Last year Pramod Acharya traveled to Sindhupalchok in the land-locked nation of Nepal to follow up on the region’s recovery from the devastating earthquake of 2015. That’s when he stumbled across a human trafficking ring. He wrote up what he learned about covering human trafficking in South Asia — along with some tips — for GIJN.
Using image analysis tools on their own means nothing without asking the right questions. AJ Labs experimented with Google Vision API, a machine-learning technology, to analyze images used by Al Jazeera over the course of last year. They hope to integrate the technology into their newsroom in the future to make processes easier for their journalists.
The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.
Non-state media in Cuba defy the constitution of the country, which explicitly prohibits the existence of private media in Article 52. But that hasn’t stopped these 14 independent media houses – most of which started up after 2014 – from winning international awards.
Traditional war reporting, which mostly focused on revealing the brutality of the conflict in Colombia, is being replaced by new storytelling techniques using alternative narratives and creative digital tools. Here’s Proyecto Coca, Rutas del Conflicto and 4 Ríos.
The reason we know so much about Russian disinformation operations targeting the United States is that some Russian journalists are very good at their jobs. What the world learned about these trolls, it turns out, came not from social media firms, governments or Western media, but from enterprising Russian journalists. Here’s how they first uncovered the Russian troll factory.
Last May, Direkt36 published its first story about how the companies of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s family were secretly benefiting from projects funded by the government – often paid from the European Union’s budget. Here the reporters break down the five most interesting parts of their reporting.
More than 30 journalists set out to film and observe every foot of the border with Mexico, from Texas to California. The result was a fully interactive map with about 20 hours of aerial footage of the border, a seven-chapter story about the journey, 14 additional stories about the consequences of the wall, 14 mini-documentaries and an explanation of the history of the border itself. Here’s how they did it.
Six independent media start-ups in Poland are trying to counter the growing politicization and the financial pressures that have ravaged quality journalism in the country. But can these start-ups build audiences and become sustainable in a challenging media market?
Full guide here. العربية Below we profile 10 stories of trafficking and forced labor common throughout the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, which includes the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. Domestic Workers: Trafficking and Unscrupulous Recruitment Indian Women Duped by Recruiters. Indian women are regularly trafficked through the United Arab […]
What started out in 2013 as a small donor-funded health journalism center situated inside a legacy newspaper in South Africa has transformed into a staff of 10, and 15 regular contributors across the continent. Today, Bhekisisa consistently produces impactful reports which help to influence policy and decision making, set agendas and define conversations.
For generations, the workers in the Brazilian Amazon who cut the palm straw used for brooms have been functionally enslaved by a system of loans provided by the bosses. Thais Lazzeri, an investigative reporter for Repórter Brasil, had to win their trust as she delved deeply into this topic for her October 2017 article, “100 Years of Bondage” which was beautifully illustrated with photographs by Fernando Martinho.
Fabiola Torres López writes about the tools and programs that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team who worked on the Paradise Papers — 383 reporters from 67 countries — became familiar with during the investigation. They are divided into three categories: digital security, document search and data connections.
Started in the Netherlands in 2013, De Correspondent wants to export its membership model to the United States. Will it fly?
Freedom of information requests have fueled recent environmental stories around the world. GIJN’s Resource Center director, Toby McIntosh, put together a round-up of a few that might stimulate your investigative thinking.
A for-profit “local newspaper without the paper” in California raised nearly $600,000 via a “direct public offering,” or DPO. Here’s how it works, and how it might work for your media organization.
Australian journalist Rick Feneley wrote a powerful investigative piece about a string of gay hate crimes that plagued Australia’s eastern border. But before “The Gay Hate Decades” was published, Feneley was left with one last hurdle: Creating a digital element to accompany his work. And that’s where SBS web developer Ken Macleod came in.
There is power in a crowd, and harnessing crowd contributions have become increasingly useful in investigative journalism. New York-based ProPublica shows how newsrooms are integrating crowdsourcing as a routine reporting tool, using it for data collection and to connect with and gather personal stories from readers.
A team of Reuters reporters, editors and data analysts reviewed the results of hundreds of autopsies and filed hundreds of public records requests involving deaths by Taser in the US. The result? Not only did the investigation catalogue 1,005 deaths, but it ended up building the most comprehensive database ever on Taser-related deaths.
Need some inspiration on making your next immersive investigative piece pop? This seriously impressive selection from Latin America includes stories about forced sterilization in Peru, the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon and Big Pharma’s stranglehold in the region.
Iranian journalist Yeganeh Rezaian confronts the difficulties women reporters face while working in Muslim countries in a paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. In this excerpt, she writes about old-fashioned sexual harassment and the problem with interviewing other women.
Twenty journalists, 11 media outlets, 11 countries, two continents and one massive corruption scheme. Investiga Lava Jato, a high-stakes, complex investigation, launched in June as a collaborative effort to develop and disseminate in-depth reports on corruption with tentacles in Latin America and Africa.
The massive ransomware attack WannaCry hit institutions in some 150 countries. Here’s how to use national freedom of information laws to develop news stories around cyber security threats.
Here’s how the data team at Argentina’s La Nación dug into 40,000 audio recordings collected by prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was murdered while investigating a Buenos Aires terrorist attack tied to Iran.
Four years of work and 8,000 judicial rulings later, the team at Univision Data shows how in Costa Rica, a person is more likely to be convicted of a crime if they are assigned a public defense attorney than if they have a private one. Their methodology included web scraping, R and logistic regression — a statistical method common in social sciences but practically unexplored in newsrooms.
At a time when many legacy publications and platforms are foundering financially, stakeholder-driven media are proving the business case for an advocacy-based, community audience paradigm. What drives it to work is if your organisation has a decent mission that matter to the target community and you deliver in a reliable and accessible manner. Mark Lee Hunter, Luk Van Wassenhove and Maria Besiou explore the success stories of SDMs and analyse the keys to their success.
De Correspondent, a Dutch member-funded journalism platform, leverages on the shared knowledge and experience of their 55,000 paying members as much as possible in their reporting. Here’s their 3-step workflow incorporating reader engagement, which helped them land their scoop on Shell.
Even as the attention span of readers gets shorter, Latin American media have taken the risk of producing long-form journalism for the internet and struggling to impose itself in the midst of overproduction of content more easily consumed on the internet.
