What We’re Reading: On the Pandemic Frontlines, Gov’t Responses to COVID-19, and the Global Autocratic Crackdown

This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the world in English, we found a helpful database that’s tracking government responses to COVID-19 with the help of 400 researchers, a multimedia project on how eight journalists from around the world are coping with reporting during the pandemic, and a piece on how autocrats are cracking down on independent news sites.

What We’re Reading: Pakistani and Zimbabwean Journalists Detained, Race and the Newsroom, and Tips for Interviewing

In this week’s Friday 5, where we round up key reads from around the world in English, one journalist from Zimbabwe and another from Pakistan were abducted and detained, the Reuters Institute report on Race and Leadership in the News Media was released, and NPR’s Terry Gross and The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro offered up some tips on interviewing.

What We’re Reading: COVID-19’s Global Press Crackdown

This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a report on the spike in crackdowns on journalists and media organizations reporting on COVID-19 , Transparency International’s suggestions for what to look out for with corruption and coronavirus, and a Citizen Lab report about how China manages social media censorship.

My Favorite Tools: Malachy Browne

For our series about journalists’ favorite tools, we spoke with The New York Times’ Malachy Browne, a pioneer in the field of visual investigations. He told GIJN’s Gaelle Faure about the tools that help him recreate crime scenes, including satellite imagery, EXIF data viewers, 3D modeling, and more.

Changing The Times

Nieman Journalism Lab calls it “one of the key documents of this media age,” and I can’t say I disagree… If anything, the main surprise is that even the storied NYT, with huge resources poured into its digital teams, has the same kind of problems as the rest of the mortal media world. But it’s an important document not because of any great revelations, but because it so clearly and starkly lays out the common challenges that all legacy news organizations face – and in some ways, the issues that even some startups will have to grapple with.

Investigating with Drones, Stone Tablets, and LinkedIn

This video was taken by a drone and then posted on a popular web portal in China. It provides an aerial view of the luxurious home of the son of Zhou Yongkang, the country’s security chief. There’s not much commentary here, just tracking shots of a white, two-story mansion built in the traditional style. But the real evidence showing corruption in the Zhou family wasn’t dug up by drones. Instead, it was names etched on tombstones in a village in China’s Jiangsu Province that allowed reporters to find the corruption trail.