Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2015 (https://gijc2015.org/category/news/page/4/)
In a discussion about the challenges journalists face when reporting on development stories, three reporters showcased their multimedia projects as an innovative way to translate complicated and overlooked issues, into compelling stories.
Investigative journalists in the “Lighting rounds: Visualization” had five minutes each to present their projects which use different visualization techniques. Below, a recap of some of the highlights.
Today public companies have to provide reports with data, while many private companies do not have to provide anything. Most companies within the oil, gas and mining sector are private, and to get information can be both expensive and time-consuming. Skybox is a new developing tool used to extract information from an otherwise private industry. Using moving pictures on ground level—captured by satellites—you can monitor different areas up close.
Timelines, local knowledge and a flash drive: the layers of the Swiss Leaks story. The Swiss Leaks investigation was more difficult to prove than Oliver Zihlmann, head of the investigative team in Le Matin Dimanche and SonntagsZeintung in Switzerland, first thought.
You have to fight for what you believe in, says investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown. In 2010 Rewcastle Brown founded “The Sarawak Report” and “Radio free Sarawak”. Through these channels the London-based journalist reports on the corrupted methods of the Malaysian government in handling the timber, oil and palm oil of Sarawak, a part of the Malaysian state Borneo, without giving any of the profits or resources back to the indigenous people living there.
While reporting on war can be traumatic for a journalist, covering topics such as human trafficking, sexual violence and migration can be equally harmful.
Reporta, a new app, has been launched to help protect journalists and whistleblowers. Every week a journalist worldwide loses his or her life for bringing news and information to the people.
The new searching tool Facebook Graph -meant to find details about your friends- makes it now possible to dig deep into details about people you’ve never met. At his two conference sessions, Internet search expert Henk van Ess refers to it as a brilliant tool for journalists. How does this work? Henk will guide us.
Development projects launched by the World Bank have displaced thousands of people physically or economically from their home. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalist’s project, Evicted & Abandoned, proved this. They found 969 projects with resettlement issues in over 100 countries, dismantling 3.4 million people physically or economically, based on reconstructed World Bank open data. The ICIJ adopted a “peeling the onion” strategy to conduct the investigation. According to ICIJ’s reporter Sasha Chavkin, they approached the civil rights groups first, then the Bank’s consultants, former employees and finally two current employees; most of the World Bank’s staff feared they would lose their jobs if they told the truth after many had already been laid off.
44 journalists were killed this year. One journalist each week. “Today we will show you that journalism is not a crime”, says Margo Smit, the moderator of the Keynote Panel: Investigative Journalism Under Attack. In this panel, four courageous investigative reporters talked about their experiences with prosecutions, dirty tricks, and violent attacks.