Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/press-freedom-2/)
As director of Citizen Lab, Deibert, 58, will be the keynote speaker at the 2023 Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC23) in Gothenburg, Sweden. His warnings about the new cyber threats to independent journalism and democracy at that event promise to be even more ominous, and even more prescient.
While there are plenty of examples of student investigative reporters who are supported by their institutions, there are many others who face a lack of cooperation, low pay, legal threats, funding issues, and even physical harm.
Two editors from India and Hungary, respectively, Ritu Kapur and Peter Erdelyi, offer survival tips based on how their outlets have managed to stay afloat in the face of press freedom challenges in backsliding democracies.
After the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian Indigenous affairs expert Bruno Pereira were killed, several newsrooms and more than 50 journalists collaborated on Forbidden Stories’ The Bruno and Dom Project, to honor the pair’s legacy and expose illegal activities in the area along the borders of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, where the men were murdered.
Geographical diversity, the stories’ impact and uniqueness, the risks taken, and the techniques used were some of our criteria for selecting the strongest French language investigations of the year, selected by GIJN French Editor Alcyone Wemaëre, GIJN Francophone Africa Editor Maxime Domegni, GIJN French Assistant Editor Moran Kerinec, and Africa Assistant Editor Aïssatou Fofana.
The Kyiv Independent was launched just months before the start of the war in Ukraine. In her keynote address at the CIJ summer conference, the outlet’s editor-in-chief spoke about the challenges of running an investigative project in the midst of conflict, and how the team have battled to make the organization sustainable.
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Russia’s leading independent media outlet, Novaya Gazeta, said: “The award today goes to the entire community of investigative journalists.” Four days later — in a webinar interview with GIJN — Muratov set out the true stakes for investigative journalists who now share that high honor.
The methods and tools that governments employ to censor and control the internet, and the tools and ways to get around censorship, are a constantly shifting battleground. But there is a set of evergreen best practices and helpful software that are useful.
Daraj co-founder Diana Moukalled discusses the outlet’s origins in Lebanon, its impact, its funding, and reporting on women’s rights and corruption across the Middle East.
Amidst disinformation and numerous attacks on press freedom, investigative reporting has all but disappeared from Peru’s major news outlets, leaving a handful of small nonprofit digital outlets to carry the mantle of accountability reporting.