Christopher Booker’s “The Seven Basic Plots” provides a useful set of frameworks. It’s a book about fictional storytelling, but you will find the same structures recurring in longform and investigative work, writes Paul Bradshaw.
When it comes to digital security, what does a journalist from West Africa, a Syrian journalist based in Turkey, and a French journalist on a reporting trip to Kashmir have in common? Answer: Very little. While they all need to protect their data, their communications, and their sources, they must each do this in different ways that are adapted to the context, explains Grégoire Pouget of the Paris-based nonprofit Nothing2Hide.
If you read “The Case of Jane Ponytail,” published in The New York Times in 2018, you’re likely to remember it. The award-winning story recounted the life and death of Song Yang, a Chinese woman who came to the United States with dreams of becoming an American citizen, but who ended up dying after falling from a building during a raid on the illicit massage parlor where she was employed as a sex worker. Now you can read the story with annotations by Dan Barry, explaining how he crafted the heart-rending narrative.
Charitable and nonprofit organizations have a lot to gain from adopting certain aspects of successful business models, and they should start with treating stakeholders as customers, argues Philip Piletic of CustomerThink.
For the very first story in our new series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Emmanuel Freudenthal, a freelance investigative reporter based in Nairobi. He told GIJN’s Gaelle Faure all about how he uses virtual tools like GPS Tracks and Gmail Snooze and physical tools like plane-tracking antennas and good old motorbikes.
You don’t need a million casual readers — just 1,000 committed ones. And there are signs that the “1,000 true fans” theory holds approximately true across a wide range of journalism enterprises — sometimes it’s actually a thousand; other times it’s 400, 1,500, or 5,000.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for journalism. It can help fuel reporting, provide answers, and engage community participation. Jess Ramirez, who works as an engagement reporting fellow at ProPublica, lists the questions you can ask yourself when approaching an engagement project.
If you’re an OSINT investigator or use OSINT in any of your work, it’s impossible to ignore Twitter as a collection source. Here’s how to get the most out of it by organizing your searches on a TweetDeck dashboard.
Every investigative journalist encounters moments of doubt. Neil Bedi, an investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, shares the set of rules his team followed to survive the toughest reporting challenges while reporting their Pulitzer-nominated series “Heartbroken.”
In a digital world where it’s become easy to fake an identity — through low-cost websites, fabricated LinkedIn resumes, or even AI-created profile photos — the usual signals are increasingly garbage. Mike Caulfield cautions against trying to decipher cheap signals, and instead look for signs that use the network properties of the web.
GIJN recently hosted a webinar with Paul Myers, a leading international expert in online investigation. More than 300 people from approximately 70 countries joined as Myers, who works for the BBC and is a big favorite at GIJN’s conferences, shared his tips on the best tools and strategies for digging up information about people. This tipsheet is an overview of some of the techniques he shared.
How do you track cryptocurrency transactions? Brenna Smith, an undergraduate researcher at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, who specializes in investigating disinformation and the illicit use of cryptocurrencies, has created a tutorial using Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades’ bitcoin funding campaign as a case study to show you how.
Reporting on extrajudicial killings — murders carried out by state actors or by non-state vigilantes with the cover of state sanction — poses specific challenges to investigative journalists. Here are tips from two extraordinary reporters working in the Philippines: Rappler’s Patricia Evangelista and Reuters’ Clare Baldwin.
In the public imagination, reporters working with whistleblowers has traditionally meant All the President’s Men-style cloak-and-dagger stealth — meetings in shadowy underground garages, potted plants turned into signals, Hal Holbrook’s whispered exhortations to “follow the money.” But today, journalists’ interactions with whistleblowers are more likely to come in Signal chats or secure drop boxes than Washington, DC garages. And that shift has changed the terms of engagement in often confusing ways.
Climate change is such a big and important topic that there are many opportunities for journalists to investigate it, writes James Fahn, and so far they may just be scratching the surface.
Nonprofit newsrooms are increasingly turning to syndication partnerships that expand their reach and collaborations that expand reporting capacity. The Shorenstein Center surveyed eight of these news organizations to find out how these types of partnerships work in practice and how they are evolving.
Many people have been using some of the most common OSINT tools and techniques unwittingly. There’s one tool in particular that anyone with an internet connection has used: Google, or other search engines. Here are examples of how good ol’ Google search queries can be more effective than any fancy reverse image search tool.
If you’re like most people, there are bits of information about you scattered around the internet. These breadcrumbs can be used to “dox” journalists, which is when malicious actors track down and share private information. Here’s how to dox yourself and safeguard your information before someone else can dox you.
Writing a nonfiction book is nothing like writing an article — or is it? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel argues that the research process is not so very different. Here’s how he unearthed the fascinating stories behind two iconic western movies, “The Searchers” and “High Noon.”
Keeping track of research is often the most important, but most overlooked component of online investigations, as is the ability to verify the material that you have already found. In this month’s edition of the GIJN Toolbox, we look at tools for keeping real-time records of online research, some tools for verifying videos and examples of how they can be used, as well as a search engine that offers a number of different ways to view search results.
There are no silver bullets, no hard-and-fast rules, no magic answers to running a membership-driven news organization. It takes a lot of effort, coordination and putting members at the core of everything. Media consultant Tim Griggs shares 10 essential ingredients for making it work.
The reporters behind French TV show Cash Investigation know a thing or two about producing investigative journalism for television: Over the past six years, their show has become a major player in France’s journalism landscape by tackling complex topics and making them understandable to a wide audience. GIJN’s French Editor Marthe Rubio sat down with editor-in-chief Emmanuel Gagnier, who shared tips on how to produce investigative reports for TV.
Quiztime is a Twitter game beloved by journalists and other online sleuths who play it to hone their geolocation skills. Every day, one of the quizmasters tweets a mysterious image, and participants try to figure out where in the world it was taken by examining the minutest of clues.
Newsrooms are increasingly embracing newsletters as they seek to engage and grow their audiences. But there’s more than one way to tackle the form. Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into creating newsletters for nonprofit newsrooms that explore single-subject issues, like education or gun violence.
More than 115 countries worldwide have laws that require officials to turn over public records.
Media outlets’ communities have a lot to offer — and often, they would like to help. Here are 25 jobs that community members can do to aid newsrooms and examples of how to best include them.
It is unfortunately becoming easier and easier to harass journalists online through the use of technology such as bots, with the intent to intimidate and silence truth-tellers. These attacks can be relentless and if left unchecked, can be a real threat to journalists’ mental health and reputation. To deal with these online “pests,” TrollBusters created an infographic that offers clear steps on how to deal with various types of cyberviolence ranging from doxing to sexually explicit photos.
A reader asked ProPublica Illinois how the media organization finds new story ideas. Reporter Jodi S. Cohen, who was just as curious as the reader, spoke to her colleagues to find out where they got their inspiration. From fleshing out ideas found in other colleagues’ stories to digging into data anomalies, and even paying extra attention to an idle truck parked at an abandoned gas station, their answers show that there are a myriad of ways in which inspiration for your next big story could strike.
