Data journalism in the Middle East has been driven by organizations that have produced collaborations and projects that combine innovative techniques with nuanced local knowledge.
The Yemen-raised investigative journalist — who has covered Iraq’s secret sex trade, the Yemen war, and the Sanaa funeral bombing — shares insights from working on a difficult beat.
Open source tools like the Yemeni Archive have allowed investigative journalists to track the impact of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in the Yemen civil war as well as identify Western allies’ role in possible war crimes or abuses.
As part of the GIJN Editor’s Pick series for 2019, here are some of the best works of investigative journalism from the MENA region, as selected by GIJN’s Arabic Editor Majdolin Hasan.
Yemen has been embroiled in civil war for decades. But its current conflict has left 100,000 dead, with hundreds of thousands more displaced. While the war has received limited coverage by most international and mainstream media outlets, during 2018 and 2019 a team of Associated Press journalists spent months investigating Yemen’s Dirty War. Maggie Michael, Nariman El-Mofty, and Maad al-Zekri won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. GIJN’s Majdolin Hasan spoke with Michael about how they did it.
Yemeni journalist Fuad Rajeh, who is based in Jordan, decided to expose threats to freedom of expression in his country by looking into the cases of two activists and two journalists who faced online threats — and, in one case, ended up being killed — for speaking their minds on social media. Here’s how he did it.
In 2007, Jordan became the first country in the Middle East to enact freedom of information laws — and Musab Al-Shawabkeh is the award-winning journalist who has been taking full advantage of it.
More than 320 journalists from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf met in Amman in early December for the 7th annual Forum for Arab investigative journalists, the largest ever. The ARIJ annual meeting has become the main networking forum for investigative journalists across the Arab world. In spite of an increasingly hostile media environment, many Arab journalists are still engaged in in-depth reporting, pushing against the narrowing borders of free reporting, and raising standards for documentation.
