There are different tools reporters can use to make video and audio files searchable, they should be an essential part of any investigative journalist’s toolkit.
Watchdog reporters should discard the idea that damage from natural disasters is simply due to “acts of nature,” and rather think of it as a mix of hazardous events and human actions.
When news outlets report that new research studies prove something, they’re almost certainly wrong. They find evidence — sometimes, extraordinarily strong evidence. It’s important journalists understand that science is an ongoing process of collecting and interrogating evidence, with each new discovery building on or raising questions about earlier discoveries.
Pavla Holcová is an investigative journalist and founder of the Czech Centre for Investigative Journalism, an independent outlet that does cross-border investigations on organized crime and its impact on the Czech Republic (Czechia) and Slovakia.
Academic research is a crucial tool for investigating societal problems and holding the powerful accountable. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Neil Bedi, criminologist Rachel Lovell, and Denise-Marie Ordway of The Journalist’s Resource share practical advice on using academic research in investigative journalism.
In a new book on undercover reporting, Australian journalism professors Andrea Carson and Denis Muller examine whether deception is ever an acceptable method for journalists to use.
In Flourish’s recent webinar on effective elections and polling visualization, data journalist Mafe Callejón shared essential tips for building an interactive map from election results.
How reporters at OCCRP took a neighborhood Telegram chat from Bucha, Ukraine and turned it into an investigation of life under Russian occupation.
Bellingcat’s Foeke Postma offers tips and tools for using new technology and online resources to investigate old photographs.
Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist working with Al Jazeera, was killed by a gunshot to the head on the morning of May 11, 2022, while reporting from Jenin, a city in the West Bank. Abu Akleh was covering a raid by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The controversial killing has drawn global media […]
In 2021, nonprofit journalism site CORRECTIV.Lokal set out to investigate the impact of restricted access to abortion on the health and well-being of pregnant people in Germany. As the recent US Supreme Court ruling shows, ongoing changes to abortion rights and legislation affect millions of people around the world and make this a crucial topic for investigative journalists.
Football (soccer to Americans) is the world’s most popular sport and the World Cup one of its highlights, anticipated by millions, even billions around the globe. The next World Cup takes place in November-December this year in Qatar, based on a decision made in 2010 by football’s governing body, FIFA (the International Federation of Football […]
To investigate what the Russian invasion looked like to TikTok users in Russia and Ukraine, and how the content available differed from one side of the border to the other, a team of journalists from the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK set out to investigate the social networking site’s algorithms and how a user’s location provides differing digital narratives about the war.
The Miami Herald’s award-winning House of Cards investigation of the Champlain Towers South collapse used a dynamic, multimedia scrollytelling format to take readers inside the causes of a deadly construction tragedy.
We need to talk about Google! The world’s most popular search engine tries to please as many people as possible. But for journalists, the quality of results has rapidly declined. What is the issue and what can investigators do about it? GIJN is pleased to announce a hands-on session with search guru Henk van Ess, […]
Mediapart’s co-director of investigations, self-taught journalist Fabrice Arfi, offers his tips and best practices for educating oneself, cultivating sources, confronting targets fairly, and avoiding legal trouble.
From respecting that different journalists have different styles of reporting to using voices from the field to tell the story, and from keeping it simple with clear language to just ‘getting started,’ here are tips from two experienced reporters for the write-up stage of an investigation.
Once a $30 billion global bluechip financial services and tech company, Germany’s Wirecard filed for insolvency in 2021 in what is one of the biggest corporate frauds of the modern era. The tenacious and prolonged investigative reporting by the Financial Times, helped to uncover widespread fraud, malpractice and negligence. Dan McCrum, a senior Financial Times […]
Megha Rajagopalan has reported from over 23 countries in Asia and the Middle East, on stories ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the peace process in Afghanistan. Her team’s investigation into prison camps in Xinjiang, China won a Pulitzer Prize. In this podcast, she discusses how she got into investigative journalism and gives her tips for speaking to vulnerable sources.
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.
How Greenpeace’s investigative site, Unearthed, used satellite imagery and database mapping to reveal hundreds of fires on environmentally protected land in the English moors – including dozens that could be illegal.
Reporters at the OCCRP are used to cataloging shell companies and trawling through bank records in search of assets. But when they received a tip-off about show jumping horses linked to the oligarchs, they decided to dig into the subject as part of the Russian Asset Tracker project.
GIJN Spanish associate editor Mariel Lozada offers a behind-the-scenes look at a reporting collaboration that uncovers the vast scale of illegal mining and illicit smuggling in Venezuela’s Amazon region.
To get a behind-the-scenes look at The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the civilian death toll of US airstrikes, GIJN interviewed two key members of the reporting team: Christoph Koettl, a member of the Times’ visual Investigations team, and the series’ lead reporter, Azmat Khan.
The state of democracy is at its lowest point in decades. Around the world, free and fair elections face growing threats from disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, voter suppression, campaign corruption, violence, intimidation, and more. Covering elections as a political “horse race” has never been enough. This approach to campaign reporting is even more inadequate today, […]
From college sophomores to 9-to-5 tech workers, open source hobbyist-investigators are gaining huge audiences by reconstructing events on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, GIJN has published a series of stories and tipsheets for investigative journalists covering the war.
Journalist Rachel Chitra used news reports to build a database on hate crimes and violence in India. Here she gives tips for reporters facing a data gap, and offers lessons learned from her research about how journalists can reliably step in to gather, clean, and publish data when the government fails to keep track of important information.
