When it comes to doing mobile journalism, is there a big difference between expensive Androids and iOS phones? Is using an old phone fine and, if not, which phone should one upgrade to? Mobile journalism trainer Ivo Burum offers up the skinny on phone basics, the truth about pixels, lenses and more to help journalists decide the best phone to get the story done well.
Finding out who owns land can be tough. While property registration systems exist in almost all countries, the quality and availability of the information vary widely. World Bank experts estimate that only 30% of the world’s population has a legally registered title to their land, a widely quoted figure that Bank officials stress is a […]
What’s the best way to protect you and your sources from commercial spyware? When the actual systems and applications used in everyday communications aren’t transparent and lack adequate security measures, using open source programs with encryption can be the best line of defense. Katarina Sabados rounded up some options for open source digital security for GIJN.
Measuring the impact of journalism can help newsrooms reconnect with its audience and attract new funders. But the wider journalism ecosystem has yet to embrace the concept of keeping track of journalism’s impact. Impact Makers Bernadette Kuiper talks to the European Journalism Centre about why journalists should care about impact, how to create it and where to draw the line between journalism and advocacy.
Effective digital investigative research relies heavily on gathering small pieces of information on a person or group and combining those to build a more comprehensive picture. Being able to find things like email addresses, usernames and sites with which they have accounts helps build out a profile that can be used for further investigation. GIJN’s Alastair Otter rounds up some tools worth checking out.
Many in the journalistic profession fear Artificial Intelligence will leave them without a job. But AI could become the savior of the trade, making it possible to better cover the increasingly complex, globalized and information-rich world we live in. Open Society Foundations’ María Teresa Ronderos writes about the ways some of the world’s newsrooms are using it now.
Inspired by the Graphic Continuum by Jon Schwabish and Severino Ribeca, the Financial Times graphic team came up with their own neat chart of visualizations. The Visual Vocabulary is a guide to help journalists pick the right type of visualization for their story.
In September 2017, the lead producer for the BBC Internet Research & Future Services, Tristan Ferne, identified 12 different story formats used in digital news. With new formats constantly emerging, Emma-Leena Ovaskainen, a visual journalist for Finland’s biggest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, has modified the list and made her own additions.
Paywalls, live events, special print editions, paid newsletters, the list goes on. From new editorial products to exclusive experiences, news organizations of all types and sizes are looking for new revenue streams. Paula Montañà Tor offers six questions that you should consider before launching a membership program.
As collaborative journalism becomes a common practice across the media industry, news outlets may need clear documentation to guide their projects. Drafting a memorandum of understanding between collaborating partners can help get everyone on the same page. Stefanie Murray, from the Center for Cooperative Media, gathered six MOU template examples as a guide.
How do freelancers carry out a yearlong investigation when they only get paid at the end? Investigative reporter Samantha Sunne has a tiered approach to keep you from spending precious time and resources.
It’s not difficult to figure out if your story is understandable — if your grandmother can’t understand it, you have failed. At this summer’s MezhyhiryaFest, the annual investigative journalism festival in Kyiv, the OCCRP’s Ilya Lozovsky offered up some tips to help investigative journalists tell better stories. GIJN’s Olga Simanovych pulled them together.
When it comes to doing investigations using online tools, there is no one tool that will answer all of your questions. Instead you’ll most likely need to build slowly towards the answer using a jumble of jigsaw pieces — a name here, a connection there. The good news is that there are dozens of tools that can be used to find the pieces to your puzzle. GIJN’s Alastair Otter has pulled together tools that can be used to help build a profile of someone — or their business.
Over the past two years, words like “bots,” “botnets” and “trolls” have entered mainstream conversations about social networks and their impact on democracies. Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab laid out some of the working definitions and their methodologies to help identify, expose and explain disinformation online.
Pick your collaborators like you pick your friends, if you can help it — trust is critical. Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University funded six collaborative reporting projects across the United States and gathered some of the lessons learned and main takeaways for other media considering collaborative reporting projects.
With daily headlines about massive data hacks, everyone should be worried about digital security. But investigative journalists may even be deliberately targeted. Digital security expert Chris Walker shared his top tips.
Want to track what Chinese businesses — big or small — are up to in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia? These tips from reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian and The South China Morning Post will help.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow from the US government to contractors around the world, but knowing how to dig into these contracts can be daunting. Here’s Michael Morisy from MuckRock with tips on how to dig in.
California officials and firefighters are becoming increasingly concerned that the drier, windier conditions spurred on by the warming climate will make wildfires more devastating and their seasons longer. But are enough people paying attention to their root causes and dire consequences? Here are eight ways US journalists have been chronicling this year’s wildfires.
For newsrooms that want to produce professional looking infographics but don’t have the technical skills or budget to hire a professional, Kat Duncan came up with five user-friendly tools to help you create neat looking infographics without worrying about too much coding.
Your newsletter mailing list is made up of real people who have allowed you into some of the most prime real estate in the world: their inbox, and this privilege should not be abused. Splice Newsroom offers their tips to offer your subscribers quality content.
Economist Jonathan Schwabish created a handy data visualization cheatsheet with straightforward key principles to adhere to when creating data visualizations. Remember: avoid 3D, make labels easy to read and try small multiples.
Customer, profits, monetize. These are just some of the words that make journalists cringe because they sound so dirty when associated with our ethically-produced investigative journalism. But university professor James Breiner argues that journalists and the media need to add these words to their vocabulary without feeling squeamish.
In this month’s Investigative Toolbox, GIJN’s Alastair Otter delves into how to share sensitive documents with OnionShare, mine Twitter with Treeverse and FollowerWonk and monitor website updates with Versionista and VisualPing.
Investigations take more time and effort than the average story — and can still leave you flat. Samantha Sunne rounded up some tools for GIJN which will help journalists around the world tease out investigative topics, find sources and keep track of that endlessly growing list of notes, sources and documents.
Research at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy show that email and SEO are critical to audience development and monetization in single-subject newsrooms. They offer some tips of how to improve and adapt these old-school web strategies to local newsrooms.
If you host your investigative documentary or journalism video on YouTube, check out this useful graphic on YouTube SEO statistics created by tech enthusiast Saksham Kumar. Knowing the ranking factors that YouTube takes into account could give you ideas on how to optimize your video to reach the largest audience it can.
There are different ways fake news sites fake us out. In GIJN’s latest tutorial, Olga Yurkova, co-founder of the Ukrainian fact-checking project StopFake, runs through the six main techniques used and offers up some simple tools to vet them.
