Many autocracy-displaced media have managed to navigate surviving outside their home country with varying degrees of success. In a series of interviews with GIJN, exiled news leaders from around the world offer some best practices and lessons learned from their own experiences.
In an era when an investigative reporter’s contacts are often all stored on their smartphone or in the cloud, digital security best practices are paramount to protect your sources.
There is no way for investigative journalists to completely eliminate the risk of being tracked through metadata, but in an interview with Reporters Without Borders, technology expert Benjamin Finn offers a series of tips on how to protect both your sources and yourself.
GIJN has partnered with the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism and the Freedom of the Press Foundation to offer a unique safety and security training program specifically tailored for investigative journalists and others in watchdog newsrooms. It will be delivered online through hands-on practical training sessions with some of the world’s leading journalism safety trainers.
Increasingly, investigative journalists are being hacked, doxxed, harassed, and assaulted by external threats, so GIJN — with generous support from the Ford Foundation — is proud to launch a first-of-its-kind safety guide for newsrooms at GIJC21: the Journalist Security Assessment Tool (JSAT).
GIJN is publishing a new business tools guide focused on helping news outlets solve their administrative needs. Written by Talya Cooper and illustrated by Chafiq Faiz, the guide includes useful software and applications – many of which are free – for small newsrooms. Tools included cover administration, management, communication, file sharing, accounting, SEO, audience engagement, audiovisual, content management, subscriber management, design and data visualization, social media and email marketing, site security, and password management.
The practice of independent journalism is facing enormous challenges, ranging from authoritarian regimes implementing regressive laws that stifle speech to journalists being unable to make a living from their work. In order to meet those challenges, journalists can benefit from understanding the protections provided by international law.
Award-winning author Jessica Goudeau, who won the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for best American nonfiction writing from the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, discusses the need to tell stories of displaced people in fresh ways, starting with empathy.
The search of a journalist’s phone in detention exemplifies the threat digital forensics technologies pose to privacy and press freedom around the world. In Botswana, journalists recount the frightening state of government surveillance, powered by international technology companies.
Being really good at getting people to tell you government secrets — the key to career success as a national security reporter — now brings great danger to a reporter’s sources.
