Reporter Patryk Szczepaniak has gone undercover as a Polish worker in the Netherlands, hired himself out as an Uber driver, and frequented Warsaw’s strip clubs, all in pursuit of a good story. It was useful preparation for his investigation into a slaughterhouse in Poland.
In US cities, the local news ecosystem is suffering from a long list of ailments. But in Colorado, hundreds of people — journalists, professors, students, business folk, local foundations, and more — have stepped up to do something about it. And they have a few ideas for where to start.
Hackastory has lined up its favorite digital stories of the year so far, from the Guardian’s interactive showing what the internet looks like from different parts of the world to a Dutch game that puts you in the middle of war-torn Mosul.
The African Investigative Publishing Collective recently conducted a multi-part investigation into the associates that handle business for African kleptocrats. Evelyn Groenink shares how the story took form and the massive challenges faced by reporters spread across multiple countries.
The Wall Street Journal’s graphic-heavy series “The Price of Climate” took an ambitious look at how financial and economic markers reflect present and future thinking about the climate. One of the editors that worked on it says it was a response to the fact “that a lot of climate change stories feel and look the same.” Here’s how they did it.
OpenCorporates is a site that shares information on more than 100 million corporate entities around the world as open data. With their latest project on German companies, OpenCorporates added data on more than 5 million companies. Here’s how they pulled it off.
In Russia, veteran human rights activist Leonid Agafonov and journalist Natalia Donskova have teamed up to create a series of investigative reports on life for women behind bars. The project covers taboo topics, spanning health issues like the treatment of cancer patients and childbirth in prison to sexual abuse and LGBT relationships.
The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit uses social media and open-source tools to create powerful video reports. Here’s how they collected virtual breadcrumbs to retrace the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed Jamal Khashoggi.
The idea of tapping audience knowledge gets to one of the core elements of beat reporting: finding people who know and care about subjects and drawing on that input to inform and improve journalism.
Vsquare publishes longform investigative journalism stories in English on Central Eastern Europe, focusing on the Visegrád region that includes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
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.
Satellite imagery has become an indispensable tool in investigative journalism for fact-finding, gauging the impact of a particular situation and figuring out the exact details. Here’s a round-up of of some major stories which satellite imagery helped uncover.
On November 27, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Central European Time, five separate media organizations broke similar stories on a United Nations cover-up of the murders of their own staff. It took nothing less than the “radical sharing” of information between these rival platforms to expose a global conspiracy of silence.
The documentary “Trafficked in America” investigates a labor trafficking scheme targeting Guatemalan teenagers who were smuggled into the United States and forced to work long hours at an egg farm to pay off their smuggling debts. In an interview with Journalist’s Resource, the film’s authors offer insights into the investigative reporting process and the importance of cultural competency in doing high-quality journalism.
A fugitive convict from the Netherlands has taunted Dutch police with provocative pictures and videos from Iran, playing a game of “catch me if you can” on Instagram. Investigative reporters from Bellingcat were able to reveal the last known location of the criminal with the help of over 60 Twitter users. Here’s how they did that.
Reporters at a regional newspaper in Bangladesh, Gramer Kagoj, heard from local villagers that a maternity allowance scheme for poor mothers was being abused by women who weren’t pregnant. With guidance from an expert, they applied statistical survey methods to interview 400 beneficiaries, and their investigation took a different turn — revealing a deeper, systemic problem.
The German nonprofit news site Correctiv wanted to cover important issues — such as property ownership in German cities — that didn’t have accessible public data. So it created CrowdNewsroom, a platform that enables it to empower readers to contribute to investigations.
There are no chemical formulas, no “Breaking Bad” hazmat suits, no gadgets to measure humidity and atmospheric pressure. Juan Ignacio Sixto takes us on a world tour of News Labs, spaces that are meant to foster innovation within newsrooms.
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.
Norway’s VG set out to investigate the story of an Israeli conman and ended up capturing — and engaging — 2 million readers around the world in a longform story told in less than 1,000 words.
Watchdog workshops can be a good way for media organizations to get a bit of help with investigations — but also, crucially, they foster engagement. Here’s how Detroit’s Detour brought readers together to investigate bulk buyers in a local tax auction.
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.
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.
In the hot summer of 2018, Hungary’s Atlatszo tracked two luxury vehicles – a private plane and a yacht – that the Hungarian government elite, including Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his closest allies, used to travel to business meetings, football games and vacations abroad. Here’s how they did it.
The Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are showing rigorous development in investigative reporting, which has grown in popularity since the Russian invasion into Ukraine. Here’s an overview of the region’s most popular and innovative investigative projects.
Particularly for media organizations committed to engaging those people “formerly known as the audience,” campaigns are a great way to connect with and build a meaningful relationship with communities, writes The Bristol Cable co-founder Adam Cantwell-Corn.
A new report highlights the obstacles to survival for media startups in the Global South, and checks in on the progress of two dozen of them to see how they’ve fared over the past three years. It includes advice from some of these outlets’ editors for those thinking of launching their own startups. A recurring theme: Before you do anything else, secure a couple years’ worth of funding.
For the 50th anniversary of the riots that rocked Washington, DC after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Washington Post mapped the extent of the rioting throughout the city thanks to data compiled from declassified Secret Service reports and archival city planning documents.
