News & Analysis

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.

Winners of the Global Shining Light Award have donated their US$1000 in prize money to the family of imprisoned Azerbaijani journalist Avaz Zeynalli. The Shining Light Award honors investigative journalism in a developing or transitioning country, done under threat or duress. Zeynalli was editor in chief of the daily newspaper Khural, one of a handful of independent media voices in the repressive, oil-rich nation of Azerbaijan, which lies at the borders of Russia, Iran, and Turkey

While most of the Christian West woke up on Christmas morning to messages of peace on earth and goodwill to mankind, events in Ukraine continued down a bloody and almost heathen, medieval path. The physical assaults in the last month on journalists, activists, and demonstrators are too numerous to keep track of without a scorecard and a timeline. But the trend is so clear that even the most witless criminal investigator can see the pattern.