Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/category/methodology/page/5/)
What happens to the clothes we donate to charity? Or the clothes we buy online, try on, and then return? Two Finnish journalists used tracking devices in order to investigate these post-consumer supply chains, finding that many items make their way on a complex journey to Africa and the Middle East before sometimes ending up in landfill.
You don’t need the resources of The New York Times to create a data journalism team in your newsroom. But you do need to think out the structure. Here are 10 things you should consider if you are considering setting up your own team.
Search engines are an intrinsic part of the array of commonly used “open source” research tools. Together with social media, domain name look-ups and more traditional solutions such as newspapers, effective web searching will help you find vital information. Many people find that search engines often bring up disappointing results from dubious sources. A few tricks, however, can ensure that you corner the pages you are looking for, from sites you can trust. The same goes for searching social networks and other sources to locate people.
Web scraping is a way to extract information presented on websites. As I explained it in the first installment of this article, web scraping is used by many companies. It’s also a great tool for reporters who know how to code, since more and more public institutions publish their data on their websites.
With web scrapers, which are also called “bots,” it’s possible to gather large amounts of data for stories. But what are the ethical rules that reporters have to follow while web scraping?
“Big Data.” It seems like the phrase is everywhere. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary by 2014, and Gartner’s just-released 2014 Hype Cycle shows “Big Data” passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and on its way down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Big Data is all the rage. But what does it actually mean? we asked 40+ thought leaders in publishing, fashion, food, automobiles, medicine, marketing, and every industry in between how exactly they would define the phrase “Big Data.” Their answers might surprise you!
The Research Desk with Gary Price is back, with its second installment, featuring a roundup of new tools — the WHO’s MiNDBANK database, with documents from 170 countries; ePSIplatform, on open data in the EU & worldwide; new UN report on wastewater; NATO archives expand; and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
Online research is often a challenge for traditional investigative reporters, journalism lecturers and students. Information from the web can be fake, biased, incomplete or all of the above. Offline, too, there is no happy hunting ground with unbiased people or completely honest governments. In the end, it all boils down to asking the right questions, digital or not. This chapter gives you some strategic advice and tools for digitizing three of the biggest questions in journalism: who, where and when?
The good people at the Journalism in the Americas Blog, who just hosted the always interesting International Symposium on Online Journalism, alerted us to a useful new video, “Data Journalism: An Explication.” Here are journalists doing their best to define data journalism.The video comes from Cindy Royal, an associate professor, and Dale Blasingame, a lecturer, in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University.
We’re back with another selection of web resources and reports that might be of interest to journalists around the world. On the list this week: new reports from the International Labour Organization, Congressional Research Service, and UK House of Commons; and tools to search domain ownership, load tweets into a spreadsheet, and search open data. Good hunting!
Editor’s Note: The Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting is a new guide to online search and research techniques to using user-generated content and open source information in investigations. Published by the European Journalism Centre, a GIJN member based in the Netherlands, the manual consists of ten chapters and is available for free download.