Guide Resource
A Guide to Fact-Checking Investigative Stories
Bulletproofing your story demands much more than getting the facts right. It requires a meticulous approach from the start in order to pass quality control.
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Reporting Tools & Tips
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Reporting Tools & Tips
Understanding the Methods of Today’s Organized Crime Is Key to Exposing It
Three experts who contributed to GIJN’s new organized crime reporting guide have shared insights into the modus operandi of criminal syndicates and how journalists can deploy cross-border collaborations to expose their illicit activities.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Tips for Investigating the Climate Change Crisis
On the second day of GIJC21, journalists from Brazil, Indonesia, and The Netherlands offer tips and tools on how to cover what may be the most important story we ever dig into: how humanity copes with the unprecedented challenge of climate change.
Resource
GIJN Launches Journalism Security Assessment Tool
Increasingly, investigative journalists are being hacked, doxxed, harassed, and assaulted by external threats, so GIJN — with generous support from the Ford Foundation — is proud to launch a first-of-its-kind safety guide for newsrooms at GIJC21: the Journalist Security Assessment Tool (JSAT).
Organized Crime Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigating Organized Crime: A GIJN Guide
In concert with GIJC21’s panel on the “New Organized Crime,” GIJN has released a comprehensive, multi-part reporting guide to investigating organized crime around the world, looking at nine key areas: criminal finance, narcotics, arms trade, environmental crime, forced disappearances, cybercrime, mafia states, human trafficking, and art and antiquities.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Double Exposure Film Fest Showcases Documentary Tradecraft
When 32 outstanding investigative documentaries were showcased at the Double Exposure Festival last week, one common question for attendees was this: How on Earth did the filmmakers persuade all these people to let their video cameras in? Three of the filmmakers shared their access tips.
Organized Crime Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigating Arms Trafficking
National laws that govern arms dealing are uneven, contradictory, influenced by corrupted leadership, and rife with loopholes. Other barriers to exposing the weapons trade range from maritime and aviation secrecy concealing the transportation of arms; corporate entities that shield dealers and operators; the role of neighboring countries as conduits, and a barter system that allows one illicit commodity, such as ivory, to be exchanged for another.
Data Journalism Reporting Tools & Tips
Interpreting Data: Tips to Make Sure You Know How to Read the Numbers
When using data for investigative stories, it is important to learn how to obtain and clean the information. But it is also vital that you interpret your findings correctly and extract the right conclusions from the numbers, filters, and spreadsheets. If you do the math correctly but fail to read the answers properly, you may end up misleading your audience.
News & Analysis Reporting Tools & Tips
Reporting on Climate Injustice in One of the Hottest Towns in America
Climate reporter Liz Weil and visual reporter Mauricio Rodríguez Pons first became interested in Thermal, which is just north of California’s Salton Sea, because it is one of the hottest places in America. They soon realized it’s also a prime example of how wealth inequality is inextricably linked to climate justice.
Resource
Business Tools for Newsrooms: A GIJN Guide
This guide was produced thanks to support from the Google News Initiative. It was researched and written by Talya Cooper, a researcher based in New York who has worked as the archivist of the Edward Snowden archive at The Intercept and as archive manager at StoryCorps. She is the co-author, with Alison Macrina, of “Anonymity,” a […]
Resource
Data Security & Encryption Tools for Journalists
GIJN is publishing a new business tools guide focused on helping news outlets solve their administrative needs. Written by Talya Cooper and illustrated by Chafiq Faiz, the guide includes useful software and applications – many of which are free – for small newsrooms. Tools included cover administration, management, communication, file sharing, accounting, SEO, audience engagement, audiovisual, content management, subscriber management, design and data visualization, social media and email marketing, site security, and password management.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigating Antiquities Trafficking
The illicit trade in antiquities is a form of transnational crime that connects the theft at heritage sites to the elite world of the global art market, often via a web of organized crime.
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Tips for Reporters Seeking to Reveal the Scale of Inequality
Data on the gap between rich and poor, privileged and marginalized, tends to be nuanced or hard to find. But amid warnings that the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate the gap between rich and poor, investigative reporters need new tools to show the scale and implications of these gaps. From audiographs to drone imagery, and featuring tips from South Africa and Brazil, we share some of these methods here.
Reporting Tools & Tips
A Journalist’s Guide to Investigating Drug Trafficking
Covering drug trafficking is inherently difficult and can be dangerous. Information is also scant. In most cases, it is best to begin by getting the best data possible. However, in all cases, proceed with caution: data on drug trafficking, especially drug seizures, gives you only a small part of the picture and can even distort reality in some cases.
Guide Resource
A Journalist’s Guide to Avoiding Lawsuits and Other Legal Dangers
The practice of independent journalism is facing enormous challenges, ranging from authoritarian regimes implementing regressive laws that stifle speech to journalists being unable to make a living from their work. In order to meet those challenges, journalists can benefit from understanding the protections provided by international law.
Reporting Tools & Tips
60 GB of Data, 27 Years of Hidden Payments: How Brazil’s Journalists Used FOIA to Reveal Pension Payments
Seventy stories and still counting. This is the main result of an ongoing struggle waged since 2017 for the disclosure of all pension and retirement payments by the Brazilian government. On the front line is GIJN member Fiquem Sabendo, a journalism agency specializing in that country’s Freedom of Information Act.
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Four Quick Ways to Verify Images on a Smartphone
GIJN has updated our popular step-by-step guide on verifying images to help find out whether the photo you saw on social media is the real thing. Try out some simple-to-use free tools — including TinEye, Google Reverse Image Search, Photo Sherlock, and Fake Image Detector — to check the source of a picture and whether it has been manipulated.
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Afghanistan: How to Help Journalists and Others at Risk
In an effort to help journalists and others trying to leave Afghanistan, GIJN has put together this list of resources for emergency evacuation and asylum processes.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigative Tools That Reporters Love
There are scores of muckraking techniques that can help journalists gain access to elusive sources and data. Here we share the dozen online tools that leading reporters commonly praised in interviews with GIJN in the past year — and especially those that require few or no special digital skills.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigative Tactics That Reporters Love
In interviews over the past year, dozens of leading journalists have told me about the scores of tools and techniques that proved helpful in their investigations. But, again and again, these top muckrakers point to about a dozen tactics that they rely on all the time. We share those favorite techniques in this roundup.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Digging Up Hidden Data with the Web Inspector
Many reporters never notice the “inspect element” option below the “copy” and save-as” functions in the right-click menu on any webpage related to their investigation. But it turns out that this little-used web inspector tool can dig up a wealth of hidden information from a site’s source code, reveal the raw data behind graphics, and download images and videos that supposedly cannot be saved.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Why Journalists Need An Archiving System
Talya Cooper spent several years working alongside journalists in a newsroom, where she witnessed some “unholy messes” of files on both physical and virtual desktops. But as she writes here, while taking good care of data requires some time and money the loss of irreplaceable reporting work can come at a higher cost.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Climate Storytelling Impact: Lessons from Norway’s Public Broadcaster
How do you increase your readers’ interest in climate stories? Two award-winning projects from the online team at Norway’s NRK offer insight that could help newsrooms increase impact and engagement in climate coverage.
Resource Tipsheet
Tips to Uncover the Spy Tech Your Government Buys
In June, a French court indicted executives from two surveillance companies on charges of complicity in torture in Libya and Egypt, following revelations by journalists about their alleged technology sales to repressive regimes. In a series of interviews, investigative reporters shared tips and tools that newsrooms around the world can use to uncover the spyware and monitoring systems their governments are buying.
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Tips for Building a Database for Investigations
Whether investigating human rights abuses, money laundering, or even public officials’ conflicts of interests, reporters are increasingly developing their own databases for investigative projects. Here are a series of tips drawn from the experiences of a number of international journalists and from the author’s personal experience gathering and creating data sets for investigative stories.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Using Public Information Requests to Investigate Drug Trafficking in Mexico
Here’s how three Mexican investigative journalists have used public information requests to aid their reporting on drug trafficking and the government’s fight against it.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Seeking Comment for Your Investigation: Tips for the ‘No Surprises’ Letter
For many investigations — especially those involving corporations, or institutions in the West — the final step is to send a letter that sets out your findings and urges a response. Here, several investigative reporters share their tips on how to deal with obstructive subjects and ensure fairness — including fairness for dangerous governments that cannot be alerted to your findings before publication.
Chapter Guide Resource
Illegal Wildlife Trafficking: Chapter 9
We’ve compiled a spreadsheet containing major reports, key groups, databases, and stories to help you investigative illegal wildlife trafficking. This table is a list of major reports, key groups, examples of investigative journalism, and relevant databases on illegal Wildlife Trafficking. The collection is part of GIJN’s Illegal Wildlife Trafficking guide, which can be found here. […]