Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/series/how-they-did-it/page/5/)
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.
Journalist Maeve McClenaghan was scrolling through Twitter when something caught her eye: a post from a local community member about a homeless person’s death. Digging deeper, she soon realized no one was collecting the relevant data to build a nationwide picture of how many homeless people were dying across the UK, sparking an 18-month investigation involving a network of over 1,000 contributors.
Architect Alison Killing says that exploring blanked-out tiles on the mapping site Baidu was the first step in tracking down and identifying the detention centers being built by China in Xinjiang, where up to 1 million people are believed to have been detained.
The perpetrators of violence in South Africa tend to receive little sympathy and sparse coverage in the national press. But when Ruth Hopkins started to explore allegations of wrongdoing inside the country’s prisons, she was inundated by claims of abuse and torture. This story explores her decade-long investigation into incarceration in the country.
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.
Open source investigation teams around the world sprang into action as they watched a pro-Trump mob violently storm the US Capitol on January 6. A senior investigator with Bellingcat told GIJN how his team was able to scrape and preserve hundreds of social media videos from the attack, and shared ten tips on how any reporter can grab visual evidence during breaking news events.
On the evening of August 4, 2020, a devastating blast at the port in Beirut shook the Lebanese capital. It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. GIJN spoke to three outlets whose investigations all played a pivotal role in understanding what led to the explosion and why a ship and its deadly cargo were stuck at the port for so long.
In this behind-the-scenes look at an important investigation into sexual abuse by international aid workers, The New Humanitarian investigations editor Paisley Dodds recounts how reporters collected the heartrending stories of abuse from the front lines of the Ebola response.
A French freelance journalist tracked down a man accused of being involved in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Here’s how French journalist Théo Englebert delved into the eight-month investigation, including his top tips for finding someone who wants to disappear.
This summer a Swedish prosecutor announced that a 30-year probe into the killing of a Swedish prime minister would be closed since there was “reasonable evidence” that the assailant had been identified. The man now believed to have carried out the crime was identified two years ago by investigative journalist Thomas Pettersson, who spent 12 years investigating who killed Olof Palme.