Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/category/case-studies/page/11/)
A joint investigation by a historian and a journalist revealed that a number of US universities were beneficiaries from land expropriated from Indigenous communities. The authors, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, reveal what tools helped them uncover the story. They built a geodatabase and traced the money to find out where the land had come from and how much was paid for it.
Particularly for media organizations committed to engaging those people “formerly known as the audience,” campaigns are a great way to connect with and build a meaningful relationship with communities, writes The Bristol Cable co-founder Adam Cantwell-Corn.
To expose the massive, cross-border corruption scandal that came to be known as Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, journalists from across Latin America had to find ways to work together. In the process, they transformed investigative journalism in the region. GIJN Spanish Editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero wrote the story of their epic collaboration.
If you run a local news organization that’s trying to figure out reader or corporate funding, this post can help you get started. In it, Jay Allred sets out ten tips for engaging with your supporters, setting out how the Richland Source, a nationally-recognized online community news organization in Ohio, raised $250,000 to fund local journalism.
In a recent series, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose explored how one Harvard-educated woman was radicalized online by tracking the conspiracy theories and memes she shares. In this Q&A, Roose explains how the story came together.
In 2020, journalism students at Roosevelt University in Chicago embarked on a project to highlight the lives of 51 women who were murdered over the course of 17 years in the US city. Dorian Geiger of Oxygen detailed the project, and the growing effort to revive dignity and justice for neglected victims.
The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit uses social media and open-source tools to create powerful video reports. Here’s how they collected virtual breadcrumbs to retrace the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed Jamal Khashoggi.
Despite its overt political objectives, the research section of FBK — an anti-corruption nonprofit founded by Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny — has emerged as a potent investigative team that recently attracted 110 million YouTube views for a video that exposed massive corruption at a Black Sea palace. FBK’s head of investigations told GIJN about the methods the team uses for these investigations, and what professional journalists can learn from their approach.
How did a crack South African investigative team, on the country’s biggest and richest newspaper, go horribly wrong? A new book by Anton Harber does a deep dive into the best and worst of the country’s journalism.
Fabiola Torres López writes about the tools and programs that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists team who worked on the Paradise Papers — 383 reporters from 67 countries — became familiar with during the investigation. They are divided into three categories: digital security, document search and data connections.