News & Analysis

Thank you for allowing me and my colleagues the opportunity to testify before you today. As you know, more than a year ago, I and 42 other NGO workers were convicted in an Egyptian court for working on programs designed to build democracy, monitor elections and train political parties and journalists. We were given sentences ranging from one to five years in prison. Most people who knew about the case probably think it was resolved long ago.

Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema has won awards, fellowships, and international acclaim for his investigative reports. But at home he and his colleagues are under sustained attack, and he reports now that surveillance and harassment are increasing. Check out the activity among Cheema’s impressive 123,000 Twitter followers after he announced his election to the GIJN board.

We are the first nonprofit investigative newsroom in the German-speaking world. Our goal is to give citizens access to information. We are one of the many answers to the media crisis. The old models of business are losing effectiveness. At the same time, journalists need to find better ways of explaining an increasingly complex world. Publishers are shutting down newspapers or cutting their budgets. Digital media has not been able to make up for this loss. The media has trouble fulfilling its watchdog role. CORRECT!V aims to change this: we want to make investigative and informative journalism affordable and accessible to media organizations throughout Germany.

Online local news start ups are devoting significantly more resources to creating content than they are to raising money to pay for it – and that may spell trouble for long term sustainability. That’s one finding from a new survey conducted earlier this year as part of my database of U.S. news start ups, www.micheleslist.org. About 80 publishers responded to the annual survey, which I conduct independently.

In the hours after Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, reports started surfacing that there were documents floating in the reservoir on his palatial 350-acre estate outside the capital. The estate is well known to the media as an off-limits location; journalists, in fact, had never entered more than 300 yards past the front gate, and even at the height of Yanukovych’s openness and good relations, journalists had only been allowed to the front door to receive cakes on journalism day.

This week the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium begins a new initiative in bringing together journalism educators from throughout the world who teach investigative reporting. The idea to expand the range of IJEC emerged from the Global Investigative Journalism Conference held in October in Rio de Janeiro where the conference organized, for the first time, a professor track of sessions and presentation of papers. Professors from six continents found they had much in common and were eager to continue the conversations and share research and teaching methods.