Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/public-records/)
Investigative projects are often likened to marathons. But, every now and then, watchdog reporters need to sprint. In a recent IRE23 conference session, experts shared tips on how to unearth background facts about little-known people on short notice.
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.
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Finding out who owns land can be tough. While property registration systems exist in almost all countries, the quality and availability of the information vary widely.
Investigative journalists can discover story leads from scrutinizing financial or asset disclosures. Data journalist Paul Bradshaw shares nine ways to find stories in companies’ accounts, including looking out for conflicts of interest, and mapping connections between companies and directors.
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Full Property Guide
The lack of transparency about property records gets little media attention. It’s just not sexy enough for most journalists, as several land policy experts have lamented. Specific conflicts over land ownership, between local communities and corporate interests, for example, may make national headlines.
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Full Property Guide
Research into property records has played a major role in uncovering corruption. The following sampling shows the variety and importance of investigative reporting in this area.
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.
There are hundreds of stories in business registries and court documents around the world just waiting for a journalist to uncover them. Emmanuel Freudenthal shares his five tips on finding open-source secrets in Africa with GIJN — helpful guidelines which can be used around the world.
The full scale of Cameroon’s President Paul Biya’s jaunts abroad since he took power 35 years ago had never been calculated until now. Journalist Emmanuel Freudenthal details how he and two of his colleagues painstakingly pored over almost 4,000 newspaper pages to establish the number of days Biya had spent overseas on private trips and the amount the lavish trips cost the country.
Taboom Media has created a reporting guide for journalists interested in investigating how US-based faith groups and NGOs foment hate against LGBTQI+ communities, both in the United States and abroad.