Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/category/uncategorized/page/15/)
While many people use Internet Explorer to surf the net, users of Firefox and Chrome enjoy a wider range of options when it comes to add-ons. Add-ons are little apps that run inside the browser and allow you some extra functionality. They are usually free and are launched by either clicking on a button or choosing from a right-click menu.
The Verification Handbook is a new resource for journalists and aid responders, with step-by-step guidelines for using using information generated by the public. Although targeted for use during emergencies, the handbook provides useful tips for verifying crowd-sourced information in general. Thanks to the European Journalism Centre, which developed the handbook, for allowing GIJN to publish this excerpt.
As news stories break, journalists find themselves wanting to speak to members of the public. They could have witnessed an incident or may have been affected by an event. Their views count and they enhance our reports with a human angle. There are many ways to locate ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, but we don’t always know how our approaches will be received, or indeed if our messages to them will be read at all. This is where Twitter comes into its own.
It’s time to transform open data from a trendy concept among policy wonks and news nerds into something tangible to everyday life for citizens, businesses and grassroots organizations. Here are some ideas to help us get there.
There are a lot of websites out there that can help you find hidden information. But there are also software applications and browser plug-ins that can be of use to investigative journalists. Created by up-and-coming developers and enthusiasts on a budget, many of these programmes are rather unsophisticated, so don’t expect slick interfaces and 24-hour help desks. That said, if you can get past the jargon and rough-and-ready feel, you’ll find nifty little apps that can help you discover nuggets of information which would be unavailable through conventional means.
In conjunction with the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio de Janeiro, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has published a new e-book, Muckraking Goes Global: The Future of Cross-Border Investigative Journalism, that may be of interest to you and your colleagues. The publication includes a number of articles that address many of the challenges faced by watchdog journalists worldwide today.
In advance of the GIJN Steering Committee at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, the provisional secretariat is pleased to offer this report summarizing the secretariat’s progress since being launched in February 2012. This is a public document but is directed at GIJN member organizations.
Kate Crawford, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, recently warned about failing to closely scrutinize the results of big data analysis. In a keynote speech at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California, she called on “data scientists” to use the methods of social science in examining data to avoid wrong conclusions and misinterpretations. We decided to seek the thoughts and comments of award-winning journalists Jennifer LaFleur and David Donald.
It’s certainly one of the single biggest leaks of documents in the history of investigative reporting. Over the last 15 months, 86 journalists in 46 countries have been poring over a cache of 2.5 million documents on offshore holdings obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ coordinated the investigation from DC, using a secure messaging system to communicate with a worldwide team of journalists and free-text retrieval software and programmers on three continents to mine the information from the documents.