Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/protests/)
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.
Data teams across the globe are still focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with The Economist examining the anti-war protests that have brought Russian citizens to the streets. Others have looked at the impact of flight bans, or been producing trackers to monitor and assess the sanctions that have been imposed as a result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order to go to war.
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.
At first glance, public procurement may not seem like the most Instagrammable subject. But what it lacks in visual appeal, it makes up for in scandal. So when journalist Jamilya Maricheva started posting stories about contracts and procurement in Kazakhstan, she soon amassed thousands of followers.
Tracking some of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter from August 23 to 29, we found a thread by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch exploring what we know so far about the long-term effects of immunizations, a look into the pandemic’s impact on the global female workforce by The Washington Post, and an investigation into teen pregnancies in Peru by OjoPúblico.
In August 2020, the leaders of Thailand’s pro-democracy movement published a list of demands after tens of thousands of reformists joined their call to take to the streets. Only one local media outlet dared to publish them: Prachatai, a bold start-up committed to promoting freedom of expression and democracy.
After going through “seven minutes of terror,” NASA’s Perseverance rover managed to successfully touch down on Mars last week. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from February 15 to 21 found reporting by The Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera, which offers more insight into the rover’s journey to the red planet. In this edition, we also feature a story about the boom in independent journalism in Russia, an analysis of the future of South Africa’s coal mining industry, and a critique of data visualization’s ability to fully convey the realities of large-scale tragedies.
The investigative team behind a story in The Washington Post that focused on two military helicopters that roared over demonstrators in Washington, DC on June 1 shared the exploratory scripts used to analyze and visualize flight data for the aircraft which monitored protesters in the city that day.
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African American man, in the United States has reignited national unrest just months after the death of George Floyd. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from August 24 to 30 finds ProPublica documenting police violence against Black Lives Matter protesters and tracking police accountability. The New York Times shows how the process of redlining, or denying mortgage finance to predominantly Black neighborhoods from the 1930s onwards, has resulted in heat disparities among cities, and BuzzFeed News uncovers scores of new internment camps in Xinjiang, China, by analyzing satellite data.
For this week’s Friday 5, where GIJN rounds up key reads from around the world, we’re looking at the latest in mapping and satellite imagery, including some clever sleuthing by Buzzfeed News; how to protect protesters in your photos; buried secrets in a US Senate report; and a rescue fund for Lebanese media hurt by the big blast.