Inside the secret CIA drone war. Intimate stories from the war on terror. People living under drones in Pakistan and drone pilots struggling with killing through joysticks in the US.
The film covers diverse and integral ground from the recruitment of young pilots at gaming conventions and the re-definition of “going to war”, to the moral stance of engineers behind the technology, the world leaders giving the secret “green light” to engage in the biggest targeted killing program in history, and the people willing to stand up against the violations of civil liberties and fight for transparency, accountability and justice.
This is just the beginning. In the midst of fast advancement of technology and lagging international legislation the film shows how drones change wars and possibly our future.
http://www.dronethedocumentary.com/
Brankica Stankovic is the editor and journalist on one of the most well-known documentary programs, the “Insider” on the TV-station B92
For five years she has been under constant police protection because she does her job as a critical investigative journalist. She refuses to bow to threats from assassins, ultra-nationalists, neo-Nazis and criminal networks based in hooligan movements.
Brankica Stankovic and her colleagues have also investigated the mafia in the construction industry, dubious real estate and money laundering in overseas tax havens.
Since 2009, when the program "Insider", brought several programs about how hooligans from the ultra-nationalist football clubs Partizan and Red Star also had numerous convictions for assault, vandalism, extortion and murder, Brankica Stankovic have been protected by special forces from the Serbian anti-terrorist corps.
Around the clock, there are heavily armed police around her and her young daughter, Sara.
Written and directed by Tom Heinemann
Produced by Borgen & Heinemann (2015)
Editor in chief, Jose Ruben Zamora owns the newspaper El Periodico in Guatemala. The media exposes cocaine cartels and the country's political corruption. He is threatened on his life and has been kidnapped. He had to send his three sons in exile in the United States.
But Jose Ruben Zamora refuses to remain silent.
Written and directed by Erling Borgen
Power through data with Excel and mine for impactful stories that only spreadsheets can disclose with a few clicks. This session will teach you the basics you need to turn tabular data into headlines and to edit your spreadsheet for user-friendly team work. Because every reporter needs to be able to check facts and figures.
For this session you need to bring your computer with a locally installed version of Microsoft Excel. If you dont have that, go to the Data-Pub and get it installed before you enter the session.
This session is about extracting data from webpages without using any code. When data is stuck within webpages, you can't analyse or visualise it. By taking this session, you will learn how to extract data from thousands of pages and from pages that require clicks to see the data. We'll also build a Google sheet with live data inside it.
In this two-hour Facebook and Twitter extravaganza you will learn the best tricks to find people fast.
It’s possible to search millions of personal details in Facebook with a new service called Graph. Henk van Ess will teach you how to use this technology creatively with real world examples. How do you find employees of a weapons company? What photos did Russians take in Ukraine? How do you access the vast library of videos from Facebook users? How do youfind the relatives of a criminal? You will learn a new language that opens a whole new world of research possibilities.
Bonus: how to follow people in Twitter without being noticed and finding eyewitnesses very fast.
Investigative journalists experience threats and violence against themselves, their family and colleges. Several press freedom NGO's and organizations like the Council of Europe have the safety of journalists and the issue of impunity on their agendas. But what strategies are most effective? And what should we do most urgently do to ensure that their member countries stop the persecution and violence against journalists doing their jobs?
The Italian mafia has established a hidden but lethal presence in Africa. Its members own diamond mines, nightclubs, and land, all with the complicity of corrupt regimes. Mafia, Inc. is more than ever a global business, infiltrating legitimate economies worldwide. An international team of reporters from the non-profit investigative journalism centres IRPI and ANCIR partnered with QUATTROGATTI and CORRECT!V to uncover for the first time the Italian mafia's grip on Africa.
Supported by two working grants for independent journalism, the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme of the European Journalism Centre and Journalism Fund, the work took seven months and included trips to Italy, South Africa, Namibia, Senegal and Kenya. Ten investigative reporters from six different countries, one data-journalist, one data-scientist, three editors, one cross-examiner, and a host of lawyers joined the effort in producing in-depth research into the Mafia's involvement in 13 countries.
In this session, four journalists involved will discuss how they conducted this investigation. They will share pivotal lessons with fellow investigative journalists on how to work in international, multidisciplinary teams on complicated cross-border issues.
This session is held in cooperation with the European Journalism Centre and the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme (Journalismgrants.org)
Stephen Grey (UK) and Roman Anin (Russia) set up a multinational team at Reuters to discover the money trail from the taxpayer to Putin’s friends. By combining multiple strategies of data journalism and field research, combing through customs records, corporate archives and the full data-set of two entire Moscow banks, they uncovered billions of dollars of suspicious money flows. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/comrade-capitalism/ )
"The Migrants' Files" is a consortium of journalists from over 15 European countries. It is coordinated by Journalism++, and is focused on examing the human and financial cost of 15 years of "Fortress Europe."
Two journalists share insights on this collaborative effort, looking specifically at:
Counting the Dead: Over 30,000 refugees and migrants have died in their attempt to reach or stay in Europe since the year 2000. The investigation showed how European policies impacted the death rate.
The Money Trails: Refugees and migrants spend over €1 billion a year to reach Europe. Europeans pay a similar amount to keep them out. A few companies benefit handsomely in the process.
Questions and topics we would like to discuss during the panel:
* How to collect data to measure something never measured before?
* How to coordinate 16 media organizations working in 13 languages?
* What tools do you use to coordinate work and databases?
* How do you reconcile on-the-ground reporting with data-journalism?
* How do you manage sending dozens of FOI requests in different countries?
This project is supported in part by Journalismfund.eu.
Award-winning filmmaker Firas Fayyad was twice held by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s fearful intelligence regime for exposing human rights abuses and covering the start of the 2011 “peaceful protests” that turned into civil war. Fayyad offers tips to foreign journalists investigating the trail of Europe’s biggest immigration crisis in decades.
He is joined via Skype by a Germany-based Syrian who reached Germany after travelling on “death boats” from Turkey across the Mediterranean.
Power through data with Excel and mine for impactful stories that only spreadsheets can disclose with a few clicks. This session will teach you the basics you need to turn tabular data into headlines and to edit your spreadsheet for user-friendly team work. Because every reporter needs to be able to check facts and figures.
For this session you need to bring your computer with a locally installed version of Microsoft Excel. If you dont have that, go to the Data-Pub and get it installed before you enter the session.
This session is about extracting data from webpages without using any code. Data is stuck within webpages making it unusable. You can't analyse and visualise it when it's stuck in a website. By taking this session, you will learn how to extract this data. Learn how to extract data from thousands of pages at a time, and to grab it from pages that require clicks to see it. We'll also build a Google sheet with live data inside it.
In this two-hour Facebook and Twitter extravaganza you will learn the best tricks to find people fast.
It’s possible to search millions of personal details in Facebook with a new service called Graph. Henk van Ess will teach you how to use this technology creatively with real world examples. How do you find employees of a weapons company? What photos did Russians take in Ukraine? How do you access the vast library of videos from Facebook users? How do youfind the relatives of a criminal? You will learn a new language that opens a whole new world of research possibilities.
Bonus: how to follow people in Twitter without being noticed and finding eyewitnesses very fast.
Discover visual investigative journalism from around the world in this session. Each participant got 5 minutes to present their project. If anyone spends more time, the session manager will abrubtly be calling the next project to the podium. Be inspired, and join for a fun and inspirational session.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Finding Africa’s missing money
Africa is losing money. Billions of dollars flow out of the continent every year due to the abuse of tax laws, smuggling, and corruption. It’s a huge problem and it’s under-reported. But there is now a growing number of journalists in Africa who are exposing this illicit financial activity.
At this session you will hear about investigations into stolen funds stashed in offshore bank accounts, secret tax breaks for corporations operating in Africa, the mispricing of mineral exports, and much more. The journalists will present their stories and explain some of the methods they use.
The session will feature participants in the Wealth of Nations programme, run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which works with Africa’s leading journalists and media houses – as well as top journalists from across the world – to report on illicit finance and tax abuse.
It will also feature journalists from the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which strengthens African investigative journalism by improving the expertise, sustainability and production capacity in muckraking newsrooms.
Do you have an idea for a good story concerning several countries?
Impressive stories on subjects as varied as tax avoidance, deadly bacteria or international corruption have been dug up through cross-border collaborations.
But how to get started?
Brigitte Alfter presents a step-by-step description of the process from idea to publication and beyond. Discuss and get advice for your story idea here.
Introduction to databases. Take the next step in data journalism and learn how to work with MS Access. You'll learn how to work with large data sets, to select, sort, and aggregate data. This class works best if you have some knowledge about Excel or similar programs.
For this session you need to bring your computer with a locally installed version of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. If you dont have that, go to the Data-Pub and get it installed before you join us.
Mac does not support Access, so make sure you have a PC.
Go beyond Google and Wikipedia into the deep web where public records, government data, archives, corporate information, and technical studies are hidden from plain view. Take home tips for backgrounding people and companies, tracking planes and ships, finding elusive documents, and more.
From the Amazon to the Transylvanian forest: What are the best ways to investigate illegal deforestation today? This panel will take you through the growing capability of satellite imagery at Skybox and other service providers, combined with and advanced "follow the money" and other reporting techniques.
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Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
It's not just war reporters who need to know about self-care on traumatic assignments. Investigative reporters who work intensively on such topics as migration, human trafficking, and sexual violence are also at risk of finding themselves in trauma trouble. Interviewing victims and witnesses, reviewing records of tragedy, viewing photos and video, and assembling the stories of traumatic events all can have a profound emotional impact. And then there is always some risk of becoming a direct target of harassment, detention or physical violence.
This panel will look at what it takes to remain resilient on such assignments, and offer practical advice, drawing on personal experience and the latest scientific insight into self-care and trauma.
For stats, we’ll go with the open source and free PSPP stats program. It is very similar to SPSS and even runs the SPSS syntax. Also PSPP has a Mac OS X version and a current Windows version.
Both can be found through links here: http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/get.html. The Windows version has a simple installer. The Mac version is a bit more involved, and those using Macs should set aside enough time to go through the steps.
In this panel, three grantees of the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme of the European Journalism Centre (EJC) discuss how their investigations came about. What challenges do investigative journalists face in covering development and how to overcome these? The journalists also touch upon the innovative aspects of their projects and explain why they moved away from traditional, linear storytelling.
This session is held in cooperation with the European Journalism Centre and the Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme (Journalismgrants.org).
The New Cold War
One and a half years after the annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation and the start of the war in Eastern Ukraine, the relations between Moscow and the West have reached a historical post Cold War low. Some observers warn for a New Cold War. "Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia", the London based think tank European Leadership Network recently stated.
How to measure the political, diplomatic and military dimension of the increasing tensions? What is happening behind the scenes and how to report on the real life, cyber and satellite battlefields?
In this panel, four journalists shed their light on these questions from different points of view. Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar explains how to analyse the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Norwegian Moscow correspondent Per Anders Johansen reveals how to research the cyber war between NATO and Moscow. Ukrainian TV journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk will give tips on how to cover the ongoing conflict in East Ukraine. And Norwegian reporter Bård Wormdal explains how to unravel the mystery of satellite warfare.
You can take your journalism many steps further if you learn to code. You can build web scrapers, you can clean and analyze data, and you can build visualizations. If programming doesn't scare you, you'll find that by adding a bit code to many online services, you'll get a much better result.
It's not hard to code. It can actually be quite fun.
In this session you'll get an introduction to the fundamentals of programming. If you plan to go to later sessions on programming web scrapers, and if you have no prior knowledge of programming, you might want to start with this session.
The trainer of the session, Tommy Kaas, is a journalist, who taught himself to code to create web scrapers.
Bring your own laptop to the session.
Here's how to organize your document trail. We see more and more situations in which journalists get lots of electronic documents and need tools for analyzing, sharing, and publishing. DocumentCloud is a good first step into this world. And with just an hour of practical training, you'll be up and running with this free tool.
Please note that this session is based on Access 1.
Introduction to databases. Take the next step in data journalism and learn how to work with MS Access. You'll learn how to work with large data sets, to select, sort, and aggregate data. This class works best if you have some knowledge about Excel or similar programs.
For this session you need to bring your computer with a locally installed version of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. If you dont have that, go to the Data-Pub and get it installed before you join us.
Mac does not support Access, so make sure you have a PC.
It's happened to you--you need to do a story on a topic that's completely outside of your experience. Surely there's someone more qualified? The answer is usually NO.
Now what? Now you have to come up to speed on that topic ASAP. In this mini-course I'll show you the strategies and tactics I use to learn a domain as rapidly as possible. You won't be an expert, but you'll have a bunch of tips and methods to get to competence quickly. I can't make you pass the PhD exam in quantum physics, but a little knowledge about learning and Google search strategies can get to through that story.
The Council of Europe Platform to promote the protection of journalism and safety of journalists has been online since April this year. A short presentation and demonstration will explain how this platform is different from other online initiatives gathering and disseminating information about threats to journalists, who are the partners, how it operates, what are its objectives and how it can be useful to journalists as a source of information on threats, trends and governmental and Council of Europe responses to them.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Microsoft Access is the way to start. Of course, it’s only available on Windows.
If not Access, the Windows users should either install SQL Server Express 2014 found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42299.
They should select ExpressAdv 32BIT\SQLEXPRADV_x86_ENU.exe for the correct 32-bit installer or ExpressAdv 64BIT\SQLEXPRADV_x64_ENU.exe for the correct 64-bit installer. If they’re not sure which to use, then have them install the 32-bit by default. The software is free but not open source.
Or they can go open source (and free) by installing PostgreSQL from here http://www.postgresql.org/download/. From that page, there are both 32-bit and 64-bit installers. Once PostgreSQL is installed, they should next install Navicat on top of that found here: http://www.navicat.com/download/navicat-for-postgresql. They’ll have to use the 14-day trial version unless they want to purchase it outright.
For Mac users, we’re recommending PostgreSQL for Mac followed by Navicat on top of that. PostreSQL is found here http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgdownload#osx and Navicat here: http://www.navicat.com/download/navicat-for-postgresql.
Meet journalists from all over the world who care about source protection and secure communications.
WHAT will we be doing?
This event is dedicated to sharing the art of encryption to anyone interested in learning how to install and use tools to help secure their online communications and exchange public keys.
BRING: Your laptop (Windows & Mac).
Cryptoparties try to bring crypto to the masses. Examples can't be too low-tech.
Our focus is journalists with only very basic computer skills, but geeks'n'nerds are very welcome, as well. Visitors should go home with a running crypto toolset on their laptops.
This is a cryptoparty: https://www.cryptoparty.in/organize/howto
Ten-year-old Yula, has but one dream—to escape the largest garbage dump in Europe and lead a normal life.
For 14 years, Oscar-nominated director Hanna Polak follows Yula as she grows up in the forbidden territory of Svalka, the largest garbage dump in Europe, 13 miles from the Kremlin in Putin’s Russia.
SOMETHING BETTER TO COME is Yula’s story and is a dramatic cinema vérité story about coming of age -- and maturing to the point of taking destiny into one’s own hands.
It is a universal story of hope, courage, and life.
Following the discovery of oil in 2010, Ghana is on the road to becoming one of Africa's more economically successful countries. But it is not quite there yet and still ranks 138th out of 187 countries in the 2014 Human Development Index.
According to the World Food Programme (WFP), four out of 10 children under the age of five in northern Ghana are chronically malnourished, meaning they will not be able to meet their full growth potential. Some of them, to put it even more starkly, will die for lack of food.
This is why Ghana still receives tens of millions of dollars' worth of food aid from the international community.
But while these annual donations, from the WFP and others, are carefully calculated to provide sustenance to all those in dire need, somehow they never prove to be enough.
The food arrives in bulk at government-run distribution centres and then quickly runs out. So what happens to all the food that is donated?
Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas´ undercover investigation reveals how officials of the Ghanaian Health Service – some of the very people tasked with distributing aid to starving children - are stealing and selling it for their own gain.
Armed with the evidence, Anas then joins forces with the Ghanaian police and together they plot a sophisticated sting to catch the crooks in the act.
Learn how to summarize data in minutes rather than hours on your spreadsheet with pivot tables. This session will be most useful if you're already familiar with the basics of Excel or another spreadsheet program.
From data search to data visualization: How do you get access to huge amounts of data, and how do you visualize your findings? In this session you will see different ways of working with data, with examples from USA Today, ProPublica, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Learn about advanced tricks in Excel that will blow your mind and give you control over your data like never before. We'll conquer common data-cleaning issues and much more.
Snowden revealed how the American and British intelligence services systematically intercept metadata from the world's population. Meanwhile, the Danish project #Sporet (in English #Tracked) made the debate concrete and demonstrated how detailed one can identify peoples' thoughts and living patterns solely by using so-called metadata.
A team from Danish daily Berlingske collected, analyzed, and presented full data sets on two MPs from each party in the Danish government, using more than 18,000 e-mails, 31,000 registered telecommunications data items, 34,000 location points and thousands more items of data from banks, calendars. browser histories, iphone apps, photos, internet shopping, tax authorities, police databases, Facebook and more. The data tell a unique story through graphs, maps, video, images and other advanced visualizations and is perhaps the most comprehensive data project made on personal data. #Sporet won the Nordic Data Awards in 2014 and a Data Journalism Award in 2015.
IMSI-catchers are used by law enforcement in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, for tracking organized crime and intelligence-gathering. A team from daily Aftenposten wanted to find out how often this technology was used in Norway, and whether its use was legal. They started their chase with 100,000 rows of measurements from a cryptophone and 42,000 rows of different variables taken from mobile networks in Oslo. Here is the first story they broke.
For 14 years, Oscar and Emmy nominated filmmaker Hanna Polak has been tracking homeless children in Moscow.
The result is the award-winning “Something Better to Come,” a documentary that shows us life on Europe´s largest garbage dump. An illegal place to visit, run by the mafia, where you could get killed by wild dogs or run over by heavy machinery, but where hope nonetheless lingers.
Through her experiences with this highly unusual project, Hanna will talk about the process of developing a story and developing the hypothesis to prove it. She also address how to finance a long-term project and deal with situations when people formally don`t exist.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Building data and research bases for 18 Arab states from scratch:
In this session, Hamoud Almahmoud, in charge of setting up the Arab world’s first data and research center, shares his drive to collecting on-line/off-line records in 18 Arab countries where the right to access information is non-existent, except for Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen. He shows how the Amman-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), can help journalists benefit from a trove of registration records for Arab companies, profiles of investors and official gazettes, and court cases. He offers tips on how to search for data in the region where spelling the names of businessmen, investors and companies may differ from country to country.
Khadija Sharife will focus on the concept of Africa's Double Offshore, using the example of Nigeria's hidden deepwater economy, catalysing loss of revenue in multiple forms through the parallel fiscal regime. Nigeria's offshore is characterised by maritime and corporate secrecy, use of tax havens, imprecise and vague national and international legislation, facilitating opacity and leakage in form and flow. This project includes an academic report, investigative pieces, and a website (doubleoffshore.org), still being populated, that focuses primarily on rig ownership relocated to virtual political economies governed by secrecy.
Eva Constantaras will discuss challenges in accessing developing country data on opium eradication, arms trafficking, and public procurement. In Kenya, civil society groups are generating valuable data from parliamentary monitoring, extractive industry documents and budget analysis that have led to major investigations. Experiments in structured journalism in Central America are also mapping out power structures of organized crime.
Pirate Fishing is a groundbreaking interactive web game that allows users to act as journalists exposing the multi-million dollar illegal fishing trade affecting West Africa’s poorest people. Developed by Italy’s Altera Studio team and Al Jazeera, the project is set in Sierra Leone, where journalists film South Korean trawlers fishing illegally in protected areas and stealing fish from local fishermen.
By watching clips, the user follows the process of evidence gathering: destroyed nets, photos of ships with hidden names, and snapshots of crew members. At the end of each clip the user must enter the evidence into the right section of the notebook to score points and to advance in status. There are several virtual environments where the user can decide how to proceed and convince officials to act.
You can watch panelist Juliana Ruhfus' original Pirate Fishing documentary, on which the game is based, here (Part One and Two) and the print report here.
Documents have long been a mainstay of the best investigative reporting around the world. This session will explore how to find obscure reports and documents on persons, institutions, companies and programs – valuable information that is often otherwise unattainable. It will also offer practical guidelines on how to analyze documents and reports to unleash their full investigative power.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Two of the central people behind exposing South Africa’s big arms and corruption scandal share their insights. They are joined by Kristoffer Egeberg from Norway's daily Dagbladet, who investigated how the Norwegian Defence Ministry illegally sold an entire fleet of naval ships to paramilitary forces in Nigeria. Egeberg this year won SKUP's top award for his reporting on the story. Paul Holden and Andrew Feinstein played important roles in exposing the South Africa’s big arms and corruption scandal.
This session will look at basic calculations for overview analysis of data, showing ways to quickly find stories through ratios, rates, percentage change, and summarizing data with pivot tables.
How can you secure your smartphone communications? This session will teach you how to establish encrypted mobile voice and text communication. We cover the following apps: TextSecure, RedPhone and Signal (Whisper). Android and iOS.
Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 3.00-4.30 p.m.
You're comfortable doing data analysis in spreadsheets for your stories and managing databases. But now you would like to take your data journalism and analytical skills to the next level. This session introduces using statistics for stories. It will cover a more systematic way of thinking about your approach to data and then applying your new understanding through descriptive statistics with an emphasis on storytelling. Familiarity with spreadsheets is necessary but no experience with statistics is assumed.
Attendees shoud download software before the session: PSPP stats program. It is very similar to SPSS and even runs the SPSS syntax. Also PSPP has a Mac OS X version and a current Windows version.
Both can be found through links here: http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/get.html.
You can get installation help at the Data Pub Thursday between 3 p.m. and 4.30 p.m.
"The bad friends of the Pope"
It's a cold evening in Marc. There is new pope appointed. How can you validate in just 30 minutes connections with dictator Videla, if any?
The killing of Ghadaffi
A Syrian reporter claims Gadaffi is killed. Your mission, if you accept it, is to prove he is wrong or right that night.
The secret plane
A prototype of a new plane lands secretly in Amsterdam. Everyone denies. How do you proof it's true?
This sessions is a one of three sessions about Verification Handbook, supported by European Journalism Centre, EJC.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Quantitative approaches to investigating public budgets and spending: what works and what doesn't. You will get examples of best practices on reporting on budgets, basically how to report big numbers, what you can and can't compare. You will get a short introduction to how to use network analysis in journalistic practice, applied on public spending data.
Open Refine is the best tool to clean really dirty data -- the kind of data in which the same name might be spelled in 30 different ways. It has built-in cleaning tools for analysts and journalists.
An introduction to webscraping with Python: This two-part, hands-on workshop will teach basic newsroom programming concepts using the Python language. We'll cover how to deconstruct a common reporting task -- gathering a table of data from a public website -- and assemble a solution from useful Python libraries that you can use again and again.
Prerequisites: Attendees should be familiar with HTML and the command line and be comfortable with databases and SQL. If you've ever written a string function in Excel ("=left(A2,5)"), you'll be fine.
Python has to be installed at your laptop before the training. Somebody can help you at the “Data Pub” on Thursday.
Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 3.00-4.30 p.m.
This session builds on skills learned in Stats for Stories 1. Now that you have a familiar way to thinking statistically about your data, this session introduces the notion of statistical significance and how to use it to back up findings from cross tabulations. In a sense, it helps answer the questions: Is what I'm finding in my data worth reporting?
Journalists around the world are harnessing the power of data journalism for news. In this session, we'll take a global tour of the latest in investigative and data-based stories, highlighting innovations in analysis and presentation. We’ll also offer practical tips to help you make your next data-driven story memorable and bulletproof.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Crime, accidents, and crises are often covered by young journalists without training or working experience. This makes them vulnerable TO stress reactions and other health problems. For first responders, handling human tragedies and coping with stress reactions are part of one's basic training. The same should be the case for students attending schools of journalism. Some universities have experience giving these kinds of lessons. How they do it will be presented at this seminar.
An introduction to webscraping with Python: This two-part, hands-on workshop will teach basic newsroom programming concepts using the Python language. We'll cover how to deconstruct a common reporting task -- gathering a table of data from a public website -- and assemble a solution from useful Python libraries that you can use again and again.
Prerequisites: Attendees should be familiar with HTML and the command line and be comfortable with databases and SQL. If you've ever written a string function in Excel ("=left(A2,5)"), you'll be fine.
Python has to be installed at your laptop before the training. Somebody can help you at the “Data Pub” on Thursday.
Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 3.00-4.30 p.m.
This final stats session, again building on skills learned in Stats for Stories 1 and 2, introduces one of the most powerful statistical procedures in the investigative reporter's toolkit. We'll cover regression analysis and the power it can add to your storytelling.
While the tools and techniques to present large datasets in a visual way may differ from project to project, the basic design principles stay pretty much the same whether you're creating a poster or a news application. During this session, we'll cover the fundamentals of good presentation, layout, and design, looking at lots of examples (both good and bad). By the end you'll be able to explain why these principles work and see how other designers, especially news designers, use them. Once you recognize the concepts, you’ll become more conscious of when and how to use them in your own projects.
ASSIGNMENT CHINA: FOLLOW THE MONEY (55 minutes)
Presented by Mike Chinoy, USC US-China Institute
In many decades of Western news coverage of China, 2012 was a watershed moment. In the space of just a few months, a Bloomberg News team headed by correspondent Michael Forsythe publishing a sweeping expose of how relatives of China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, has earned vast fortunes in a variety of often disguised business deals. Soon after, David Barboza of the New York Times published his own revelations of the wealth accumulated by the relatives of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
Both stories broke new ground, not only in terms of what they revealed about China’s new rich, but also as examples of a new kind of investigative journalism that has become increasingly important for covering a rapidly changing China. The correspondents took advantage of China’s evolution towards a more open, internationally engaged, market-style economy to unravel a series of complex, opaque, often hidden set of business dealings reaching to the highest levels in the People’s Republic.
The behind-the-scenes story of the journalists who conducted the investigations -- and faced the dramatic, controversial, and often frightening consequences -- is the subject of “Follow the Money.” Based on extensive interviews with most of the leading figures involved, the film chronicles the emergence of a new kind of journalism that will become increasingly crucial as reporters -- and the public at large -- seek to understand the dynamics of a new, wealthy, and increasingly powerful China.
“Follow the Money” is the final episode of Assignment China, a 12-part series chronicling the history of American correspondents in China from the 1940s to the present day produced by the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. The lead reporter is Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the Institute and former CNN Beijing bureau chief and senior asia correspondent.
http://indiasdaughter.com/home/
When the news of the ‘India’s Daughter’ (Jyoti Singh) gang-rape hit our TV screens around the world in mid December 2012, I was as shocked and upset as we all are when faced with such brazen abandon of the norms of ‘civilised’ society. I knew that violent and brutal rapes happen all the over the world with horrifying and relentless frequency.
What moved and compelled me to commit to the harrowing and difficult journey of making this film was not so much the horror of this rape, but the optimism occasioned by the events that followed the rape – the reports of protesters, in unprecedented numbers, braving the December freeze for over a month, in response to this heinous crime. It was the ordinary men and women of India who withstood the onslaught of tear gas shells, lathi charges, and water cannons, to make their cry of ‘enough is enough’ heard with such extraordinary forbearance, commitment and passion, that inspired me to action. This was an ‘Arab spring for Gender Equality”, and it occurred to me that in my lifetime I had never witnessed any other country make such a stand for ‘me’, for my rights as a woman. I felt compelled to bend my skills, my energies and whatever talents I may have in my field of work (film-making) to amplify those determined and hopeful voices who cried “enough is enough”.
When we look at the worldwide statistics of rape and violence against women in general, India comes off pretty badly. But I think it is important to bear in mind that this is by no means an India-centric problem. Far from it. Patriarchy, discrimination against, and devaluation of women is rife the world over. The statistics which roll at the end of the film bear witness to that. In my own country, the UK, 33% – that’s 1 in 3 – young girls aged between 13 and 17 have experienced sexual violence. One woman in 5, globally, will be raped or be a victim of attempted rape, and 1 in 3, globally, is beaten, forced into sex, or abused. I have been raped.
One of the more startling aspects of “INDIA’s DAUGHTER” is an unprecedented confession in custody from one of the rapists in this case. We filmed him in Tihar Jail, Delhi, after his conviction. This interview has afforded crucial insight into the mindset of the men who committed the rape, and presents a wider in-depth exploration of the patriarchal society and culture which seeds and encourages violence against women. With understanding comes the possibility of change.
What chilled and depressed me most of all through the time I spent making the film, was the realisation when I met the rapists in prison, that these were ordinary, apparently normal and ‘unremarkable’ men. The horrifying details of the rape – the pulling out of Jyoti’s intestines with bare hands -- had led me to expect deranged monsters. It would be easier to process this heinous crime, if they were monsters, the ‘rotten apples in the barrel’, aberrant in nature. Perhaps then, those of us who believe that capital punishment serves a purpose, and I am not amongst them, could wring their hands in relief when they are hanged. For me the truth couldn’t be further from this – and perhaps their hanging will even mask the real problem, which is that it is society itself and our shared culture when it comes to attitudes to women, that is responsible for these men and for their actions.
An equally chilling and shocking aspect of the film lies in the contribution to it by the defence lawyers, so called ‘educated’ men. It is this, even more than the horrifying lack of remorse and self-justification of the rapists, that confounds viewers and makes them utterly furious. ML Sharma: “We have the best culture. In our culture there is no place for a woman”. AP Singh (the other defence lawyer in the case): “If my daughter indulged in pre-marital relations, I would take her to my farmhouse and in front of my whole family, I would pour petrol on her and burn her alive”.
Jyoti herself, who fought tooth and nail to afford her further education, was determined to work towards changing her society’s attitudes to girls and women. Her motto, according to her closest friends was: “Don’t think you are a ‘girl’: what a boy can do, we can do!” and she’d often express her conviction that the biggest problem in India was ‘mentality’ – that people have fixed and stereotyped notions about the differences between girls and boys, which limit girls lives and infringe their rights. Tragically, it was the very values and attitudes that she decried, and strived against in whatever way she could, which destroyed her. This film pays tribute to her remarkable and inspiring short life, and it looks through the specifics of this case to shine a bright light on what fuels rape and violence against women.
If anything positive can be said to have come out of the horror of this event, it is the awakening amongst women and men alike in India and the world to the issue of violence against women. This particular gang rape has been a huge turning point. The case has been a catalyst for change, and the protesters forced government to at least introduce some immediate measures in response to their call. Not enough, but a start. Ultimately, the film is optimistic – as Leila Seth says towards the end of the film: “These things will change. It’s only a question of how hard we push”. The massive public response to the incident bears witness to an attitudinal change on the horizon, a resetting of the moral compass.
All of us who care about those who bear us and who are (or should be) half our world, should stand up now with courage and commitment and demand this long overdue change. I hope with all my heart that this film will prove to be the powerful tool for change I meant it to be. And for this, we need you. Please join hands with our campaign and lend your energies, ideas, and voice to support this push for change.
Here's how to securely communicate with sources and colleagues around the world. This session will teach you how to establish encrypted chat. We will create a DuckDuckGo account, install Pidgin (PC) or Audium (Mac) and the Off The Record (OTR) plugin. Finally, we will exchange fingerprints and talk about general security surrounding the use of encrypted chat. Mac and PC.
In the two CartoDB sessions you'll learn how to create interactive maps for the web with a free tool. CartoDB is an online application, and you won't have to install anything on your computer.
In this first session you'll be introduced to CartoDB. We will geocode addresses and create maps with points. You'll learn the basic map operations. We'll style the map and the info windows and make the map ready for publishing.Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 4.30-6.00 p.m.
All data journalists can benefit from learning Structured Query Language or SQL, the language behind database managers. Whether you're hunting for evidence in large databases, needing to mash data tables together, or building an interactive database for your news organization, SQL is a tool for making these data skills possible. This course introduces SQL with an emphasis on how it can help reporters manage data for deeper investigative dives into that data.
These sessions introduce the SQL model and cover the basics of writing SQL queries. Familiarity with spreadsheets is helpful but no experience with SQL or databases is assumed.
Attendees should install software before the session, and they can get installation help at the Data Pub Thursday between 4.30 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Microsoft Access is the way to start and it’s only available on Windows.
If not Access, the Windows users should either install SQL Server Express 2014 found here:https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42299.
They should select ExpressAdv 32BIT\SQLEXPRADV_x86_ENU.exe for the correct 32-bit installer or ExpressAdv 64BIT\SQLEXPRADV_x64_ENU.exe for the correct 64-bit installer. If they’re not sure which to use, then have them install the 32-bit by default. The software is free but not open source.
Or they can go open source (and free) by installing PostgreSQL from herehttp://www.postgresql.org/download/. From that page, there are both 32-bit and 64-bit installers. Once PostgreSQL is installed, they should next install Navicat on top of that found here: http://www.navicat.com/download/navicat-for-postgresql. They’ll have to use the 14-day trial version unless they want to purchase it outright.
For Mac users, we’re recommending PostgreSQL for Mac followed by Navicat on top of that. PostreSQL is found here http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgdownload#osx and Navicat here: http://www.navicat.com/download/navicat-for-postgresql.
You can get installation help at the Data Pub Thursday between 3 p.m. and 4.30 p.m.
Ahead of the October 13th publication of the first official report into the downing of Flight MH17 in Ukraine, award winning investigative journalist Eliot Higgins reviews the open source evidence of who was responsible, the claims made by the Russian government, what it all means in the context of the first official report, and how open source and social media investigation has played a key role in helping us understand what happened in Ukraine on July 17th 2014..
This sessions is a one of three sessions about Verification Handbook, supported by European Journalism Centre, EJC.
Angolan investigative reporter and anti-corruption activist Rafael Marques de Morais is editor of the newssite MakaAngola and author of the book “Blood Diamonds; Corruption and Torture in Angola.” In his book, Marques de Morais accuses some of Angolas top generals of human rights violations and corruption, an accusation that recently led to him being convicted for “defamation.” Marques de Morais has received several awards for his work, in March he received the Freedom of Expression award from the UK-based Index on Censorship.
Reporting On Modern Day Slavery – Lessons We Learned
The aim of this talk is to instruct others, to learn from our successes and failures and to alert them to the best ways of reporting the issue.
Irish investigative reporter Sean O'Driscoll focuses on conditions for migrant workers in the Gulf states and gives insight into the realities of police surveillance, media bribery, harassment and deportation in these countries.
O'Driscoll was himself deported from the United Arab Emirates in October 2014 after beeing tailed for months by pursuit cars, bribed, propositioned to spy on other foreign journalists and possibly traced by way of his cell phone. Read more on that in this Newsweek article.
Tobore Ovuoire from Nigeria's Premium Times went undercover to unravel how trafficking rings operate as proper organised crime syndicates.
Here's how to securely communicate with sources and colleagues around the world. This session will teach you how to establish encrypted chat. We will create a DuckDuckGo account, install Pidgin (PC) or Audium (Mac) and the Off The Record (OTR) plugin. Finally, we will exchange fingerprints and talk about general security surrounding the use of encrypted chat. Mac and PC..
In this second of two sessions you'll learn to use more features in CartoDB. You will see how to create a cloropleth map like this, and we will style the polygons so the different colors reflect different values in the dataset, we are visualizing. We will merge datasets inside CartoDB, a technique which will make it easy to upload datasets, and based on those create cloropleth maps. We'll also create visualizations using several maps. To join this session you must attend session 1 or have a basic knowledge of CartoDB.
Bring your own laptop to the session.
Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 4.30-6.00 p.m.
This session builds on skills learned in Structured Query Language for Reporters 1. Now that you've written your first SQL queries, expand you analytical power by learning to summarize and aggregate your data through SQL queries. We'll emphasize how SQL commands help you find evidence for your investigations in larger databases.
While the visual presentation of data has been part of news since its earliest days, it’s in the midst of a renaissance. Building graphics, data visualizations, and complex interactives is quickly becoming a central part of every newsroom’s daily journalism operation. During this session, we'll cover the basics of how to visually tell a clear, honest, and compelling journalistic story with data. We’ll learn how to think about presenting data visually, how and why it works, and how to do it the right way.
How do journalists avoid pitfalls and mistakes when making investigative stories? The answer is a system of pre-publication quality control.
Together with his investigative team, Nils Hanson has developed a methodological approach to fact-checking and "bullet-proofing" investigative stories that is now being adopted in other newsrooms. Participants will be taught tools to avoid becoming the target of investigations themselves.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Mojo Masterclass – As journalism becomes increasingly competitive, mainstream or community journalists need a broader digital storytelling skillset.
They especially need to know how to mojo – to use smart devices to create user generated stories (UGS).
The Smartmojo 101 Guerrilla Workshop is a three-hour fast track introduction to mobile journalism. Participants will learn how to shoot a basic sequence, use natural light, receive tips on recording clean audio, and learn how to edit this into a short UGS—all on their iPhone.
This is a practical mojo workshop and you’ll need an iPhone loaded with the iMovie app.
Go Mojo!
In this session Eggert will discuss training consists of ‘attendance’ phases and ‘e-learning’ phases and proposing that blended learning can enrich continued training for working journalists and make it more efficient. He will share with the audience the design of our blended learning courses, the topics covered and the electronic tools usde. The presentation will include an evaluation of participants’ performance after attending a course, and he will present and discuss the hypothesis of why blended learning increases the efficiency of any training for working journalists. Metze will describe work over the past 4 years in which an experienced Dutch investigative journalist and a small, respected weekly, developed a 6-month training program called The Investigative Teaching Lab, from which theysubsequently developed a non-profit platform for investigative journalism. The core principles of the effort are teamwork and a multi-method, multi-perspective approach to investigative journalism. In the teaching lab, teams of 4 to 6 participants study, discuss and work on one big investigation. He will present on the opportunities, challenges and results of the methodology and using the same principles for developing a nonprofit business model.
Get help with Sofware downloading Friday 4.00-5.00 p.m. in the Data Pub.
This class will introduce you to analyzing data for stories by using mapping software. More than just a pretty picture, mapping software can help you uncover stories that others miss.
The sessions will use ArcGIS Online. You will get free licenses so you can use the software when you return to your home country.
This class is divided into two parts. Each session is one-hour long. You are not expected to have any mapping skills beforehand, but if you know how to use a spreadsheet, that would be helpful.
Get help with software downloading in the Data Pub Thursday 4.30-6.00 p.m.
This final SQL session, again building on skills learned in Structure Query Language for Reporters 1 and 2, shows how to write SQL queries that join separate data tables and databases together for more powerful investigative analysis.
It’s Friday 16.00 hrs.
The news broke that Jihadi John, ISIS-executioner, is Mohammed Emwazi and lived in a normal house in London. How do you find his family? How do you find videos from inside his house? How do you proove that his brother has ties to ISIS? And how do you do this all in twohours? Or how do you find out, hours before the news broke, that a German pilot probably committed suicide? Henk van Ess will show you actual research he did for the Daily Telegraph and Die Welt.
The story was followed by criticism against government in the Diet session and the government later revised the schedule. NHK also aired the story that things are far from under-control on the day Japanese prime minister made a speech at IOC meeting based on the analysis of what TEPCO disclosed.
A new start-up that intends to stay on the story - for longWhen we look at the worldwide statistics of rape and violence against women in general, needless to say India comes off pretty badly. But I think it is important to bear in mind that this is by no means an India-centric problem. Far from it. Patriarchy, discrimination against, and devaluation of women is rife the world over. The statistics which roll at the end of the film bear witness to that. In my own country, the UK, 33% – that’s 1 in 3 – young girls aged between 13 and 17 have experienced sexual violence. One woman in 5, globally, will be raped or be a victim of attempted rape, and 1 in 3, globally, is beaten, forced into sex, or abused. I have been raped.
One of the more startling aspects of “INDIA’s DAUGHTER” is an unprecedented confession in custody from one of the rapists in this case. We filmed him in Tihar Jail, Delhi, after his conviction. This interview has afforded crucial insight into the mindset of the men who committed the rape, and presents a wider in-depth exploration of the patriarchal society and culture which seeds and encourages violence against women. With understanding comes the possibility of change.
From idea to publishing – this classic session gives you important tips on how to make sure your investigative project becomes a success.
It will give you important tips on how to examine your own idea, how to convince human sources to cooperate with you, how to get the evidence you need, how to demand accountability and how to make sure that everything you publish is accurate, fair and relevant.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
The most widespread epidemic of Ebola virus disease in global history started in West Africa in December 2013. The mortality rate among infected patient groups was as high as 70 percent in countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Almost two years later more than 11.000 people has succumbed to the virus, and the epidemic has had severe consequences in countries affected.
How did the epidemic spiral out of control? and what kind of challenges do reporters face when covering an unknown and deadly enemy? What kind of lessons can the coverage of an African epidemic teach us about covering the next health emergency?
US journalist Ashoka Mukpo was on assignment in Liberia as a freelance photographer for NBC when he himself contracted Ebola in October 2014. He survived thanks to fast treatment at hospitals in Liberia and the US.
“I think it's important in life to take risks for things that you believe in. But it's also important to keep yourself safe. So, I mean, it's hard to call Ebola a learning experience. But I think that I'm gonna walk away from this with some important lessons for the future”, he told NBC after doctors said he no longer had Ebola in his bloodstream.
Editor Rodney D. Sieh owns and runs Liberia’s FrontPage Africa and will explain how he and his staff was covering the epidemic, and how negliance and bad decisions by the government and local authorities made the situation worse.Rosemary Nwaebuni from Nigeria’s Pointer Newspaper focuses on her coverage of “Nigeria and Ebola: The Success Story
How do you conduct a critical investigation on foreign soil? You don’t know the language or landscape, and you still need to protect your sources. How can you film or report, when you "flash" so much that everything stops around you or you risk being arrested? And what's hit and run television?
Award-winning documentarian Tom Heinemann shares practical examples in this session.
Displaying a series of events can be as simple as drawing a straight line. But if you want to get fancier, there are a bunch of other options to display chronologies and storylines. In this workshop, we'll take a tour of current timelines in the wild and walk you through three open-source tools to help you make your own: ProPublica's TimelineSetter, Zach Wise's TimelineJS, and WNYC's Vertical Timeline.
Get help with Sofware downloading Friday 4.00-5.00 p.m. in the Data Pub.
This class will introduce you to analyzing data for stories by using mapping software. More than just a pretty picture, mapping software can help you uncover stories that others miss.
The sessions will use ArcGIS Online. You will get free licenses so you can use the software when you return to your home country.
This class is divided into two parts. Each session is one-hour long. You are not expected to have any mapping skills beforehand, but if you know how to use a spreadsheet, that would be helpful.
An introduction to webscraping with Python: This two-part, hands-on workshop will teach basic newsroom programming concepts using the Python language. We'll cover how to deconstruct a common reporting task -- gathering a table of data from a public website -- and assemble a solution from useful Python libraries that you can use again and again.
Prerequisites: Attendees should be familiar with HTML and the command line and be comfortable with databases and SQL. If you've ever written a string function in Excel ("=left(A2,5)"), you'll be fine.
Python has to be installed at your laptop before the training. Somebody can help you at the “Data Pub” on Thursday.
BBC’s Internet investigations specialist, Paul Myers, goes through his favourite online research tools. Bring your questions to this informal romp through Researchville. Learn how to investigate website domain names, reverse IP search and examine IP blocks for parallel websites, find hidden sub-domains, scan a server for hidden photos and use research software, apps and add-ons.
Reporta™ is a security app created by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) for journalists working in potentially dangerous environments. Designed in consultation with leading journalists and global security experts, Reporta is the only comprehensive global security app created specifically for the media community. The app empowers journalists to take control of their personal safety. Reporta has three key features:
1. Activate a Check-in system that creates a trail when you are working in potentially dangerous environments.
2. Create customized Alert messages when you or a colleague may be at risk.
3. Issue an SOS distress message with one simple touch of the phone.
The free app will be launched for iPhones and Android devices on September 29, it will be available in six languages: Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Turkish.
For more than 100 days the Norwegian-built trawler «Thunder» has been chased across three oceans, suspected of fraud and illegal fishing. A secret Interpol mission named «Spillway» is being directed from Norway.” This was the opening lines of a Documentary, published in March this year in the Norwegian Business Daily. For more than three months reporters Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Saeter was in almost daily contact with Sea Shepherd Captain Peter Hammarstedt on the “MV Bob Barker”, who for months followed the poacher “Thunder” from the shadowlands in Antarctica to a wet grave outside West-Africa. During their investigation Engdal and Saeter found mounting evidence that the operations of the notorious poacher was directed from Galicia in Spain. After finding and analyzing hundreds of documents from countries on all continents of the world, talking to law enforcement agencies, private investigators, insurance companies, environmentalists, fishermen and locals in in a notorious fishing village in Galicia, Engdal and Saeter managed to document the history and shady dealings of “Thunder”, its crew and owners. The Longest Chase is a story about the outlaw sea, big money, tax havens, fraud, exploitation of the poor and the emptying of the seas.
Mysterious suicides in the Amazon, corrupt telecom dealings in Bangladesh, lethal mercenaries in Mozambique, war crimes in Korea, a renegade law in Britain, and a dead Eritrean refugee hanging from a tree in Germany. Meet the people behind ten exciting projects from around the world and learn how they broke their stories.
In this session you will learn tips and tricks to get information from various parts of the world. More than 100 countries now have freedom of information (FOI) and right-to-information (RTI) laws. The participants in this panel have broad experience creating, enforcing, and using these laws around the world. The panel features experts from East Asia, the United States, and Europe with first-hand experience in the rapidly changing field of FOI.
Investigations that span national boundaries can be some of the trickiest, yet some of the most rewarding to pursue. Offshored corporate interests, multinational company structures and global supply chains often take investigators overseas, into jurisdictions they may be unfamiliar with. Local language, unknown administrative and regulatory conventions, hidden media biases and restrictive data provision can be significant barriers to a successful investigation. This session will look at tools to overcome the challenges of cross-border investigations and uncover an entity's global footprint, including an introduction to Arachnys Investigator, which enables users to query thousands of global public corporate, legal, news and regulatory data sources from 200 countries in real time.
Displaying a series of events can be as simple as drawing a straight line. But if you want to get fancier, there are a bunch of other options to display chronologies and storylines. In this workshop, we'll take a tour of current timelines in the wild and walk you through three open-source tools to help you make your own: ProPublica's TimelineSetter, Zach Wise's TimelineJS, and WNYC's Vertical Timeline.
An introduction to webscraping with Python: This two-part, hands-on workshop will teach basic newsroom programming concepts using the Python language. We'll cover how to deconstruct a common reporting task -- gathering a table of data from a public website -- and assemble a solution from useful Python libraries that you can use again and again.
Prerequisites: Attendees should be familiar with HTML and the command line and be comfortable with databases and SQL. If you've ever written a string function in Excel ("=left(A2,5)"), you'll be fine.
Python has to be installed at your laptop before the training. Somebody can help you at the “Data Pub” on Thursday.
BBC’s Internet investigations specialist Paul Myers goes through the dynamic, esoteric techniques for conducting investigations on the world’s largest social network. Learn how to search through “unsearchable” pages. Learn how to trace people, even if they are using a fake name. Find photos, comments and “likes”. Find email addresses, friend lists and phone numbers – even if this information seems private. Learn how Facebook’s former “Graph Search” can still be used to conduct elaborate investigations on obscure demographics.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Importing PDFs and getting structured data out of the files is a challenge. We'll train you to use CometDocs and structuring in Excel. CometDocs is for now the best tool to extract the kind of strange characters we face when converting from different languages. It is free for all members of IRE.
An introduction to webscraping with Python: This two-part, hands-on workshop will teach basic newsroom programming concepts using the Python language. We'll cover how to deconstruct a common reporting task -- gathering a table of data from a public website -- and assemble a solution from useful Python libraries that you can use again and again.
Prerequisites: Attendees should be familiar with HTML and the command line and be comfortable with databases and SQL. If you've ever written a string function in Excel ("=left(A2,5)"), you'll be fine.
Python has to be installed at your laptop before the training. Somebody can help you at the “Data Pub” on Thursday.
In this practical session you will learn to use the geolocation OSINT tool cree.py, created by Greek software developer Ioannis Kakavas. Learn how to trace people's movements throughout the day through social media.
Great story projects, investigative techniques, and collaborations have come out of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference since our first meeting in 2001. We know that good networking is key to this. To better connect people, we have arranged a dozen networking sessions, based on interests noted by our attendees in a pre-conference survey.
So here’s a chance to meet your colleagues interested in similar topics. No pressure here: we reserved meeting rooms and asked veteran journalists to host an informal discussion about how we can help each other – through sharing resources, contacts, and story ideas. Be sure to add your name and email to the contact list they pass around so we can follow up!
Sami Al-Hajj knows from personal experience more than anyone would ever want to know about human rights abuses and threats to journalists.
During his six years at Guanatanmo, the Al Jazeera Cameraman was interrogated more than 200 times. His Crime? Journalism.
The Sudanese cameraman is today the director of Al Jazeera’s Public Liberties and Human Rights Centre. He joins us to speak about how Al Jazeera cover today’s conflicts in North Africa and The Middle East.
Emin Huseynov is an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights activist. He was the chairman of the Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety. After he was forced into hiding at the Swiss embassy in Baku to avoid arrest for six months, Huseynov fled Azerbaijan and has now asked for political asylum in Switzerland.