GIJC15

The session will explore different ways of teaching investigative reporting. Mark Hunter will talk about his work in the Middle East in Mongolia to create an IJ curriculum for Arab-language universities and the goal to create a curriculum that either professors who have no investigative journalism experience or reporters with no teaching experience can use as a foundation text. It's now in beta testing in the Arab World and Mongolia. Vincent Wang will describe the history of bringing investigative reporting into the curriculum and how it is possible to run a campus-based, investigative journalism oriented newspaper in China and overall problems of doing investigative journalism at Chinese Universities.

The question of how to produce and disseminate high quality news reporting while attaining financial stability and making the most of what digital technology has to offer is perhaps the most pressing question facing journalists today. Many of the new outlets are successful in one of these areas but not in all three. Anya Shhiffrin has been working to assemble a large data set of international online news initiatives around the world to see if there are discernable points in common and to understand patterns of success and failure. She plans to present initial results on see how high quality sites are financed, how they are staffed and managed, what kind of information and news they provide and come to an understanding of what it takes for these innovative news sites to grow and endure. Chuck Lewis will moderate and offer his observations from more than three decades of work in the nonprofit sector on how high quality journalism has been sustained and could be sustained.

This session will incorporate decades of experience in teaching students, faculty and professionals in more than 30 countries how to use data for journalism. The session will review how the teaching has evolved, what fundamentals still apply, how to ensure that integrity and credibility are maintained, dealing with ethical questions of what is public and what is private, and constructing a sensible and practical syllabus and curriculum. 

These veteran journalists and professors will share the lessons learned in producing high quality and often award winning stories with students on both local and international stories. They will share syllabi and cover the reasonable expectations to have of students and how to ensure accuracy and credibility through careful editing and fact-checking.

Chuck Lewis explores the efficacy and potential of increased journalistic and academic data, research and reporting collaboration, in the context of credible, accountability information. Credible journalistic, academic, research “think tank” and other investigative, data-gathering institutions and individuals must increase the extent to which they share their information, knowledge and expertise with each other, and embrace new synergistic approaches and previously unimaginable collaborations and potential partnerships. And there is increasing evidence of editorial cross-pollination and collaboration. To what extent can the public space for timely, authoritative, accountability-related information and reporting about those in (government and private sector) power can be enlarged? Evelyn Groenik and Anas Aremeyaw Anas will explore how get African investigative journalism on international platforms. It will look at five potential pillars for how African and Western colleagues can overcome cross-cultural challenges to do this, which include making sure both sides are investigative journalists, that media houses are ready to accept very new kinds of investigations, that is intensive dialogue throughout while working on the story, that media houses needs in length, style and angle are clear and that both sides create the story.

Castellanos and Rodriguez will describe the data methodology behind Rutas del Conflicto, a project created in 2014 that collected information from more than 700 massacres committed in Colombia. The ethodology that sought to incorporate citizen journalism based on an exercise of data journalism. Through a combination of tools including an app for mobile devices, partnerships with radio and television stations in remote areas, and printing their publications on the Internet, Rutas del Conflicto, working with a group of students from the University of El Rosario (Bogota) and the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Santander), created a methodology that has enabled dozens of victims tell their stories and participate in confronting the data related to the massacres.From basic knowledge in database design, they developed a methodology that explains how their colleges classified information and built related tables that allowed them to tell a story using mapping tools and timelines as Google Fusion tables. During the last year, students of the Rosario University have created several journalistic pieces using this methodology in various topics like sports, science, arts and culture, as well as conflict-related jobs.

How do you structure an investigative journalism training program in a country with no tradition of it? How do you create teaching materials and develop local trainers, mentors, and role models? Here's what the Deutsche Welle Akademie did by partnering with the Mongolian Press Institute and veteran trainers from the global investigative journalism community.

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.

This roundtable will explore how to create and maintain investigative journalism curricula in universities. It is expected to not only offer examples and experiences but to also be a wide-ranging conversation with all those in attendance. Notes will be taken and shared after the conference.

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.

This session will look at how investigative journalists approach their work from the ethics of involving "fixers" to help with work in foreign lands to how two recent surveys of investigative journalists in the U.S. have provided both demographic details and insight into how and why they do investigative journalism to how New Zealand journalists perform investigations.

Horvit will review the many journalism toolkits for various beats and topics that are offered by Investigative Reporters and Editors and the methodology behind them. Schriffin will review her work on a extensive toolkit for coverage of extractive industries. Both will talk about how to put together your own toolkits for yourself and for your students.