Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/database/)
GIJN senior reporter Rowan Philip shares accumulated best practices from reporters around the world, on how to investigate culprits of war, human rights abuses, and other conflict.
OCCRP Data, part of the Investigative Dashboard, offers journalists a shortcut to the deep web. It now has over 170 public sources and more than 100 million leads for public search – news archives, court documents, leaks and grey literature encompassing UK parliamentary inquiries, companies and procurement databases, NGO reports and even CIA rendition flights, among other choice reading.
Whether investigating human rights abuses, money laundering, or even public officials’ conflicts of interests, reporters are increasingly developing their own databases for investigative projects. Here are a series of tips drawn from the experiences of a number of international journalists and from the author’s personal experience gathering and creating data sets for investigative stories.
This edition of the GIJN Toolbox explores global databases and remote sensing resources that reporters can use to investigate local environmental threats.
How Greenpeace’s investigative site, Unearthed, used satellite imagery and database mapping to reveal hundreds of fires on environmentally protected land in the English moors – including dozens that could be illegal.
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.
In the project Migrantes de otro mundo — Migrants from Another World — a team of more than 40 journalists in more than a dozen countries decided to collaborate to tell the untold story of the migrants from Asia and Africa who travel through Latin America each year. As the creators of the project put it: “By its wandering nature, migration is a story that can only be properly told through collaboration.”
Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 22 to 28 finds The New York Times analyzing travel patterns and genetic data to show how the disease spread across the United States, and the impact it has had on nursing homes and elderly care facilities. The Washington Post is responding to the increasing importance of visual data communication by expanding its data and graphics team, and the Pulitzer Center is calling for data journalism story proposals.
In September, the Danish national newspaper Berlingske, in partnership with the OCCRP and other international media partners, exposed a complex money laundering scheme led by Azerbaijan’s elite. The stories revealed that, between 2012 and 2014, $2.9 billion connected to the country was siphoned through European companies and banks. Here’s how they got the story.
Using image analysis tools on their own means nothing without asking the right questions. AJ Labs experimented with Google Vision API, a machine-learning technology, to analyze images used by Al Jazeera over the course of last year. They hope to integrate the technology into their newsroom in the future to make processes easier for their journalists.