Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/corruption/page/10/)
When Nino Bakradze was growing up in Georgia in the ’90s, the country was embroiled in a civil war and a post-USSR economic crisis. In a media landscape dominated by state TV, investigative journalism just didn’t happen. The situation hadn’t changed much when she graduated, so she set up iFact to turn the tables. GIJN’s Alexandra Tyan spoke to the team.
Khabar Lahariya started as a four-page experiment to educate women who were learning to read and write but has now grown into a full-blown newspaper that exposes corruption and society’s injustices. Staffed with women from rural India, the newspaper is shaking a deeply entrenched system of neglect in the small villages of India.
The Peruvian investigative journalism association Ojo Público – a GIJN member — has created a new tool to investigate government contracts. In this piece, data journalist Romina Colman explores what the tool, which is called FUNES, can do and who can use it.
In this review of the best investigations in Russian and Ukrainian last year, the GIJN Russian team selected the stories that shed light on systemic societal problems in many countries in the region, and those which may inspire journalists in other parts of the world to investigate corruption, money laundering, and other topics using the same investigative methods and tools.
GIJN’s Spanish Editor Andrea Arzaba rounds up the top investigative stories from Latin American media outlets in 2020, focusing on deep dive investigations into important but often overlooked topics including femicide and migration.
The jury for the DIG Awards – an annual celebration of the best investigative documentaries made around the world – has revealed the films and programs that have made it onto the annual shortlist. The final awards will be given as part of DIG’s festival, which is taking place in the historic city of Modena in northern Italy this week.
What does it mean to pursue independent journalism in an environment of democratic retrenchment? Nic Dawes, a former editor at South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and India’s Hindustan Times, reflects on the role of the media in holding power to account as the US election draws close.
Across the data science community, knowledge graphs have become a growing phenomenon in recent years, driving many applications including virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa. Friedrich Lindenberg, from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, writes about how its data platform Aleph makes use of knowledge graphs to help investigative reporters analyze and cross-reference data.
For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with Lionel Faull of the London-based investigative newsroom and training outlet Finance Uncovered. He told GIJN’s Olivier Holmey all about the tools he uses to encrypt his communications, convert PDFs to readable text, find data on company ownership, sync his written and audio notes, and more.
The Ukrainian investigative group Bihus.info has built a name for itself investigating corruption. It formed in the aftermath of the Ukrainian Revolution, as journalists tried to piece together some of the documents destroyed and damaged by the former regime. Today, they are battling a tough media freedom environment and investigations into their own staff and reporters which slow them down and which they see as an effort to pressure them in relation to their reporting.