Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/crowdsourcing/)
GIJN has assembled a kind of starter-toolkit to help journalists track Russian money, political interference, and disinformation in their own countries. From oligarch planes to sanctions trackers, you’ll find over 30 useful sites here.
In 2021, nonprofit journalism site CORRECTIV.Lokal set out to investigate the impact of restricted access to abortion on the health and well-being of pregnant people in Germany. As the recent US Supreme Court ruling shows, ongoing changes to abortion rights and legislation affect millions of people around the world and make this a crucial topic for investigative journalists.
In a lightning round session at #GIJC21, a panel of leading reporters and editors needed just five minutes each to outline new tools and databases that any reporter can use to gather hard-to-find facts.
From investigating the US Capitol rioters to creating a database of the deaths of the homeless in the UK, to uncovering mistreatment in nursing homes in Australia, crowdsourcing and community-based reporting are changing how investigative journalists across the globe do their work. In this GIJC21 session, journalists share how they did it.
Journalist Rachel Chitra used news reports to build a database on hate crimes and violence in India. Here she gives tips for reporters facing a data gap, and offers lessons learned from her research about how journalists can reliably step in to gather, clean, and publish data when the government fails to keep track of important information.
Meduza, one of Russia’s last remaining independent news sites, lost 30,000 donors after the government cut off subscriber payments from the country due to unflinching coverage of the war. In less than a week, two German reporters organized a crowdfunding campaign to replace those funds to try to save Meduza.
Africa’s investigative journalists are playing a critical role in unpacking the continent’s expanding pandemic and have already snapped some governments out of their early complacency on COVID-19 preparedness. However, amid warnings about the potential impact of the virus on the continent’s 1.1 billion citizens, four leading African journalists shared strategies for coverage in this critical time in a webinar attended by reporters from 57 countries.
There is power in a crowd, and harnessing crowd contributions have become increasingly useful in investigative journalism. New York-based ProPublica shows how newsrooms are integrating crowdsourcing as a routine reporting tool, using it for data collection and to connect with and gather personal stories from readers.
Peter Gosselin at ProPublica has a very different investigative beat: Americans 60 years and older. More specifically: age discrimination and the treatment of older workers. Read how he recently exposed such practices at IBM by leveraging on crowdsourcing.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from July 16 to 22 finds @UpshotNYT confirming Nike’s claim that their Vaporflys really do give runners an advantage, @FinancialTimes visualizes Trump’s escalating trade war, Britain’s digital divide and introduces their new charting tool and @MilesMcBain makes some data journalists very happy by creating Datapasta.