Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2015 (https://gijc2015.org/category/uncategorized/page/2/)
“China is the invisible elephant in the room. Investigative Journalism for China is also important. It can be done. It’s being done. It’s very challenging, ” says Ying Chan, moderator of Covering China: Tips and Practices and founding director of the Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.
The first day of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference was a busy and productive one. Below, you can read some highlights of four popular panels on reporting organized crime, teaching investigative reporting, the Migrant Files project, and “finding Africa’s missing money”.
Pirate Fishing, an interactive investigation by Al Jazeera, exposed the world of illegal fishing in Western Africa to an internet audience using elements of an online computer game.
“The skill of digging into complex wrongdoing is required for both my day job and my evening job,” said Jim Mintz, founder of the Mintz Group, of his days as a private investigator and his nights teaching investigative reporting at Columbia University.
“The first casualty of war is the truth, but can we say the same about natural disasters?” asked Yohan Shanmugaratnam. The international news editor of Norwegian daily Klassekampen, Shanmugaratnam was introducing the How To Investigate Disasters panel on the third day of 9th Global Investigative Journalism Conference.
When documentary filmmaker Hanna Polak arrived in Russia in 1999, she was immediately inspired to help the children. For 14 years, Polak filmed Yula, a young girl living inside the largest junkyard in Europe, 13 miles from Putin’s Moscow. In Polak’s latest documentary, “Something Better to Come,” Yula shares one dream: to escape and lead a normal life.
The second day of 9th Global Investigative Journalism Conference offered data-driven journalist the opportunity to sharpen their skills through sessions focused on training them to identify useful data, extract it, clean it, analyze it, visualize it and finally, tell a story.
In the past decade the demand for data journalism courses around the world has spiked. Universities at both graduate and under-graduate levels offer training and specialized courses that equip journalists with the necessary technical skills they need to find, sift through and interpret databases. The outcome are new stories, innovative visualizations and a bridge between the world of data and that of story telling.
Global Investigative Journalism Network members have voted to hold the next Global Investigative Journalism Conference for the first time in Africa. GIJN’s member groups also voted to re-elect the current seven board members who were up for election this year.
GIJC17 Votes
Johannesburg 31
Amman 13
Vancouver 13
Board Member Votes: At Large
Paul Radu 34
Jan Gunnar Furuly 31
Marina Walker Guevara 29
Brant Houston 29
Mzilikazi wa Africa 23
David Schraven 14
Eva Jung 16
Attila Mong 9
Cecil Rosner 9
Board Members Seats: Regional
Latin America: Fernando Rodrigues (unopposed)
Middle East/North Africa: Rana Sabbagh (unopposed)
North America:
Marina Walker Guevara 7
Brant Houston 3
Cecil Rosner 3
Note: Under GIJN’s election rules, a seat on the board is reserved for the highest vote- getter from each designated region. Therefore, Fernando Rodrigues was re-elected as Latin American representative, Rana Sabbagh as Middle East representative, and Marina Walker Guevara as North America representative. Another four board seats are filled by at-large representatives who receive the highest vote totals. Therefore, the at-large seats went to Paul Radu, Jan Gunnar Furuly,
Brant Houston, and Mzilikazi wa Africa — all current board members. For more on the election results, see our story here.