Visualizing Palestine, Palestinian Territories (in English and Arabic)
Infographics, visualizations, data journalism, design

Part of the “Guide to Administrative Detention” poster

Visualizing Palestine uses beautifully designed infographics to tell stories about Palestinians and the Palestinian territories. It covers topics usually absent from the discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as detailing the lack of access to medical care in Lebanon, or showing the school enrollment rates of Palestinian refugee children who have fled Syria for neighboring countries. Each infographic is accompanied by a list of sources. The site makes the complex data behind the infographics understandable and publishes its visualizations under a creative commons license so they can be used by other media.

“You don’t remember numbers or statistics. You remember stories. We create the visualizations so people can use them as tools to advocate for something.” Ramzi Jaber, co-founder of Visualizing Palestine in an interview with DW

HarassMap, Egypt (in Arabic and English)
Mapping, social media, crowdsourcing, social research, mobile technology

HarassMap was set up in response to the high rates of sexual assault in Egypt. Launched in 2010, it allows people to anonymously report when and where they were victims of sexual harassment. They can do this by calling, texting, emailing or tweeting. Incidents are then documented on an online map, based on the open-source Ushahidi mapping software. The idea is to use crowdsourcing to better understand sexual harassment in Egypt, where there is little research on the subject. HarassMap is a volunteer-based, independent initiative. You can read more about the project on DW.

Stop Fake, Ukraine (in English and Russian)
Fact checking, citizen journalism, social media

Run by a small group of current and former students from the Mohyla School of Journalism in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, StopFake curates and refutes false claims spread by Russian media about the conflict in Ukraine. The fake-busting site has proved hugely popular since it started in March 2014. In its first few weeks of operation, it had 1.5 million visitors and some of the weekly video round-ups detailing the fakes have more than 100,000 views on YouTube. Many of its reports make the rounds on social media.

“We do the same things as anyone else would do – find the truth, check the facts, talk to people, and these are universal ways to improve journalism in any country.” Co-founder Yevhen Fedchenko in an interview with onMedia

CGNet Swara, India
Citizen journalism, mobile technology

CG Net Swara allows people to ring up and leave a voice message about something important to them, or listen to the stories of other users. The service is most commonly used to air grievances, such as the non-payment of wages, or to pass on local news. Selected recordings are checked by journalists and published on the site, as are text summaries. Some issues are also passed onto contacts in the mainstream media. The idea is for CG Net Swara to act as a citizen journalist’s forum in India’s impoverished Chhattisgarh state, where there is a shortage of media services in local tribal languages.

“Our primary goal and area of operation is media dark zones. There are 100 million people living in central tribal India and they have no voice.” Founder Shubhranshu Choudhary in an interview with the Doha Center for Media Freedom

Rutas del Conflicto, Columbia (in Spanish)
Database, mapping, crowdsourcing, mobile technology

The Routes of Conflict project tracks massacres and violence that have taken place in Columbia since 1982. Users can search the online database according to victims’ names, locations or armed groups. The resulting map shows how many people were killed in each incident, who the victims were, who was responsible for the killings and also provides links to relevant documents. The information is also available via a mobile app.

African SkyCam, Kenya
Drone journalism

African SkyCam is a group of journalists who want to show newsrooms that there is a cost effective way of capturing aerial footage to give African audiences new and independent perspectives on a story. Because African media organizations usually don’t have their own helicopters, they have to rely on hitching lifts with police or military to get certain shots. Drones are a way of being more independent.

“With an eye in the sky, African journalists can tell stories that might have been impossible without access to aerial footage.” Founder Dickens Onditi Olewe in an interview with onMedia

Khabar Lahariya, India (in English as well as several other languages local to India)
Citizen journalism, newspaper collective

Khabar Lahariya is a small weekly newspaper published in several local languages by a group of marginalized rural women in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states. The idea behind the eight-page paper is to spread and promote information about life in rural areas – covering everything from reported rape to a house fire in a local village. Founded in 2002, the paper now has 40 women journalists and a print run of around 6,000. It’s estimated a single copy of the paper is read by ten or more people. The collective launched an online site in 2013.

“We expose problems and we follow up on the solutions.” Reporter Meera Devi in an interview with The Hindu

CONNECTAS (in Spanish, Portuguese and English)
Networking, investigative journalism

CONNECTAS is a non-profit journalism project for Latin America with the aim of promoting transnational investigative journalism and training.

“The media in Latin America have focused excessively on what happens in the countries’ capital cities, and report very little about what is going on countrywide, much less what is happening around the continent.” CONNECTAS founder Carlos Eduardo Huertas in an article published by the Nieman Foundation

Poderopedia (in Spanish)
Database, visualizations, fact checking

Poderopedia provides a verified source of information on influential politicians and business people, such as who their family members are, where they went to school and university, and who they have worked for in the past. It also visualizes the relationships between the people and the organizations in its data base, revealing networks of influence. The platform first started in Chile, where business and politics are closely connected, and has subsequently expanded to Venezuela and Colombia.

“We consider Poderopedia, in its call for transparency and dissemination of data, to be a mechanism against the lack of transparency that currently, above all, characterizes Venezuelan institutions, both private and public.” Marianela Balbi, director of Venezuela’s Press and Society Institute.

Africa Check (in English)
Fact checking

Africa Check aims to sort fact from fiction on a variety of African topics, such as the real population of Nigeria or claims that cancer causes more deaths than AIDS on the continent. Founded in June 2012, the project runs in a partnership with the journalism department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It has 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors each month. It also has a slew of resources for journalists on its site about how to fact check properly. Read more about the project on onMedia.

“There is a huge increase in the flow of information and also of misinformation One of the things we are concerned about is giving journalists tools to verify this information.” Africa Check founder Peter Cunliffe-Jones

Animal Político, Mexico (in Spanish)
Digital media, social media

Animal Político is an online news site devoted to Mexican politics that is especially popular with young readers. It attracts more than three million visitors per month and has nearly a million likes on Facebook – numbers that continue to grow rapidly. The site started off as a Twitter news service in 2009 and since its inception, the founders have emphasized the use of social media to attract readers. Interestingly, it’s a freestanding digital media organization – which means it’s not supported by grants and foundations, or by another media institution.

“We don’t care that the (Mexican) president went to Querétaro or Michoacán today and gave a speech….We actually care a lot more about … the social impact that policies have on people, the civic organizations working to better the country, and about human rights violations.” Founder Daniel Eilemberg in an interview with WLRN

Chicas Poderosas, Latin America (in English and Spanish)
Data journalism, networking

Chicas Poderosas is a network and training model to encourage female journalists in Latin America to embrace digital technologies and data journalism. It’s about building a diverse digital network of digital journalists.

“At Chicas we help journalists learn technology and we connect them with mentors, developers and designers so they can keep learning.” Founder Mariana Santos in an interview with the Knight Foundation

InfoAmazonia, Brazil (in English, Spanish and Portugese)
Mapping, database, geojournalism, citizen journalism, news aggregator

The project tracks forest loss and other environmental issues, such as bush fires, in the Amazon basin and displays this information in interactive maps. To do this it, InfoAmazonia uses a combination of satellite and other data as well as citizen reporting from the nine countries of the Amazon region. It also aggregates news stories about the Amazon.

“The ultimate goal is that displaying this information with such impacting visuals will help to elevate the debate on public policy in this region to another level.” Gustavo Faleiros, founder of Infoamazonia in an interview with Visualloop.com

Plataforma de Periodismo (in Spanish)
Networking

Plataforma de Periodismo aims to improve the coverage of conflict and post-conflict Columbia and create a network of journalists who cover these issues. The website is set up as a training space, with resources, case studies and digital tools.

“We saw the need to create a digital space to train, inform, and reflect on these topics,” said project coordinator Edilma Prada Céspedes in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

Code for Africa
Data journalism, networking

The Code for Africa initiative aims to nurture the skills necessary for people to find, access and use data in order to promote more transparency. There are already country chapters in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa and plans for several other countries to follow.

Compiled by Holger Hank, Peter Deselaers, Guy Degen and Steffen Leidel, edited by Kate Hairsine

Goetz, who currently works for the German public broadcaster NDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, has continually come up against secret services in his investigations. He helped expose the locations of CIA secret prisons in Europe as well as the secret service bumbling that led to the US using false intelligence from the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball” (who still lives in Germany) to justify the Iraqi war. “The essence of journalism is to show if a country is living a national lie” is one of Goetz’s mottos.

In his most recent coup, Goetz met with one of the world’s most wanted men, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And despite, or perhaps because of his investigations into the activities of the US secret services, Goetz has a relaxed attitude to potentially being under surveillance.

“Secret services don’t work well,” he says in an interview with onMedia.

Revelations about the extent of the NSA’s spy activities have made many journalists unsure about how well they can protect their information. Are their concerns exaggerated or justified?

I think it is important to protect sources. That’s the main responsibility we have as journalists – to protect people who take risks to talk to us. For that reason, there are a lot of things you shouldn’t do with an iPhone or a smartphone. Because if you are interested in protecting people, they are vulnerable devices.

I see you have an iPhone. What do you do to protect your communications?

I encrypt my e-mails with PGP and when I have important things to talk about, I do it on Jabber. But you have to remember that I don’t research this stuff to be stored in an archive. All of this information is going to end up in a newspaper. It is a very public profession. But we do special things to make sure that the people who give us information are safe.

When I googled you, I saw you had a Twitter account and other social networking accounts. Do you have any security concerns about using these?

I use Twitter to read the news – I’ve never tweeted anything. But I use social networking all the time to find people. For example, if you want to find drone pilots in Germany you can search for someone who works at the US Africa Command Africom and lives in Germany. You can actually find a lot of people with NSA profiles who live and work in Germany. The US security services has a big turnover so these people are always looking for new jobs. They have their profiles online and it’s easy to use them for research.

Together with the German parliamentarian Christian Ströbele, you met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in October 2013. The meeting was kept secret until after the event but do you think the secret service agencies knew it was going to take place?

That’s just speculation. We have no idea if we were spied on or not.

John Goetz (left) met with Snowden in Moscow

Aren’t you worried about being spied on?

I’m not worried about being watched myself. I’m worried about people who take risks to talk to me or give me information that could end up causing them difficulties because I wasn’t careful. The key thing is we didn’t discuss the Snowden meeting on our phones, we didn’t talk publicly about it. We were careful because it is the matter of someone’s safety and that’s important for us. But journalists and others should remember that institutions such as the US secret service are manned and staffed by people consumed by pettiness. They have petty concerns and they alter their information to please their bosses. They don’t work well and they have never worked well.

What do you mean by that?

Many people – especially many activists – assume, “Oh, of course secret services can get this or that information”. Theoretically, that’s true! But in reality, these institutions, especially in the United States, are often screwed up and don’t work properly. Look at the example of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked documents to WikiLeaks. Manning wasn’t caught because the NSA figured it out. They would never have been be able to find out who he was. The only reason Manning was caught was because he spoke to Adrian Lamo (who subsequently turned Manning in to US officials).

Your latest research “Geheimer Krieg” (“Secrets Wars”) exposes US anti-terror operations running secretly from bases in Germany. The German government claims it had no knowledge of these operations. One reviewer wrote that you make no bones about following a certain agenda in your research. Is that true?

I think the essence of good journalism is to reveal when a society is lying to itself. Germany tells itself it plays a major role in ensuring peace in the world. It believes it is different to the rest of the planet because it thinks it follows the rule of law, and tells itself its allies follow these rules and the countries it doesn’t like, like Iran or Russia, they don’t follow these rules. But that is complete fiction. Germany’s allies frequently do not live by the rule of law. Exposing this is journalism. I think it is important to report if the German government isn’t leveling with its population.

Are journalists allowed to be outraged by their research? Shouldn’t they be neutral instead? There has been much debate recently about whether Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, for example, is an activist rather than a journalist.

I don’t think it makes sense for me to be the person in the public debate who is outraged. Rather, it makes sense for journalists to present the facts to spark national discussion. But there is nothing wrong with Glenn Greenwald. The debate about whether Greenwald is a journalist or an activist is petty, it is basically sparked by people in the US who want to discredit Greenwald and think Edward Snowden is a traitor. Greenwald and Laura Poitras (one of the initial journalists who met with Snowden and received copies of his leaked NSA documents) have done a tremendous service to humanity and they are among the most important journalists reporting today.

But shouldn’t journalists distinguish themselves from activists?

The only thing that matters is whether the story is true and whether you have the documents to prove it. And this is what Greenwald has. He has the documents to prove the story.

You can join John Goetz and others panelists (including William Echikson from Google, Anne Roth from Tactical Technology and Malte Spitz from the Greens Party) for a discussion about Digital Safety for Journalists on Thursday 23 January, 2014, at 7 pm (CET) at the ARD Studio in Berlin. The panel discussion will be in both English and German and you can follow the conversation on Twitter via the #digisafe hashtag.

Interview by Steffen Leidel, edited by Kate Hairsine

Thanks to an interactive web app developed by the investigative unit at the Costa Rican newspaper, La Nacion, users can search and visualize information on more than 100,000 secretive companies, trusts and funds in offshore financial centers.

The database, launched in June 2013 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked files. The data has already been analyzed by around 100 journalists working at 58 media organizations in what has been called the largest journalism collaboration in history.

DW Akademie caught up with Giannina Segnini, who heads La Nacion’s investigative unit, on the sidelines of the Global Media Forum where Segnini was taking part in a panel discussion about data-driven journalism.

In her interview with Steffen Leidel, Segnini talks about the Offshore Leaks Database and the increasing need for reporters to collaborate, not just with each other, but also with computer programming experts. (You can read her article about building the database here.)

Giannina, a single publisher or broadcaster would have been completely overwhelmed with the analysis of the offshore data. Does the way in which the ICIJ conducted their investigation prove journalism needs more international collaboration?

Absolutely, cross border reporting is more important than ever before. Trade is global, organized crime is global and as a result, journalism needs to go global as well. Teams from some fifty different countries worked together to analyze the offshore data and dividing up the work and dividing up the data brought very interesting results.

I can imagine it wasn’t easy getting everyone working together.

Sure, it was very difficult to coordinate everything time-wise and different teams used different procedures but it worked well and will continue to work in the future.

What needs to be improved?

We need to have a secure platform where journalists can exchange and compare data sets. That is something that I have already suggested to a number of organizations. It would be great to have something like a social network – like Facebook – so instead of diving down through the data, it would allow us to communicate with one other. So that I get an alert, for example, from a colleague in South Africa if they have a data set that matches one of mine.

What are you hoping to achieve with the Offshore Leaks Database that your team helped develop?

As of now the data belongs to everyone in the whole world instead of being exclusively reserved for journalists. We are saying: “This is what we journalists have already found out. Now everyone around the world can access this information and discover hidden relationships that we journalists might not have uncovered yet.”

Making the information publicly accessible on the Internet hasn’t been without controversy, especially in Germany. Some fear that people or organizations named in the database will be automatically seen as tax evaders even if they haven’t done anything wrong.

Each country’s laws are different when it comes to data. Germany has very restrictive data laws and there is a culture of data protection. The offshore leaks data doesn’t contain any sensitive information: it contains the names and addresses of companies and their representatives. Any sensitive information, such as passport numbers or bank account numbers have been eliminated and we have done this ourselves. What is left is basic information that is publicly available.

The offshore leaks data could only be processed with the help of computer scientists and programmers. Do journalists need to be more open to the world of programming?

You can’t force journalists to be interested. Essentially it’s about their attitudes – journalists who are genuinely interested can gradually develop their own knowledge. What is necessary in today’s world though is that media organizations have at least one developer for every 10 journalists. Organizations which don’t do this won’t be able to keep up with other sites.

There is a very vibrant development community worldwide. Aren’t they a good source for editors?

It is a very good source. We reporters need to have more contact with this other world which is usually very separated from journalism. But the collaboration of journalists and programmers can create incredible things and there are many initiatives that are trying to promote these collaborations. Hacks and Hackers is working extremely well at connecting journalists, designers, and programmers in one spot.

But are enough journalists really prepared to work with developers or programmers?

Not every journalist wants to do this. You have to work with those reporters who really want a collaboration. The first step is to stop being scared of the subject matter. Many journalists are simply intimidated by such things. The developers who work with me often talk about concepts that I don’t understand and then I ask them to explain. That’s part of teamwork. It’s not about getting journalists to become programmers and in my opinion, that’s not the right path either.

Do you think your readers appreciate your paper’s data mining efforts?

The fascination lies in keeping it simple. I don’t believe in creating incredibly complex visualizations – people don’t want them. We always look for the simplest way to show the story we want to tell and we add download options for the few readers who might want to do their own calculations and create their own visualizations. This needs to be optional. But really, people are interested in being told a story. Do people want to navigate their way through a sea of data without any guidance? To be able to guide them, we reporters have to know how to analyze and filter out what is important. This is what journalists have to do in order to give people the information that interests them.

Listen to the complete Global Media Forum panel discussion about data journalism

Back in 2010, La Nacion’s investigative unit consisted of three journalists. Segnini decided to start experimenting with database analysis, scraping websites and collating information from publically available sources. She then brought in two computer developers to work on the investigative team. The unit has since uncovered several corruption scandals including cases leading to the imprisonment of two former Costa Rican presidents. You can follow the work of La Nacion’s investigative unit here (in Spanish).

For more about Segnini, see her profile. You can also follow her on twitter.

Africa Check was launched in 2012, and is a non-profit organisation led by the media development agency AFP Foundation and the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

The organisation not only examines the public claims of politicians, leaders in civil society, government agencies and NGOs, but also checks the facts journalists use in their stories.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones of the AFP Foundation is the Director of Africa Check and says getting the facts right is the “essence” of journalism. But under the pressure to feed 24 hour news, and working across more topics, journalist may feel they “don’t have the time and the expertise, or even know where to look” to verify information.

Reading an Africa Check report is a little bit like a mini-lesson in the basics of journalism. You also see that this project has the potential to have a high impact on African media and perhaps serve as a model in other countries or regions.

Take this recent example of mis-reporting the HIV rate among South African schoolgirls that appeared in The Sowetan newspaper.

It is an alarming headline that gained a lot of attention. The South African Press Association (SAPA) picked up the story citing The Sowetan, and then the story was reported by media outlets around the world and via social media networks.

By checking quotes with the Health Minister’s staff and using a publicly available source, Africa Check’s investigation found that the real rate of HIV among SA schoolgirls is half of what the media reported: “HIV prevalence among young women aged between 15 and 19 was around 12.7% in 2011”.

Africa Check reports feature a prominent box with key facts

Peter Cunliffe-Jones says it took just a few minutes to check the key facts in this story.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones: “Accuracy of our reports in media houses is fundamental to the role, purpose and survival of journalism.”

To help journalists improve their skills the Africa Check website has some useful tips for fact checking and a list of online references – potentially making it a go-to website for African journalists to start their search for sources of data.

Africa Check’s focus at the moment is South Africa, but Cunliffe-Jones says the organisation will soon broaden its coverage to countries across southern Africa. He says it’s encouraging that South African media outlets are now starting to cite Africa Check’s reports, or have corrected their stories following an Africa Check investigation.

So how does Africa Check fit into media development within Africa?

By having the project based in the journalism department of Wits University, Cunliffe-Jones says Africa Check can carry out fact checking, but also offer teaching and training. Moreover, the project is “fostering a culture of fact checking” which is fundamental to good journalism.

Watch this short video below (from Vimeo user Pokitin) for some more thoughts from Peter Cunliffe-Jones on fact checking in journalism and the Africa Check project.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones from Pokitin on Vimeo.

Author: Guy Degen

The beginning was analogue. Ironically, that hard disk containing leaked data on offshore service providers in tax havens came by post. To be precise, the disk contained 260 gigabytes of secret data which equals approximately 500,000 printed Bibles. No one could read all that in a lifetime.

The ICIJ faced a huge challenge. How can such a huge data set be analyzed? And, first of all – how can you possibly analyze such different types of data –  images, encrypted data and more that two million emails? Data experts had to take action even before journalistic research could begin.

The volume of leaked data is enormous. It’s actually about 150 times bigger than that of the biggest published leak, which was the archive of embassy dispatches by Wikileaks. Besides, all those dispatches had one and the same format and could therefore be analyzed in a standard way. The offshore hard disk on the other hand had all sorts of mixed formats such as company databases, emails, word documents, scans or correspondence saved as pdfs. Many of those documents are found two or more times in the data set, in case they have been forwarded as email attachments from one recipient to another.

Identifying duplication was just one of the challenges data experts were facing. Many documents were saved as images, including passports of the founders of covert companies copies of which had been mailed to tax havens. Other documents containing instructions by the actual company owners to the false CEOs had first been printed out, signed and then scanned. Such documents were digitized with the help of OCR (optical character recognition) which transforms images into text in order to be made readable by the hardware.

Finally, the data set was indexed so that search engines could find specific data.  That was a success. The program dtSearch can be supplied with a list of names and search for them in the 260 gigabyte large data set. Another program, Nuix, can recognize documents where German is used with the help of key words. It can also discover connections between different data, for example between an attached pdf file and an email correspondence of several people within a certain time period.  For example, the “Securities and Exchange Commission” in the US uses Nuix in case it has confiscated millions of emails of suspected  joint stock companies.

In the meantime, programmers have recreated the software used by the offshore service providers. It became possible to click through the register of companies just the way service providers did that and to answer many fundamental questions:  Who’s the actual founder of a particular trust? Who is the contact person? Has the person been charged? At which address has the invoice been sent? Only this way was it possible to shed light on offshore deals and interdependencies.

Gunther Sachs: Playboy in tax heaven

For instance, it took months for the Süddeutsche Zeitung to investigate into the financial matters of the German industrialist and playboy Gunther Sachs, both within the data set and in real life. At the end of the day the intricate offshore scheme set up by the man was visualized in a relatively simple way, which nevertheless took a lot of effort.

In the case of Gunther Sachs, specific technicalities were taken care of by the data experts Sebastian Mondial from Germany, Duncan Campbell and Matthew Fowler from the UK, as well as Rigoberto Carvajal and Matthew Caruana from Costa Rica. After the basic technical work had been done, ICIJ decided to distribute further tasks worldwide, since the sheer volume of data made it almost impossible to analyze it in a small team. All in all, 86 journalists in 46 countries took part in the evaluation: Süddeutsche Zeitung and a public radio and television broadcaster NDR in Germany, Washington Post in the USA, Le Monde in France and the Guardian in the UK.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is a project of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington and is primarily financed by foundations in the USA,  acted as the research coordinator. A systematic analysis of the data has shown that they include documents about more than 122,000 covert companies and trusts based on the British Isles, Virgin Islands, Cook Islands, Cayman Islands, Labuan Island, Seychelles as well as in Samoa, Hong KJong, Singapore and Mauritius.

The documents expose 12,000 middlemen offering these offshore structures and contain data on about 130,000 people with addresses from 170 countries. Each of these numbers can reveal a story. The work with the data set is just at the beginning.

Translated by Natalia Karbasova

Links:
Original publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: Wie Computer-Forensik das Offshore-System entschlüsselte
Secrecy for sale: Inside the global offshore money maze