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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.