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Reporting Tools & Tips
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Reporting Tools & Tips
Tips for Beat Reporters to Investigate “On The Side”
In a panel at IRE21 — the annual conference hosted by Investigative Reporters & Editors — veteran reporters shared a dozen tools and tips that can help time-pressed beat reporters keep investigations running ‘on the side.’
Reporting Tools & Tips
Two New Game-Changing Microphone Options for Mojos
Good audio is essential to quality mobile reporting and because mobile journalists — or mojos — often work unassisted, they require equipment that’s easy to use and quick to set up. Here are some newly-released smartphone audio offerings, as recommended by GIJN’s resident mojo expert Ivo Burum, that can help.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How to Investigate Money Laundering
The criminal blueprint and its elements need to be understood to efficiently follow the money and stop criminals from doing business as usual. Criminals, both the ones just starting out as well as those who are already well established, have regional and global infrastructure that is continuously built and maintained by what the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) team calls the “criminal services industry.” Here’s OCCRP’s Paul Radu on how it works and how to untangle it.
Resource
Why Journalists in Autocracies Should Report as If They’re in a Democracy
In a RightsCon session hosted by GIJN, three editors shared survival strategies for independent newsrooms in authoritarian nations, as threats to the press, and institutions of accountability, grow around the world. They described a form of journalistic judo, where journalists can find advantages in the very tactics used to repress them.
Guide Resource
Investigating Femicide: A GIJN Guide
Femicide — the intentional murder of women because they are women — is a global problem. According to the UN’s latest estimates, 50,000 women and girls are killed each year by intimate partners or other family members. GIJN’s latest resource aims to help journalists understand what femicide is, find and understand the data available, and suggest which experts to interview.
Reporting Tools & Tips
6 Steps Newsrooms Can Take Right Now to Preserve Digital Archives
One little-recognized, unlisted casualty of the struggle for newsroom survival is the impact on an irreplaceable resource that citizens across America rely on: the public record of their communities as recorded by their local newspaper, radio or TV station, online newsroom or other news outlet.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Mapping Migration Deaths with GIS Modeling
Geographical information system modeling — a digital technology that allows geographers to perform spatial, data-driven analysis of landscapes — is providing an insight into why some undocumented migrants perish while crossing international borders, including in the Sonoran desert on the border between Mexico and the United States.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Exposing the Hidden Impact of Police Dog Maulings in the US
Four news outlets teamed up to reveal that police dogs bite and maim thousands of people a year, an investigation that was one of five finalists for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize. Here the journalists involved explain how they overcame some of the biggest challenges in reporting the series, and give tips for journalists creating databases for their own investigations.
Resource Tipsheet
Tips for Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in Your Next Investigation
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit library that is best known for the Wayback Machine, a staple for investigative journalists around the world. Launched 20 years ago, the Wayback Machine now archives much of the public web at the rate of more than 1 billion archived URLs per day.
Resource Tipsheet
Online Advanced Search Techniques
Updated in March 2022 GIJN hosted two webinars in 2021 with Paul Myers, a leading international expert in online investigation. Myers, who works for the BBC and is a popular speaker at GIJN conferences, shared his tips on the best tools and strategies for digging up information about people online. Check out his tipsheet below. […]
Reporting Tools & Tips
How Journalists Tracked Down Missing Data to Change the Conversation on Homelessness
Maeve McClenaghan realized no one was collecting the relevant data to build a nationwide picture of how many homeless people were dying across the UK, sparking an 18-month investigation involving a network of over 1,000 contributors.
Reporting Tools & Tips
New Tools to Organize Your Workspace and Enhance Digital Reporting
At the recent NICAR21 data journalism conference, organized by Investigative Reporters and Editors, experts shared dozens of new tools and plugins that can save time or add efficiency and insight to any investigation.
Case Studies Reporting Tools & Tips
How Reporters Exposed the Spies Implicated in the Navalny Poisoning
No law enforcement agency announced any criminal investigation into the attempted murder of Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, after he was poisoned with a chemical weapon in Russia last year. Instead, investigative journalists stepped forward. In a GIJN webinar, journalists from Bellingcat and Russia’s The Insider explained how, and why, they used black market data to help expose the true culprits behind that attack.
Reporting Tools & Tips
GIJN Bookshelf: A Dozen Books for Muckrakers in 2021
At GIJN we’re fortunate to come across various books and reports on the state of the news media and great investigative reporting. Here are 12 of the more interesting recent volumes we’ve found that investigative journalists might want to pick up in 2021, as well as a novel written by an investigative reporter for a little light relief.
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Guides to Finding Expert Sources
Looking for sources? Finding experts in a particular field is a good place to start for many stories. GIJN took a look at various guides to expert sources. After cutting those that are outdated, too specialized, or tools of the PR industry, we found a handful worth consulting. Here are six services with functioning, reliable databases used by journalists searching for expert sources.
Reporting Tools & Tips
12 Tips on Reaching More People and Getting Bigger Impact on Investigative Stories
In a GIJN webinar on audience engagement, editors and digital marketing experts shared tips and resources on how to reach and engage with audiences by maximizing the impact of stories, and by using carefully curated newsletters.
Resource Tipsheet
Investigative Journalism Manuals
Looking for tips, tools, and tutorials? The below guides focus on investigative journalism and provide case studies and examples from around the world. Most are available for free, unless indicated otherwise. You can also find our guide to investigative journalism manuals in Chinese and Spanish. Have an addition that you’d like to share? Send us […]
My Favorite Tools Reporting Tools & Tips
My Favorite Tools: Geo-Journalist Gustavo Faleiros
For our “My Favorite Tools” series, we spoke with Brazilian journalist Gustavo Faleiros, editor of environmental investigations at the Pulitzer Center where he leads the Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN), about mapping deforestation and using data to chart what is happening in global forests.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How to Take Better Images on Your Smartphone
Smartphones have bigger hard drives and more power than some laptops. And while there are millions of apps, many of them used for filming and photography by mobile journalists, Ivo Burum says that the standard features of ordinary smartphones should be mastered first.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Amnesty International’s Sam Dubberley on Digital Verification and Human Rights
In this interview, Amnesty International’s Sam Dubberley discusses how open source techniques can help in the investigation of human rights abuses and gives advice for journalists interested in this type of research.
Reporting Tools & Tips
How to Investigate COVID-19 Vaccine Contracts
Contracts to buy COVID-19 vaccines are being kept largely confidential by the global purchasing entity started by the World Health Organization and by national governments. Here GIJN’s Toby McIntosh offers a guide to reporting on the creation and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and combating government secrecy at both the international and national levels.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Tips for Mining Social Media Platforms with Henk van Ess
Open source reporting expert Henk van Ess has dozens of tricks to find elusive social media information through indirect means, as well as a search app he created. In a recent GIJN webinar on “Investigating Social Media,” Van Ess shared several of these tips.
Reporting Tools & Tips
Henk van Ess on Visual Thinking for Online Investigations
In a recent GIJN webinar, open source reporting expert Henk van Ess shared several online search tricks. But he explains that these work-arounds are merely tools for a new approach to online research that he calls “thinking visual,” which invites reporters to think of keywords like a search engine, rather than a person.
Reporting Tools & Tips
My Favorite Tools 2020: Top Investigative Journalists Tell Us What They’re Using
This year, in our My Favorite Tools series, we asked 12 of the world’s top journalists what their go-to tools are. From VeraCrypt and OnionShare to Aleph and the Wayback Machine, here are GIJN’s favorites.
Reporting Tools & Tips
GIJN Toolbox: SpyOnWeb, VirusTotal, and SpiderFoot HX
In this reboot of GIJN’s popular “Toolbox” series, we walk through the techniques journalists can use to find connections between websites using IP addresses and Google Analytics tags hidden in the source code of websites. We’ll also demonstrate how to use the powerful tool SpiderFoot HX to visualize network maps, which help journalists draw connections unseen in the offline world.
Investigative Techniques Methodology News & Analysis Reporting Tools & Tips
Investigating Sexual Assault and Abuse
In a GIJN webinar three journalists who have experience reporting on the #MeToo movement and sexual abuse told reporters how to investigate an often-hidden crime. Among their tips are preparing interviewees for the process, investigating the story doggedly, and using alternative forms of evidence to verify your story. Read these and other tips for investigating sexual abuse allegations in GIJN’s latest tipsheet.
Guide Resource
Investigating Sexual Abuse: An Updated Reporting Guide
The subject of sexual violence remains a sensitive if not taboo subject in much of the world and often goes unreported. Watchdog journalism has started digging deeper into sexual violence, but these investigations are still few relative to the estimated number of cases worldwide.