As VICE weathers through cutbacks, VICE Arabia is betting on investigative journalism to set it apart from the competition in Arabic-speaking countries. Its team’s first big scoop exposed a smuggling network that exhumed corpses to sell them to medical students, who needed them for their studies. VICE Arabia’s senior editor tells GIJN how they uncovered the story.
When Washington, DC-based journalist Scilla Alecci began investigating a story that would later become part of the Implant Files, she hit a brick wall: Hospitals in India wouldn’t answer her phone calls. So she took the advice of an Indian colleague and booked a flight over. Together, they started knocking on doors all over the country, leading them to unexpected discoveries.
After a landmark New Jersey supreme court ruling made police use-of-force reports fully available to the public, NJ Advance Media decided to dig in. They fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the reports and create the United States’ most comprehensive statewide database on this issue.
Looking for a data journalist working in Spanish? Periodistas de Datos aggregates up-to-date information on data journalists working across Spain and Latin America. The platform’s creators explained to Maria Crosas Batista how they built it.
With the increase in eyewitness media, open source investigators are usually exposed to high amounts of graphic footage and this can cause mental distress if left unchecked. Hannah Ellis, research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, shares a guide to prevent excessive secondary trauma and how to address the symptoms.
Chinese journalists have broken stories this year on medical abuses, #MeToo and the environment, leading to government prosecution, consumer uproar and boycott, and disciplinary actions. Here are some of the best investigative journalism work in China in 2018, nominated by practicing Chinese journalists and media professionals, and selected by the GIJN Chinese team.
Paul McNally produced what was South Africa’s first investigative podcast around the story of a wrongful conviction. Here’s what he discovered while writing, producing and editing Alibi — with some advice on how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Earlier this year, Botswana’s INK Centre for Investigative Journalism tracked down a dossier which detailed the heinous crimes of Gukurahundi — a series of massacres of civilians carried out by the Zimbabwe National Army in the 1980s — which had been kept under lock and key for decades. It was the first time the names of the deceased and blow-by-blow accounts of how the executions were carried out were made available to the public. INK’s Ntibinyane Ntibinyane writes for GIJN on how they did it.
When Clare Rewcastle Brown founded the Sarawak Report in 2010, it was designed to highlight issues affecting indigenous communities in Malaysia, but it soon became instrumental in breaking what the US attorney-general has described as the worst form of kleptocracy in history — the 1MDB scandal involving the plundering of state funds allegedly by Malaysia’s then prime minister and his associates.
With the cost of investigative journalism untenable for too many struggling newsrooms, how are they able to play the role of watchdogs and hold local public officials accountable? New models, replicating global collaborations like the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, may be the answer. Marthe Rubio, the editor of GIJN in French, spoke with editors heading these initiatives in France and the UK.
Non-partisan advocacy organization Issue One spent a year combing through thousands of financial filings over a six-year period to figure out where the money for campaign advertisements in the USA was coming from and who it was going to. They ultimately compiled a database that outlined the top 15 “dark money groups” — organizations that receive millions of dollars of donations from companies and businesses to fund campaign ads.
The Global Reporting Centre has launched an ambitious project investigating labor abuse, environmental impact and corruption in global commerce. Here’s the Centre’s Peter W Klein on how Hidden Costs will bring together award-winning journalists, scholars and major media organizations — including the New York Times, PBS Frontline, the Toronto Star, Smithsonian Channel, NBC News, DigitalGlobe and Google News Labs — to undertake investigative-reporting projects.
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.
As the Chinese Communist Party tightens its grip on the news media, investigative journalism has suffered a heavy toll, disappearing from China’s newsrooms. But the recent outpouring of #MeToo reporting in China has signaled the emergence of a new genre of investigative journalism. One that is marked by a wave of user-generated content, with professional journalists serving as aggregators and fact-checkers, in addition to performing traditional reporting tasks such as deep reporting and writing.
Beyond the moral and social benefits of unveiling corruption and injustice, investigative reporting is actually good business. Need proof? Here’s a pocket-guide to five investigations that have brought millions back into the pockets of the people.
Data journalism is booming in Latin America, particularly in Argentina. La Nación data journalist Carolina Ávila, who led the team that won the best use of data in a breaking news story category in the 2018 Data Journalism Awards, shares their secret to success — an interdisciplinary team, creativity and ability to turn around stories quickly.
For the last three years Gavin Chait has been fighting — and winning — multiple freedom of information cases to unlock data on vacant properties. Here are the lengths he took to disprove the City of London’s excuse for not publishing information on unoccupied commercial properties.
Canada’s OpenFile had an elegant concept. They would ask readers to tell them what they thought was important and make editorial decisions around that. But the platform’s initial success couldn’t be sustained as it struggled to make money and maintain the flow of reader-suggested stories. Here’s what the OpenFile journalists learned about community journalism along the way.
It’s easier than ever for news organizations to update, promote and reuse stories from their archives. Here are some lessons and strategies from The Conversation on how best to revive and repost your archival content to fit the news cycle.
John Schrag had known for a while about an unexamined pool of data that could shed new light on the issue of concussions in high school sports. The executive editor of a newspaper in Oregon, his first instincts were to keep the story in-house and garner all the glory, but he quickly realized the only way the story would see the light of day was through collaboration.
Following a surge of tick-borne illnesses in the northeastern US, two reporters with the Center for Public Integrity are investigating the health impacts resulting from climate change — and they are engaging the help of health professionals and the public to gather stories and data.
The increasing lack of credibility and growing political meddling in Romanian mainstream media in recent years has resulted in many journalists leaving these outlets and starting their own independent sites. Some of these initiatives support themselves by relying on crowdfunding. But is it viable in the long term?
The past 15 years have transformed the world of audio. Key factors: Smartphones, bandwidth and Apple. Since 2003, at least seven other milestones have helped the audio renaissance gain steam.
A behind-the-scenes look at how one reporter put together a data-driven story about healthcare workers dying of opioid overdoses in the United States.
In late May, journalists from CENOZO in West Africa — with support from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — published #WestAfricaLeaks, the largest collaboration of investigative journalists in the region, exposing tactics used by regional tycoons, multinational companies and politicians to take their money offshore and out of reach. Here’s how they did it.
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.
A collective of African Investigative journalists has found that publishing stories about corruption in their home countries doesn’t always put much pressure on those leaders who plunder state resources, but publishing in the countries where their donors live has the potential to hit them where it hurts — their bank accounts.
As Mexico prepares for national elections this summer, social media is filled with misinformation and disinformation. To combat this, a group of news organizations and civil society groups came together earlier this year to launch Verificado 2018, a collaborative fact-checking and debunking effort.
