justice machine in the United States. Storybench cut through the noise and pulled out these 10 visualizations that best explain the world of criminal justice.
As collaborative journalism becomes a common practice across the media industry, news outlets may need clear documentation to guide their projects. Drafting a memorandum of understanding between collaborating partners can help get everyone on the same page. Stefanie Murray, from the Center for Cooperative Media, gathered six MOU template examples as a guide.
Video games and journalism have had a history — the melding of the two has been less successful in breaking news because of the fast turnaround. However, it has seen more successes in longer investigations that take more time to develop. ProPublica’s Sisi Wei shares the process behind the unit’s gamification of five asylum seekers’ stories.
In 2011, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his brother Omar, two of the most wanted drug kingpins in Mexico, sent members of the criminal syndicate Zetas to murder and disappear entire families in Allende, Mexico. ProPublica’s Ginger Thompson spent two years investigating the role of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in the massacre by gaining the trust of the citizens in the town.
Peter Gosselin at ProPublica has a very different investigative beat: Americans 60 years and older. More specifically: age discrimination and the treatment of older workers. Read how he recently exposed such practices at IBM by leveraging on crowdsourcing.
