Global Investigative Journalism Network-

Top 10 in Data Journalism: Donut Holes, Turkish Data and Cop Shootings

By GIJN & Connected Action | April 5, 2018

What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 26 to April 1 finds @washingtonpost on fatal police shootings, @decodeurs mapping Europe’s terrorist attacks, @DagmedyaVeri’s open data resources for Turkey and an undated chart of shrinking donut holes from the @smithsonian archives.

MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

14 Independent News Sites Changing Cuban Journalism

By Elaine Díaz | April 4, 2018

Non-state media in Cuba defy the constitution of the country, which explicitly prohibits the existence of private media in Article 52. But that hasn’t stopped these 14 independent media houses – most of which started up after 2014 – from winning international awards.

SOURCES & METHODS

Journalism’s Deep Web: 7 Tips on Using OCCRP Data

By Stella Roque, Iain Collins, and Friedrich Lindenberg | April 3, 2018

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.

NEW MODELS

Meet the Startup Fighting for the Future of Russian Media

By Howard Amos | April 2, 2018

The Bell illustrates a growing trend in which Russian journalists and media managers are finding ways of building news organizations that are not financially dependent on rich businessmen vulnerable to Kremlin pressure.

DATA JOURNALISM

This Week’s Top 10 in Data Journalism

By GIJN & Connected Action | March 29, 2018

What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 19 to 25 finds a sobering study on income inequality between black and white males visualized by @nytimes, a cool time-lapse graphic of snow fall in the United States by @PostGraphics and peak baby-making seasons by country by @VismeApp and @ddjournalism.

ARMED CONFLICT

War and Peace: 3 Colombian Journalism Projects Using New Narrative Strategies

By Nadya Hernández | March 28, 2018

Traditional war reporting, which mostly focused on revealing the brutality of the conflict in Colombia, is being replaced by new storytelling techniques using alternative narratives and creative digital tools. Here’s Proyecto Coca, Rutas del Conflicto and 4 Ríos.

NEW MODELS

Tear Down This Paywall: Germany’s Taz Launches Reader Revolution

By Anna Rohleder | March 27, 2018

Berlin-based daily Tageszeitung (Taz for short) is a reader-supported newspaper where a 500 euro membership doesn’t even get you a free subscription. Yet more than 17,000 people have joined the Taz news cooperative in Germany on exactly those terms.

AROUND THE WORLD

Google and ICFJ Launch MENA Training

The first Google News Initiative launched this this week with a large-scale effort to offer digital skills training to thousands of journalists across the MENA region. In partnership with the International Center for Journalists, the training series will focus on digital tools to gather and source information, enhance trust and verification and support data-driven journalism and immersive storytelling. The program will take place over the next year and will see 4,000 journalists trained in six countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Tunisia.

Source: ICFJ

Montenegro: Car Bomb Near Journalist Home

A car bomb exploded on Sunday outside the home of a journalist who was investigating organized crime groups in Montenegro. The explosion rocked the northern Montenegrin city of Bijelo Polje an hour after a new pledge by the National Security Council to tackle organized crime. No one was injured in the bombing, the seventh this year. The Montenegrin Journalists Association said Sead Sadikovic had been threatened because of his investigative work.

Source: OCCRP, Balkan Insight

Int’l Stories Honored by 2018 IRE Awards

The just-announced IRE awards honor powerful stories ranging from U.S. sex harassment to murders in Kiev and London. Winners of IRE's top honor, a medal, included the documentary Killing Pavel, on the murder of a Russian journalist in Ukraine, produced by GIJN members Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Slidstvo. "This year’s entries were among the finest examples of investigative reporting I’ve seen since I began my tenure on the awards committee," said contest chair Jill Riepenhoff.

Source: IRE

New CPJ Campaign to Free Jailed Journos

The Committee to Protect Journalists today launched a new campaign to free the record 262 imprisoned journalists around the world. Based on easily-mailed postcards sent from the CPJ site, the campaign is designed to build support and pressure in the lead-up to World Press Freedom Day on May 3. CPJ is focusing at first on five journalists wrongly imprisoned in China, Republic Congo, Egypt, Kyrgystan and Turkey. You can follow the campaign at #FreeThePress.

Source: CPJ.org

3 Indian Journalists Run Over, Killed

In the latest deaths to shake the Indian press, three journalists were killed by vehicles this week, in what their families and human rights groups say are acts of murder. The attacks underscore how India has become one of the world's most dangerous places to be a journalist, particularly for the non-English press and outside the largest cities. One reporter, Sandeep Sharma in Madhya Pradesh state, had recently exposed bribery of a senior police officer as part of illicit sand mining. Violent "sand mafias" are tied to control over sand use, which has tripled in recent years with India's construction boom.

Source: Guardian

Google Vows $300m to Bolster News Media

Google today announced major new efforts to support the news media, pledging to invest $300 million over the next three years to combat fake news, bolster sustainability, and foster new tools. The programs are group under the Google News Initiative and are intended as a global expansion of the Digital News Initiative that has granted tens of millions of dollars to European media in recent years. The GNI initiative cites three specific goals: to highlight accurate journalism while fighting misinformation; help news sites become more sustainable; and create new media tools to assist journalists in their jobs.

Source: Google, The Verge