In this latest GIJN Toolbox, we highlight three new powerful but easy-to-use investigative tools that have been specifically developed with the needs of data and investigative journalists in mind.
Knowing how to use spreadsheets is a crucial skill, as it allows you to find potential stories in large amounts of data and to think critically about how to use it.
Brazilian journalist Rafael Soares discusses his favorite reporting methods and tools for investigating police misconduct and abuse of power in Rio de Janeiro.
In this edition of GIJN Toolbox, we examine the latest advancements from the IRE22 conference on data extraction and optical character recognition (OCR) tools for turning unwieldy documents into searchable spreadsheets.
To share best practices and other lessons learned from our most recent global conference, GIJC21, we are releasing a series of videos from the event’s many seminars, panels, and workshops. The second installment focuses on how investigative reporters can better utilize data tools and visualization techniques.
Whether investigating human rights abuses, money laundering, or even public officials’ conflicts of interests, reporters are increasingly developing their own databases for investigative projects. Here are a series of tips drawn from the experiences of a number of international journalists and from the author’s personal experience gathering and creating data sets for investigative stories.
Open source investigation teams around the world sprang into action as they watched a pro-Trump mob violently storm the US Capitol on January 6. A senior investigator with Bellingcat told GIJN how his team was able to scrape and preserve hundreds of social media videos from the attack, and shared ten tips on how any reporter can grab visual evidence during breaking news events.
In an extract from his book Finding Stories with Spreadsheets Paul Bradshaw explains how to use basic cleaning functions in spreadsheets to make it easier to combine data, including a case study where the same functions were used to speed up a research process for a story.
