GIJC21 Sessions

Cleaning your data is an essential part of good data journalism. Join this practical session on how to use Open Refine for data cleaning. The focus will be on cleaning text and dates. Before the session please install Open Refine on your computer: https://openrefine.org/download.html

Journalists don’t have a monopoly on exposing wrong-doing and abuses of power. Increasingly citizen investigators – including individuals working alone on laptops, small and large NGOs, and professors and their students are playing important roles in public interest investigation and opening up new opportunities for collaboration. In this session you’ll hear from cutting-edge investigators at Citizen Lab, Forensic Architecture, the UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, and the new SEEK project. They’ll talk about tools and techniques they use to expose wrongdoing and how and when they collaborate with journalists.

Our lightning rounds are popular, fast-faced presentations, one after another. Great Tools for Investigators offers a geek-fest of ideas on the latest apps and tools for finding info, collaborating with your colleagues, staying secure, tracking company assets, and documenting corruption. Included are presentations on the databases that ICIJ and OCCRP used in the recent Pandora Papers.

Web scraping is used to collect large information from websites, such as statistics, incidents, and social media items. It has become an increasingly valuable tool in journalism, and it has never been easier with Web Scraper (https://webscraper.io/), a free extension to Google Chrome and Firefox, and it can be used easily for rather complicated tasks in web scraping. This demonstration-session will show you how to apply Web Scraper in journalism.

With the UN Climate Change conference (COP26) also taking place this week, we’ve teamed up with Internews’ Earth Journalism Network for a live report from the event in Glasgow. Come hear EJN fellows from Asia, Africa, and Latin America talk about what’s coming next in climate coverage and where the big investigative stories will be.

Investigative journalism can’t survive without sustainable media organizations. Many were hit hard during the pandemic, despite record-breaking audiences. What revenue options are currently the most viable and why? Join our panel of journalists and consultants to hear strategies that work in the real world, from fundraising and membership to commercial revenue.

Tech tools are invaluable to today’s investigative reporting. Here are innovative examples from scientific testing and telecommunications locators. How do you follow the journey used or donated goods take, when companies or charities bar access to reporters? Attendees will hear how reporters used small GPS and GSM tracking tags to reveal unethical export practices, as well as new testing techniques to expose environmental abuses. This panel brings together five investigative reporters and editors spanning Kenya, Finland, and Bangladesh.

Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and it is used widely among data journalists. Among its uses are cleaning and analyzing data and scraping websites. In this workshop, Dutch journalist Winny de Jong gives an introduction to the most common applications of Python for data journalists. De Jong is author of the online course, Python for Journalists: https://datajournalism.com/watch/pyth…