Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/how-they-did-it/)
In “Under Poisoned Skies,” an award-winning investigation from BBC News Arabic, reporters headed to southern Iraq to explore the impact of gas flaring on the environment and public health. GIJN spoke to the director and producer of the documentary to hear how they did it.
The latest cross-border investigation by the ICIJ — Deforestation Inc. — used thousands of pages of documents, court records, green certificates databases, trade data, and audit reports to expose how a lightly regulated sustainability industry overlooks forest destruction and human rights violations.
Rare cancers among military veterans are increasingly linked to earlier chemical dumping and burn pits at old bases. In this piece, three Associated Press reporters share tips on exposing these links, based on their year-long investigation into a former US military base.
GIJN Arabic interviews BBC reporter Emir Nader about how his investigative team verified the leak of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s final, frantic phone calls before his 23-year-long dictatorship crumbled in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring uprising.
In a collaboration of 16 news organizations, the Pegasus Project revealed that thousands of citizens — including 180 journalists — were selected as targets of commercial spyware by 11 governments. The coordinators of that project told GIJN how the investigation worked, and offered detailed tips on how to investigate while under extreme threat of digital surveillance.
Private air charter companies used to transport collegiate and professional sports teams are also part of a vast network of US deportation flights tied to possible human rights abuses.
To get a behind-the-scenes look at The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the civilian death toll of US airstrikes, GIJN interviewed two key members of the reporting team: Christoph Koettl, a member of the Times’ visual Investigations team, and the series’ lead reporter, Azmat Khan.
In the 1990’s when Brazilian investigative journalist Kátia Brasil visited an Indigenous territory in the Amazon biome, the forest was “lush” and intact. But illegal gold mining has led to a surge of outsiders entering the area, and the results have been devastating. Two investigative teams, at Amazônia Real and Repórter Brasil, decided it was time to dig into this secretive industry, to find out who is behind the gold mining that is leaving a toxic scar across the region.
In a scandal known as ‘Vacunagate,’ 487 influential people in Peru, including its president, were secretly inoculated against COVID-19 months before vaccines were approved for the public. Two investigative newsrooms in Peru found that Chinese drug makers had secretly sent thousands of ‘courtesy’ vaccine doses to several countries in South America in addition to the doses needed for clinical trials there. Editors from both told GIJN how reporters can tackle this new form of corruption.
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.