“There certainly appears to be a worrying trend around the world where powerful companies or public officials attempt to censor public participation on matters of public interest through lawsuits, for instance in the law of defamation,” explained Dario Milo, a South Africa-based attorney who specializes in communication law and is a member of the European Union’s Expert Group on SLAPPs.
A collaborative project brought together 40 women journalists from 30 states across India to tell the stories they had uncovered while investigating the impact of COVID-19. But their coming together turned into a much broader conversation about the challenges of their work and lives.
When Giacomo Bologna was working on his first freelance story, he reached out to the Fund for Investigative Journalism for help. With a grant to cover his gas mileage, the cost of copying records, and his time, Bologna set up shop in a small room on the third floor of a courthouse in Mississippi and started reviewing paper files to trace a large nonprofit hospital’s practice of aggressively pursuing payment from thousands of poor patients.
Investigating the environment in developing countries can be a particularly dangerous game – far more so in the Global South than in North America and Europe. Journalists in the developing world are prime targets for powerful political and economic interests, operate in a hostile climate, and often lose their lives far from the Western media spotlight.
For digital-first news outlets in Latin America, lessons learned from reader-funding experiments are being transformed into highly tailored membership programs that offer a chance at a more sustainable future. Independent, mission-driven or subject-specific news sites, in particular, are leading the way, converting close relationships with audiences into funding through editorially-linked, labor-intensive initiatives.
Afghan journalist Zahra Joya, 28, is not hopeful of a bright future for women journalists in her country. In November 2020, she used her personal savings to recruit five women journalists and start Rukhshana Media. They wanted to go around the country and tell the stories of maternal mortality, domestic violence and women’s reproductive health. Since then, they have published stories on the taboo of menstruation, child marriage, street harassment, gender discrimination and what it means to live as a survivor of rape.
How did a team of reporters across Asia investigate digital sex crimes, and what did they learn about interviewing victims of image-based abuse during their deep dive into this phenomenon? Sarah Karacs speaks to the team to find out how the collaboration worked, and what they learned about a phenomenon of growing concern worldwide.
Could news media use drones to better inform the public? To procure new data or do remote fact-checking with small unmanned aircraft? Could drones protect journalists, who have been targets for violence? Enthusiasm waxed. And — a decade later — waned.
In March 2020, environmental journalist Helena Carpio, leaned out of her window to see Caracas filled with smoke. Something was burning, but no one knew where and there was no official news on what was happening. She started to investigate, and the resulting project analyzed two decades of satellite data on hotspots to explore the when, where, and why of forest fires in Venezuela and across Latin America.
In a scandal known as ‘Vacunagate,’ 487 influential people in Peru, including its president, were secretly inoculated against COVID-19 months before vaccines were approved for the public. Two investigative newsrooms in Peru found that Chinese drug makers had secretly sent thousands of ‘courtesy’ vaccine doses to several countries in South America in addition to the doses needed for clinical trials there. Editors from both told GIJN how reporters can tackle this new form of corruption.
A haven of banking secrecy for decades, Switzerland has now become a land of raw materials trading. Most of the private hydrocarbon trading giants have set up their headquarters in Geneva. But unlike banks, which have to comply with international standards on money laundering and tax fraud these trading companies are accountable to virtually no one.
Newsletters are popular because their offering is different from the information that is dangerously filtered and molded by social media giant’s random, opaque algorithms. GIJN has selected five original newsletters that can inspire journalists around the world.
The roots of today’s increasingly captured media in India lie deep and go back a couple of decades to the seemingly innocuous newspaper business practices of India’s largest media company, Bennett Coleman & Company, founded in 1838. The resulting, industry-wide cap on newspaper subscription prices in India has, over time, created a very unhealthy, near 100-percent dependence on advertising.
After more than a year of living with a pandemic that shut down the world, lockdowns are beginning to lift for many across the globe. But for many journalists – a number of whom are already struggling with traumas of their own in a beleaguered industry known for its hostile and pressure-cooker environments – concerns are mounting about an impending mental health crisis brought on by a year of mass isolation, uncertainty, and endless dread.
The US Justice Department indicted five Iranian intelligence officials last week, alleging they were part of a plot to surveil and eventually abduct an Iranian-American investigative journalist living in the US. Read the indictment.
The Reporter is known in Taiwan for its in-depth investigative stories. The team behind it recently launched a podcast, which surged into the charts soon after it was launched. Here host Jason Liu and producer Lan Wanchen tell GIJN about their experience in making podcasts related to investigative journalism and their tips for making a program that audiences want to listen to.
More than 130 journalists were killed in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras in the years between 2011 and 2020, many of them attacked while investigating political issues, corruption, and organized crime. RSF has analyzed the attacks and found that half of the journalists had received threats related to their work.
A recent report published by the Forum on Information & Democracy’s Working Group on the Sustainability of Journalism says the journalism industry is experiencing a “potential extinction event” as the certainties (chiefly the advertising-supported model) under which journalism operated for 40 to 50 years continues to fall away.
Award-winning author Jessica Goudeau, who won the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for best American nonfiction writing from the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, discusses the need to tell stories of displaced people in fresh ways, starting with empathy.
Local reporters have been finding innovative ways to report on the death and devastation caused by India’s devastating second wave of the coronavirus – even as the authorities tried to downplay the severity of the crisis. Bhavya Dore speaks to reporters who staked out the banks of the river Ganges and stationed themselves outside morgues and hospitals to investigate what was really happening.
It is well known that trust in journalism is low among some audiences. Outlets need to be more open, accessible, and accountable. Audio offers a simple and effective means to do that.
The New York City Police Department has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals. Here’s how thousands of volunteers from around the world participated in the investigation.
With more sophisticated AI technologies emerging, researchers warn that “deepfake geography” could become a growing problem. As a result, a team of researchers that set out to identify new ways of detecting fake satellite photos warn of the dangers of falsified geospatial data and call for a system of geographic fact-checking.
When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold last year, editors scrambled to rapidly assemble teams to cover the crisis. Steps ahead were the outlets already dedicated to investigating health as a subject who knew how to source and build networks of public health and vaccine experts, and crucially, how to investigate both the science and the politics behind the pandemic response.
Serbia’s investigative nonprofits face an extraordinary array of threats and harassment due to a new model in which autocrats outsource repression to oligarchs, pro-government media, street gangs, and other proxies. In a series of interviews, three leading editors told GIJN about the sinister tactics they face, and the determination required to keep accountability alive.
The Earth Journalism Network has supported thousands of journalists around the world, building a model of editorial and financial support to investigate the most urgent story of our time — climate change.
The search of a journalist’s phone in detention exemplifies the threat digital forensics technologies pose to privacy and press freedom around the world. In Botswana, journalists recount the frightening state of government surveillance, powered by international technology companies.
In 2018, private investigator Igor Ostrovskiy revealed to US investigative reporter Ronan Farrow that he was spying on him, and became a whistleblower on the threat of “hunting journalists.” Ostrovskiy recently briefed journalists on how to deal with the growing menace of physical surveillance.
