2025-11-12 16:00:42
Imagine you’re an employee at a tech company or governmental agency and you’ve noticed practices that you suspect are illegal or dangerous to the public. Personal reasons to not share the evidence with a journalist might include: “I only have pieces of evidence;” “Maybe I’m the only employee concerned;” “I could be harassed if my identity is revealed;” “My Non Disclosure Agreement could be a problem,” and “My employer’s internal surveillance system could track me down.”
All these concerns contribute to what experts say is an evergreen barrier to whistleblowing: the “first-mover” problem. Even the most courageous whistleblowers — such as former Uber executive Mark MacGann — admit that they waited many months to disclose their evidence of malfeasance because they were waiting for other concerned colleagues to step forward first.
But new employer AI and surveillance protocols — and the additional risk of losing lucrative tech salaries — have now raised the stakes for potential leakers. As a result, journalists and civil society groups must provide insiders with comprehensive solutions to lowering the bar for reaching out, and, ideally, demonstrate to the person that they’re not alone.
One innovative new service to address all these issues is a nonprofit called Psst.org, which is entirely designed with the real-world needs of potential whistleblowers. Indeed, it states: “Psst lets you deposit the information and get help without having to go full ‘whistleblower.’” It offers a secure digital safe for even small disclosures, flexible or immediate pro bono legal support, and — in an innovative twist — it can eliminate both the first-mover and the vulnerability problems by patiently matching an individual’s initial concerns with those of other employees at the same organization, all while respecting the wishes of information-sharers.
Jennifer Gibson, co-founder of Psst.org, told GIJN that the service has already received roughly 100 whistleblower support requests in its first year, including submissions by 55 concerned employees to a beta version of its encrypted safe.
One of these disclosures was from the former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who recently filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly ignoring major security flaws in its messaging service. In addition to disclosure advice and forging an attorney-client relationship, Psst also helped Baig find an employment lawyer to litigate the case without personal cost.
In its first case, the organization helped a Microsoft whistleblower expose that company’s “Big Oil” AI contracts, as described in The Atlantic by tech investigator Karen Hao, the best-selling author of “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race For Total Domination.”
This nonprofit service was highlighted in a Journalist’s Resource webinar panel this year on Dealing with Leaks in the Age of AI and Disinformation, featuring Mark MacGann, Paul Radu, co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP,) and former Forbidden Stories editor-in-chief Sandrine Rigaud. (Full disclosure: Rigaud has since been appointed Program Director at GIJN.)
Rigaud noted that leaks from two primary sources — hackers (including civic-minded hacktivists and ransomware criminals) and concerned employees with privileged access to data — have both been affected by AI. For instance, while the volume of leaks from hacked data has increased dramatically, she said hacked or supposedly hacked evidence can be more easily and convincingly forged by AI systems; a problem requiring greater verification through traditional reporting methods.
In January 2022, MacGann carried two suitcases full of hard drives, phones, and documents relating to Uber’s lobbying and safety practices to a Geneva hotel room for a first meeting with a Guardian reporter. The more than 100,000 records he disclosed led to the collaborative Uber Files investigative series.
However, in the webinar, MacGann cautioned: “Cases like me schlepping up suitcases full of hard drives and hard-copy documents — that’s just not going to happen anymore because of the intense digital and physical surveillance of employees, and the increased hostility toward people speaking out in favor of democratic principles.”
He added: “We need to make it easier for whistleblowers to remain anonymous, by providing the technical solutions for the delivery, the matching [with other whistleblowers / journalists], and the verification of leaks.”
MacGann said that promising technical solutions to promote anonymity and safe disclosure included an initiative to repurpose a hyper-secure survey tool, MyPrivacyPolls, as a whistleblower portal, called MyPrivacyPolls Gray. While still in development, the tool — created by the Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard — leaves no digital breadcrumbs, and can deliver leaks directly to a registered journalist’s email inbox with zero data storage on any server, and which requires no login or identity disclosure from the whistleblower. This project was inspired by Dr. Latanya Sweeney, a public interest technologist at Harvard Kennedy School, who told GIJN that whistleblowers had noted to her team that the MyPrivacyPolls survey form architecture offered some security advantages over existing whistleblower channels.
“We were talking specifically about what Frances Haugen had done in leaking the Facebook documents — taking these photographs, uploading them to Google Drive, and seeking to provide them to a reporter,” said Sweeney. “The way she did that involved a lot of trust in Google, and we were, like: ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea!’”
In contrast, MyPrivacyPolls Gray offers a more secure alternative, Sweeney explained. “A journalist goes to MyPrivacyPolls and makes an account, and a form, and they publish the URL — the form ID. Whistleblowers out in the world can then go to that URL, and we guarantee [their leaks] will show up in the email inbox of the journalists who created it,” she said. “And neither we nor anyone else would know about the submissions.” Sweeney did concede that more work needed to be done in connecting concerned employees with specific journalists.
However, MacGann said Psst’s system was already addressing many of those very same technical challenges, while also solving the first-mover problem, by matching potential whistleblowers with like-minded colleagues they might not even know about, perhaps a few office cubicles away.
On the so-called demand — journalists’ — side of the leak relationship, Rigaud noted that being open about leak sources remains crucial in establishing trust with your audience. “Its important to be transparent and invite readers to assess what we’re sharing with them,” she said. “A few years ago, when a journalist got a leak from a hacker, they’d often describe it as coming from an ‘anonymous source.’ That’s less and less the case now.”
She added: “The fact checking element is easier with a source like Mark MacGann, who is ready to help you understand and verify the documents. Unfortunately, this is the exception.”
Currently, Psst has some notable limitations. It is only offered in English, and, for now, is limited to disclosures from the tech industry and governmental agencies.
However, its website represents an explanatory masterclass in understanding personal employee concerns, with statements such as: “Remember, this isn’t solely on you. Other people are also coming forward… If their info matches yours in any way, it organically brings a picture into view, and takes the onus off you. You’re no longer alone at your desk,” and “We do a triage of sorts — finding you the support you need on the legal, media and psycho-social side of things.”
Neither does Psst push a “hard-sell” approach for disclosure. Prospective whistleblowers are offered several options: they can be wholly anonymous; can passively deposit information while waiting for a “match” with a similarly concerned anonymous colleague; can get free advice; or connect with a journalist if they choose.
A planned archiving option to allow people to anonymously and securely park pieces of information in a virtual “safe” — and decide what to do later — is not yet operational.
“Of the options available, the majority or people so far have been wanting to speak to a lawyer right away,” Gibson revealed.
Meanwhile, a GIJN test of the safe deposit process reveals that employees are relentlessly reminded to never use a work-provided device to engage with Psst resources, and instead use a personal device with supplied security conditions. Likewise, they are also advised to consider avoiding HR hotlines for their complaints. Concern for every scenario of whistleblower risk defines the service, and potential clients are offered a Signal number to call for urgent support.
“At the moment, the term ‘whistleblower’ has so many negative connotations; you say it, and so many people get scared,” noted Gibson, who previously served as legal director at The Signals Network, another whistleblower protection group. “We’ve kind of asked these individuals to out themselves on a sacrificial altar for all of us, in order to tell us information we should already know about the harm a company or government is doing. The trend we’re seeing is that people have fewer and fewer big pieces of the puzzle.”
“Unfortunately, I think the lesson the tech industry learned from the Frances Haugen [Facebook whistleblower] case was not, ‘Maybe we need to do better,’ but rather ‘We need to lock down our information better and surveil our employees better,’” she added. “We saw people coming for help who had important information, but not enough to risk everything.”
Gibson believes the new environment described by MacGann and Rigaud requires more collective disclosures, rather than individual heroism, to achieve both safety and accountability.
She said the Psst safe was loosely modelled on the encrypted Callisto Vault tool within Project Callisto, which was designed to collectivize reporting of sexual assaults by college students by matching unique identifiers of serial perpetrators.
“What we’re hoping is that, one, collectivizing will make people safer, and two, it should increase the number of people who speak up,” she explained “We decided: let’s put a lawyer in every room with a whistleblower, and help them figure out how to move forward. Raising red flags should not have to be a heroic act.”
Although she cannot disclose details, Gibson said the matching system has already found at least one employee with similar concerns and information as an anonymous colleague — but that Psst needs to raise awareness about this feature.
“My hope is that by the end of year two, we’d have a couple of hundred requests coming in, and more people using the matching function in the safe,” she said.
Notably, the vast majority of new clients to the service wish to remain anonymous.
Said MacGann: “My advice [to potential whistleblowers] is to preserve your anonymity. Once you’re a named whistleblower, that completely transforms your life. But if we can get this technology to a place where it’s a completely discreet app, and it’s not wasting the journalist’s time or the lawyer’s time, that’s what we all aspire to.”
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-11-11 16:00:53
Newspapers started putting up paywalls on their websites in the mid-2010s, offering access to all or some of their content through paid subscriptions to make money after years of decline in advertising revenue and circulation, as media and eyeballs shifted to consuming news online.
But a campaign by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is calling on news outlets to drop their paywalls for reporting based on FOIA requests or public records. This strategy, it argues, might be an effective way to respond to increasing attacks on the press, funding cuts, and opacity of government action, particularly in the US. By providing access for as many readers as possible, they can keep more people informed about the actions of the federal government and attempt to hold it accountable.
“They’re public records for a reason. They don’t belong behind a paywall,” said Caitlyn Vogus, senior advisor at FPF. “If citizens can’t get access to facts and truth, democracy doesn’t stand a chance.”
Moderating a FPF webinar titled Unpaywalled: The Case for Making Public Records-Based Reporting Free, Vogus added: “Now more than ever, free access to reporting based on government records isn’t just important, it’s essential… But paywalls often stop people from accessing that reporting, and the vast majority read the misinformation or propaganda instead.”
While there is a press freedom and public interest argument for making this kind of reporting more widely available, newsroom leaders from the tech-focused outlets WIRED and 404 Media told webinar attendees that they had discovered other benefits to this tactic as well — such as greater trust, “instant” new subscribers, and increased traffic.
“When we announced it… that bet paid off above and beyond what I could have possibly imagined,” said Kate Drummond, the global editorial director of WIRED.
Vogus and Drummond were joined by Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Joseph Cox, an award-winning investigative journalist and one of the founders of the tech journalism outlet 404 Media.
Convincing news outlets to make their reporting free might not be easy, Vogus acknowledged. “Reporters need to get paid, and newsrooms need to survive,” she said. “But the news isn’t just a business. It’s enshrined in the First Amendment and serves a vital role in our democracy, or what’s left of it,” she added.
“We know FOIA-based reporting is costly. It’s time-consuming. But we also know for a fact that transparency builds trust and trust builds readership and readership leads to more traffic and subscriptions. When WIRED did it, they instantly got a wave of new subscribers,” she added.
In March 2025, WIRED announced that it would drop its paywall for articles driven by public records. Since 404 Media was founded in 2023, it too has made articles based primarily on public records requests freely available to all readers.
Cox and Drummond explain they have similar reasons for doing this — a focus on the public interest and the importance of cutting through misinformation.
Cox was for many years a reporter at Motherboard, VICE magazine’s technology vertical, where he estimates that around 30% of his investigations were underpinned by public records and FOIA requests. “VICE was a public website, based on an advertising model,” Cox explained. “I just got very used to the idea — and saw the benefit of — publishing public records, linking to them, and for readers and potentially, sources, being able to access them.”
When launching 404 Media, the team wanted to continue that tradition of openness, even though the site, to remain sustainable, has both a free tier that requires email registration and a paid tier for full access. “There’s just something about being able to have a government document that you know is real, you got it from the government through a FOIA request or a lawsuit, and then you can show that to readers… we didn’t want to get in the way of that,” Cox said.
In WIRED’s case, Katie Drummond explained that its decision to drop the paywall was sparked by their reporting on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-led government force that made huge cuts to US federal agencies and funding, including effectively shuttering USAID. (DOGE cuts targeted government departments that handle FOIA requests, and the department has also denied requests to hand over its own documents under FOIA.)
That decision came against a backdrop of more and more misinformation, inaccurate journalism, and propaganda reaching the eyes and ears of readers, she explained. “We need to run a sustainable business too; WIRED relies on subscriptions to fund our journalism and support our newsroom. But we felt like this was one thing we could do as a show of good faith.”
Drummond added: “So it felt like for us a no-brainer, that within the constraints of the business that we need to run this, there was something we could do to make sure that as many people as possible were were exposed to this information, and were gaining an increased understanding of what was happening inside the federal government during the DOGE era, and then, of course, in perpetuity after that.”
The question for newsrooms considering following suit is whether they can remove their paywall for this type of reporting and still make money that supports the outlet overall? Cox and Drummond said that if anything, this initiative gave them a financial and subscriber boost.
Drummond noted that not everything WIRED published is based on public records, and that they still produce a great deal of journalism that sits behind a paywall.
“We made a calculated bet that our audience would show up for us when we did this,” Drummond recalled. “There was an outpouring of goodwill and good faith on social media… We saw a huge increase in subscribers on the day that we made that announcement, and then in the days following we got hundreds of emails from people thanking us for doing it and letting us know that they had subscribed because we had done that.”
While Drummond noted that “results are not guaranteed” and these findings are limited, she said the move has been, “additive to the business rather than anything taken away, from a financial point of view.”
Good faith was also a factor for 404 Media’s experience, said Cox. At the top of their site’s articles based on public records reporting, there is a box explaining that it’s free and asking readers to subscribe or donate if they want to support more of this kind of accountability reporting.
“This can actually bring in subscribers, even though it’s not required,” he said. “The idea of good faith comes up a lot, especially at 404 Media, where, for example, we also took a bunch of our coverage of ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], all about the technology they use, and we translated that into Spanish and published it without a paywall.”
“We want people to access this information and it does pay off, I think, journalistically, ethically, and business-wise as well in the end,” Cox added.
He also noted that 404 Media, where appropriate and safe, links to the public records in their articles. For Cox and his team, the ethical obligation to make those kinds of documents more available to readers outweighs any concerns about giving away materials that competing sites might use in their reporting. The speakers noted another argument for making FOIA-reporting unpaywalled: the process of gaining access is still more onerous than it should be — and it has not become any easier.
Harper explained that there is also a larger, civic responsibility that compels the press to provide free access to FOIA-based public documents for everyone. “We can’t fully engage in the democratic process or with the government if we don’t know what that’s doing,” she said. “And so curtailed access to reliable information limits our ability to have policy debates about immigration, health care, climate change, you name it.”
Watch the full Freedom of the Press Foundation webinar below:
Alexa van Sickle is a journalist and editor with experience across digital and print journalism, publishing, and international think tanks and nonprofits. Before joining GIJN, she was senior editor and podcast producer for the award-winning foreign correspondence and travel magazine, Roads & Kingdoms.
2025-11-10 16:00:12
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia, GIJN is publishing a series of short interviews with a globally representative sample of conference speakers. These are among the more than 300 leading journalists and editors who will be sharing practical investigative tools and insights at the event.
Lina Ejeilat is the co-founder and executive editor of 7iber, an award-winning online magazine based in Amman, Jordan. Launched in 2007 as a blog and citizen-media platform, 7iber evolved into a professional magazine by 2012, with a dedicated team of journalists, editors, and multimedia producers publishing hard-hitting investigations and critical analysis on underreported issues in Jordan and the Arab region. Formerly a reporter for Thomson Reuters in Amman,
Ejeilat now also teaches reporting and data journalism at the Jordan Media Institute, and leads training workshops for investigative journalists across the region. In 2023, she won WAN-IFRA’s Women in News Editorial Leadership Award for the Arab region.
Ejeilat will speak on the panel Global Health Under Siege: Exposing Corporate Lobbying Tactics at GIJC25, which will reveal new strategies by multinational corporations to undermine public health regulations, and share investigative and collaboration techniques to expose them.
GIJN: Of all the investigations you or your team have worked on, which has been your favorite, and why?
Lina Ejeilat: I have many favorites, but there’s one that stands out the most because of the unexpected impact that it had. In 2017, our colleague Shaker Jarrar uncovered that three areas inside Jordan, most of which was very fertile agricultural land, were under Israeli control because of a clause in the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Accords of 1994 that granted Israel “special rights” in these lands — practically leasing them for 25 years, subject to automatic renewal and completely undermining Jordanian sovereignty over them. The details of the treaty were not accessible to the public, nor were the details of the land being under Israeli control, so he had to find sources inside parliament (which ratified the accords in 1994) to get access to the treaty and its annexes, and inside the Department of Lands and Survey, so we could visually recreate exact maps of these areas. He also collaborated with Palestinian researchers who had access to Hebrew-language archives and documents. The investigation was picked up by local and regional media, and sparked widespread public reactions. It inspired a grassroots campaign over the course of a year that resulted in Jordan officially announcing that it will not renew this lease and would regain control of these lands. It’s very rare for journalism in Jordan to have this kind of impact on politics.
GIJN: What are the biggest challenges for investigative reporting in your country?
LE: The biggest challenge is undoubtedly the extremely restrictive political environment and shrinking civic space. Over the past 10 years, we have seen growing restrictions on media, freedom of expression, and all forms of public political engagement. There’s very little access to information or open public records. And Jordan’s cybercrimes law has made it very easy for public officials to sue journalists for defamation and libel.
GIJN: What reporting tools, databases, or techniques have you found surprisingly useful in your investigations?
LE: In the absence of open public records or accessible data, we have learned to mine and manually build datasets. For example, in an investigation we did on the parliamentary election results in Amman’s third district, we knew that the Independent Electoral Commission — the official body responsible for the elections — wasn’t going to publish the detailed ballot count. So we had a team of six reporters go to every polling station in the district at the time ballots were counted and take a photo of the results sheet. Then we manually entered this data into a spreadsheet. This allowed us to do an extensive data analysis and to produce a very rich and nuanced story that would have been impossible otherwise.
GIJN: What’s the best advice you’ve received from a peer or journalism conference — and/ or what words of advice would you give an aspiring investigative journalist?
LE: At the very first GIJC that I attended, back in Johannesburg in 2017, I attended a fantastic session by Martha Mendoza, titled “What Washington Is Doing in Your Country.” This year when we worked on a story about the thousands of young Jordanian men who were making a long and dangerous journey to immigrate to the US through the Mexican border, we went back to the data sources she shared, and we were able to prove that there had been a spike in the number of Jordanians seeking asylum in the US in 2024 and 2025.
Another piece of advice that I recently heard from a veteran journalist, and that resonated very much with me, was this: one of the most important skills you need to cultivate is how to shorten the distance between an idea and the execution of this idea. I think this is very important, especially for those of us who work on investigative stories and “slow” journalism, because, while it’s very important to give the story the time and space it needs so it can be thoroughly reported and narrated, it’s also important to preserve a sense of timeliness and to resist the urge to keep working on one story indefinitely.
GIJN: What topic blindspots or undercovered areas do you see in your region? And which of these are ripe for new investigation?
LE: There is no shortage of underreported areas in our region, and one thing I’ve learned throughout my work at 7iber is that oftentimes you will find great ideas for investigative stories in everyday issues. In recent years, we have expanded our coverage of health and environmental issues. Health is one great example of an area that sits at the intersection of public policy, socio-economic justice, corporate accountability, sustainability, and climate change. By paying closer attention to everyday struggles of people around us, we’re able to identify important stories to investigate.
GIJN: Can you share a notable mistake you’ve made in an investigation, or a regret, and share what lessons you took away?
Some years ago I worked on an investigation about labor violations faced by female teachers in private schools. The original story was meant to be about the gender pay gap in private schools, and an independent national commission had recently published a study about it, stating that the pay gap between men and women in private schools was 42%. The published study did not include the raw data, and at some point in the reporting process it occurred to me to request it. I was surprised to find serious flaws in the conclusions, first because they were comparing different types of workers in private schools, not just teachers, and without ensuring that they were comparing salaries of people with the same qualifications doing the same type of work. But more importantly, the number of the men in the sample was way too small, and the more stark finding was that a significant number of women surveyed were getting paid salaries well below the legal minimum wage. I realized that this is where the real story was, and pursued it.
This taught me that you should always ask for the raw data, and that averages can be very deceptive and hide important stories underneath. But my regret is that even though our main angle was 27% of female teachers were getting paid below minimum wage, we still included a comparison with men in the data visualizations and we shouldn’t have. Just because it was in the commission’s study doesn’t mean we needed to include it.
GIJN: Can you share an example of the kind of technique or insight you plan to highlight for GIJC25 attendees — or otherwise what you yourself are looking forward to in Malaysia, whether in terms of networking or learning about an emerging reporting challenge or approach?
LE: GIJC is always a place of great inspiration, and I often come back with new ideas for stories and new techniques and tools we can use. At the last GIJC, for example, I was deeply inspired by a panel on investigating health-related issues, and ended up reaching out to one of the speakers and collaborating with her in our health journalism fellowship program. I’m looking forward to new inspiration this year. I’m also planning to seek out insights and advice from other media outlets on how they are dealing with challenges related to AI bots and changing reader-behaviors, since it’s something we have been grappling with for some months now.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-11-07 16:00:21
Reuters pulled together numerous data sources to track the accelerated military buildup the US government has undertaken recently in the Caribbean, reopening shuttered or defunct bases while engaging in deadly strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats said to originating from Venezuela. In this edition of our Data Journalism Top 10, covering stories from October 21 to November 4, we also feature Bloomberg’s satellite analysis of the destruction left by the strongest hurricane to hit Jamaica in modern times, ARIJ’s compelling account of the abuses suffered by Sudanese refugees fleeing into Egypt, OCCRP on how drug traffickers in Europe have turned to burying their product to manage a market glut, and Decoherence Media’s look into the archives of a defunct neo-Nazi online forum to map its former members.
Image: Screenshot, Reuters
Since September, the US has conducted a series of strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 people. This operation is being framed by the Trump administration as an effort to curb cartels and the flow of drugs into the US. A Reuters visual investigation revealed and tracked the scale of the buildup of military assets, some of which are stationed right off the coast of Venezuela. In the past two months, reporters photographed US military bases, analyzed satellite imagery, and used ship and flight-tracking data to visualize the expanding activity across the Caribbean. Using open source visuals and on-the-ground reporting, the team also traced US military vessel movements. The investigation identified construction activity at key US bases, including the previously shuttered Roosevelt Roads base in Puerto Rico. After speaking to US military officials and maritime experts, the report concluded that Washington’s buildup seems poised to extend beyond mere counter-narcotics operations.
Image: Screenshot, Bloomberg
Hurricane Melissa was the worst storm to hit Jamaica in recorded history. The Category 5 hurricane killed more than 40 people on the island, and crippled essential services. In the hard-hit southwestern town of Black River, Bloomberg reporters used high-resolution synthetic aperture radar data from UMBRA to assess the extent of damage. The analysis showed that 76% of buildings were damaged, many with collapsed roofs. Additional reporting drew on Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data to estimate damage across developed areas, revealing that western towns suffered the most severe losses. Bloomberg also used NASA’s Black Marble night-light imagery to measure the storm’s impact on the power grid, which “sustained massive damage.” Some 70% of transmission lines failed, leaving residents across the island country without power.
Image: Screenshot, ARIJ
This joint investigation by ARIJ and Al Mohajer revealed how smugglers and criminal gangs are preying on refugees fleeing the violence in Sudan. Focusing their investigation on refugees that have crossed into neighboring Egypt, reporters found widespread problems but also that those who lacked UNHCR registration were unable to file police reports against their abusers. The team interviewed a dozen survivors of smuggler-related violence and surveyed 324 refugees, finding a number of men and women had been raped or sexually harassed. One-third of refugees had been robbed, one in 12 kidnapped for ransom, and others threatened or financially exploited. Through interviews, the journalists mapped four main smuggling routes in an interactive visualization showing border stops leading to a quarry region near Aswan, a city in southern Egypt that is notoriously dangerous.
Elsewhere, a joint investigation by Sky News, Sudan War Monitor, and Lighthouse Reports used open source reporting to trace the fate of civilians who fled a key Sudanese frontline city, and exposed how paramilitaries hunted them down in surrounding “killing fields.”
Image: Screenshot, Decoherence Media
Decoherence Media is an outlet co-founded by former Bellingcat data scientist Tristan Lee that investigates authoritarian and anti-democratic movements. In this, the first of a three-part investigation, the team revisited a 2019 leak of a database from the neo-Nazi online forum Iron March. Researchers located an original torrent file containing the full web server for the forum, which was promoted as “the first and only global Online Fascist Zine.” The server contained “a bounty of information,” including email correspondence, visitor logs with IP addresses, draft posts, and user comments, allowing investigators to map the network’s structure and reach. Using IP-based geolocation, they traced more than 275,000 unique visitors, including known members of the militant Atomwaffen Division, with most traffic coming from the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Though the Iron March forum itself is now defunct, its legacy endures through decentralized channels and a public database, now searchable via fashyleaks.com, which journalists, researchers and activists can query.
Image: Screenshot, Amazon Underworld
To investigate the reach of armed and criminal groups across the Amazon, researchers from Amazon Underworld mapped 987 municipalities in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, documenting where such networks operated. Through field interviews, document analysis, and information requests, the team gathered qualitative data that revealed 67% of municipalities face at least one armed or criminal group, and 32% face multiple actors, including a number of gangs that operate across borders. In many areas, illicit economies have become the dominant source of income, with profits surpassing the resources of state agencies used to combat these groups. The findings were visualized in an interactive map showing how organized crime impacts key Amazonian territories.
Image: Screenshot, High Country News
After a catastrophic wildfire sparked by a damaged transmission tower, state regulators in California introduced new wildfire prevention rules. One of the fixes deployed by the state’s largest utility company — PG&E — saw a change to the fast-trip settings that automatically cut electricity when equipment detects a potential physical hazard that might spark a fire. Reporters from High Country News and Type Investigations conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis using data from Cal Fire and PG&E to map service areas and circuit lines against wildfire locations while tracking cumulative power outages from 2022 to 2025. Their findings show that rural communities, which often border forests and face higher fire risk, experienced 600% more fast-trip outages than urban areas. For millions of Californians, these outages have become routine: nearly one million people experienced outages in 2024, with power repeatedly cut to homes and businesses. Reporters estimated that more than 20,000 people who rely on electricity for their medical devices are PG&E customers that live in rural areas averaging 10 or more outages each year.
Image: Screenshot, Texty.org.ua
Journalists and information designers at Texty visualized findings from a scientific study on sleep patterns in Ukraine to find out the impact of war on the citizenry’s rest. They tracked more than 100 people who kept sleep diaries to capture sleep phases. Texty transformed this data into smart interactive graphics that broke each night of sleep into stages of light sleep, deep sleep, REM, and awake time, showing how shelling and air-raid alarms repeatedly disturbed rest. The project analyzed 40 nights of data collected between October 2023 and March 2024, comparing sleep patterns to the frequency of air raid alerts. Even as shelling lessened, chronic sleep disruption persisted: 44% of participants showed signs of insomnia and 27% had clinical insomnia, nearly triple the rates found in countries at peace. Also worth reading this week related to the conflict in Ukraine, is Der Spiegel’s report on the numbers of Russian soldiers who have died in the war in Ukraine.
Image: Screenshot, OCCRP
Last year, a Spanish police raid uncovered seven metric tons of cocaine buried on a farm near Seville — a haul with a street of value of €420 million (US$485 million). A report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) suggests that this is part of a new strategy, and that traffickers are increasingly hoarding or burying cocaine to manage a market flooded with supply. It also outlined how high-yield coca crops, and increasingly inventive smuggling methods — from ‘narco-subs’ to ‘chemical camouflage’ — have reshaped the global cocaine trade. Drawing on data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the European Union Drugs Agency, and interviews with experts across Europe and Latin America, reporters found that coca cultivation in Colombia grew by nearly two-thirds between 2018 and 2023. With wholesale prices plunging, and even dropping by half in some markets, traffickers are hiding shipments to manipulate prices.
Image: Screenshot, The Pudding
For The Pudding, data journalist and journalism professor Alvin Chang analyzed how often the word “democracy” appeared, and when it was perceived as under threat, in the Congressional Record, the official transcript of everything said in the US Congress, combining historical records from 1873 to 2017 with recent congressional speeches. Using a Google language model, Chang examined the 200 words before and after each mention of “democracy” to determine whether the context described a threat. He classified these as: general threats to the democratic system, external threats from abroad, internal threats from government actors, or systemic and legal issues that undermine democracy. As users scroll through the piece, speeches from each era unfold, with dots representing mentions that merge into a bar chart showing how often the word appeared. The visualization charts a shifting narrative, as fears of democracy’s collapse moved from foreign enemies during world wars to threats said to be emerging from the government itself in recent years.
Image: Screenshot, Folha de S. Paulo
Folha de S.Paulo mapped one of the most significant shifts in modern geopolitics — the rise of China as a rival of the United States in world trade. Using UN data on trade in goods between 2000-2024 and WTO data on services between 2005-2023, reporters compared the total trade of the US and China with other countries around the world. In 2006, 148 nations traded more with the US than with China, they found, but by 2024, the situation had flipped: 141 countries traded more with China and only 82 favored the US. Interactive maps illustrated the global shift, showing China’s expansion first across Oceania, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and later into Western Europe and Latin America. The analysis linked this dominance to decades of economic liberalization, China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, and large-scale industrial growth driven by infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road Initiative.
Image: Screenshots, Datadista
Spain shut its unprofitable coal mines by the end of 2018 and has largely phased out coal-fired power generation over the past decade, promising a just transition for mining regions. Datadista’s investigation drew on figures from Spain’s Institution for Just Transition and energy-sector data, and reporters charted how mining employment fell from 45,000 in 1990 to just 1,700 by early 2018. Between 2020 and 2021, the government signed Just Transition Agreements with unions and utilities to guarantee early retirement, retraining, and relocation for workers. Yet new industrial projects in towns like As Pontes and Andorra often stalled or lacked binding guarantees. Funded by €868 million (US$1 billion) from the EU’s Just Transition Fund and €300 million (US$330 million) in recovery funds, many initiatives focused on small local projects or municipal infrastructure. Datadista found that despite the plants’ closures, the promised economic renewal lagged behind, leaving mining communities uncertain about their future.
Hanna Duggal is a data journalist at AJ Labs, the data, visual storytelling, and experiments team of Al Jazeera and a GIJN contributor. She has reported on issues such as policing, surveillance, and protests using data, and reported for GIJN on data journalism in the Middle East, investigating algorithms onTikTok, and on using data to investigate tribal lands in the US.
2025-11-06 16:00:22
For those hoping to cross from Mexico into the United States, the final hurdle is often the Rio Grande, also called the Rio Bravo. The river marks the border between Texas on one side, and four Mexican states on the other.
Crossing it has long been known to be dangerous. But what began as an occasional news story when a tragic drowning had occurred became a transnational investigative project when three newsrooms decided to dig into the data on deaths on both sides of the border.
The resulting investigation, which was published by Mexico’s El Universal, the investigative outlet Lighthouse Reports, and The Washington Post, went on to win the 2025 Gabo Award in the coverage category, where judges praised its “investigative rigor, its innovative approach, and its ability to question power structures with evidence and sensitivity.”
The project started with an idea to examine how many women and children were dying trying to cross this stretch of water. Reporters had observed changes in migration dynamics since the pandemic: now entire families were leaving their countries to reach the United States. And while there are dangers the length of the journey, crossing this river – the final stage – was proving for many to be a matter of life or death.
GIJN interviewed journalists Miriam Ramírez and Daniela Guazo from El Universal, along with Melissa del Bosque of Lighthouse Reports to learn about the work behind the investigation. They detailed how dogged document gathering and extensive data analysis allowed them to reveal a figure for migrant drownings that was “significantly higher” than the previous best-known estimate, and shared their experiences of organizing a cross-border collaboration, collating data, and being true to the stories of the people they featured.
In large-scale collaborative investigations like this, building a methodology before starting research is key to saving time and focusing on what you want to find out or prove. Melissa del Bosque, who is the investigations editor at Lighthouse Reports, said the team understood early on the importance of establishing a work scheme.
The methodology that served as the basis for the investigation was developed with the support of experts, activists, journalists, and academics such as Professor Stephanie Leutert, an expert on migration at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Rio Grande runs along the border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas on the Mexican side, and the state of Texas on the US side.
One of the team’s key early discoveries was that there was no single official record of deaths in the river – while some deaths were recorded in the US, others were documented by Mexico.
To counter that problem, they designed a work process from data collection to analysis, that created a roster of sources among authorities at the local, state, and national levels, and that established standards and processes for contacting identified sources. Lastly they made sure that they had a standardized data entry and verification process, which covered everything from processing information to identifying and handling duplicate cases.
Del Bosque said that the methodology – and the work plan that was based on it – meant that collaboration was smoother and brought clarity about what the investigation sought to achieve. The methodology was also made public, so that other journalists could replicate similar work.
Expecting there to be a number of government agencies or public organizations that would hold the information they needed for the investigation, journalist Miriam Ramírez and her colleagues created a list: identifying 165 sources to whom they made requests for information.
While they initially hoped to use 2012 as a starting point, obstacles in accessing the data forced them to refocus their research on the period from 2017 to 2024.
Miriam Ramírez who works for El Universal. Image: Courtesy of the reporter
From the beginning, they realized that there was going to be an issue working across borders. While US authorities provided files with geographic coordinates, age, name, date of birth, nationality, and the place where the drowning occurred, the situation was more complex on the Mexican side. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Migration Institute provided annual statistical data that was “very poorly disaggregated, making it difficult to analyze the information,” Ramírez explains.
“We had to abandon our initial hypothesis regarding the drowning of children because we faced deficiencies in the records… Few authorities provided information from previous years, and we only obtained useful data from 52 of the 165 authorities identified,” she says.
The team submitted more than 200 requests to access the information. When they hit a wall, they sought other avenues: they modified their questions, searched public databases, and made calls to speak directly with the agencies, utilizing all available resources to get the data they needed.
During the data collection process, del Bosque noted how both countries lacked information on migrant deaths by drowning. Even other media, she adds, showed little interest in reporting on the issue, as if there were no stories to tell.
Faced with data gaps and the disparity of records between countries, the Lighthouse Reports team took on the challenge of standardizing records and analyzing the data. The methodology they used details the process to avoid duplication of cases between those provided by the Mexican municipalities and prosecutors’ offices and those from US Customs and Border Protection.
Through this work, the team was able to find:
“What we did was to analyze the periods when these deaths began to increase, the start of Operation Lone Star, and the reinforcement of the National Guard deployment, and that’s where we find these patterns, a link between militarized immigration policies, and the increase in deaths,” Ramírez notes. While her team could not establish a conclusive causal relationship between the border build-up and the spike in drownings, expert interviews and migrant testimony pointed to a clear correlation.
Their methodology also addressed how to discard duplicate data. This allowed for the consolidation of a single database, enabled them to generate an analysis of the information, and then share the results. Ultimately the figures shed light on one of the teams’ hypotheses: Operation Lone Star had had an influence on the number of drownings being reported.
The Washington Post team conducted the forensic analysis and reconstructed the increase in Lone Star’s infrastructure using satellite imagery. Contributions from the other journalistic teams complemented this work.
Reporters documented the build-up of infrastructure on the US-Mexico border, such as the use of barbed wire and shipping containers at certain points. Image: Justin Hamel/ Lighthouse Reports. Republished with permission
For this project, up to three meetings per week – which took place in Spanish and English – were necessary, ranging from editorial meetings where findings were shared, to huddles with the team of reporters to follow up on hypotheses, to meetings to review the visualizations that would be generated.
“Data analysis supports the editorial teams’ hypotheses. It’s not about looking for new angles; it’s about supporting what already exists. After that comes the question: how do we visualize this?” explains Guazo.
The data team proposed up to six sketches so the team could discuss how they would illustrate the data showing fatalities, the presence of the National Guard, and buildup of the Lone Star infrastructure.
Choosing the right visualization for data is always a challenge, which is why Guazo recommends being clear about what you want to show and answering the questions: What is most important in the story? What do you want to convey to the reader?
The research required constant fact-checking to avoid errors in data analysis, and with new data added periodically, previous readings had to be modified.
Reporters mapped out the changing infrastructure at key points along the Texas border with Mexico. Image: Screenshot of a map created by The Washington Post and Lighthouse Reports
The project lasted 10 months, but alongside the data element stood an editorial prerogative: Above all, the life stories of the people they were writing about had to prevail. Together, they reported on stories of people with destroyed families and broken dreams, migrants caught in a struggle to improve their quality of life. Among the stories of loss they recounted is one of a mother who lost her toddler and newborn baby while trying to cross.
That subject matter made the fieldwork even more challenging than the technical data questions, says Ramírez.
“I had been processing death figures, I knew there were drownings, but once I got to the field and saw the children, women with babies, pregnant women, it really impacted me,” she adds.
The situation at the border is also complicated by a serious organized crime dynamic, with migrants often facing kidnappings, extortion, disappearances, and homicides on their journey through Mexico.
From del Bosque’s perspective, there are not enough journalists interested in covering stories about migration due to political pressure or threats related to organized crime gangs, who are often involved in transporting migrants.
“Many media outlets don’t want to write about these issues because they say: ‘We’ve already written stories, there’s nothing new,’” she says. “Eight years ago there was more interest, unfortunately now migrant deaths have become normalized, and there’s also a crisis in journalism and few journalists focus on migration. We need to create new ways of looking at this issue.”
Lucero Hernández García is a freelance journalist and digital consultant from Mexico, and a GIJN collaborator. She has a master’s degree in communication and digital media, with a specialty in multimedia production. She runs workshops and teaches data, visualization, digital tools, and online journalism to university students. Her work has been published by IJNet, and she has received scholarships from Cosecha Roja, Sembramedia, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
2025-11-05 16:00:20
In September 2025, podcaster Pablo Torre published an investigation alleging that the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers may have used a side deal to skirt the league’s strict salary cap rules. His reporting, aired on multiple episodes of Pablo Torre Finds Out, focused on star forward Kawhi Leonard.
Leonard, one of the NBA’s most sought-after free agents, signed a four-year, US$176 million contract renewal with the Clippers during the 2021-22 off-season — the maximum allowed under league rules at the time. But Torre reported that in early 2022, Leonard’s LLC, KL2 Aspire, signed a cash and equity deal amounting to roughly $50 million through a brand sponsorship with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt financial technology startup that marketed itself as a climate-friendly bank.
Torre highlighted how the sponsorship coincided with major investments in Aspiration by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and another team investor. The arrangement, Torre suggested, looked less like a conventional endorsement deal and more like a “no-show” side payment that could have helped the Clippers keep their star without technically violating the salary cap.
Leonard has denied that the partnership was improper, insisting he fulfilled his contractual obligations. The Clippers and Ballmer have also rejected claims of wrongdoing.
Torre’s reporting nevertheless had an immediate impact. Major outlets picked up the story, Aspiration’s bankruptcy filings drew renewed scrutiny, and the NBA announced it was investigating the matter.
In the wake of Pablo Torre’s revelations, many legacy media outlets highlighted his reporting.
At the University of Florida’s College of Journalism & Communications, part of my research involves unpacking the importance of decentralized networks of local outlets that cover stories from underrepresented areas of the country.
I see Torre’s work as a clear example of the growing need for this kind of bottom-up, citizen journalism — particularly given media industry trends.
Watchdog journalism is supposed to hold power to account.
This is sometimes referred to as the “fourth estate.” A term that dates back to the 17th century, it reflects the idea that an independent press is supposed to act as a fourth pillar of power, alongside the three traditional branches of modern democracies — legislative, executive, and judicial.
Proudly independent from political or financial influence, fourth estate news media has traditionally demonstrated a public service commitment to exposing corruption, encouraging debate, highlighting issues that are important and forcing leaders to address those issues.
The need for watchdog journalism appears more urgent than ever.
In the Western world, with authoritarianism on the rise, the fourth estate is experiencing widespread threats. Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index found that global press freedom reached an all-time low in 2025. For the first time, it classified the situation as “difficult.”
Meanwhile, market forces and profit motives have weakened the media’s role in upholding democratic checks and balances. Fierce competition for clicks, eyeballs, and ad revenue impacts the type of content and stories that commercial outlets tend to focus on.
There appears to be less and less of a financial incentive to put in the time, resources, and effort required for deep investigative reporting. It’s just not worth the return on that investment for commercial outfits.
In the US, the Trump administration and media consolidations have further weakened the press’s ability to serve as a check on those in power.
Over the past year, two major TV networks — ABC and CBS — reached settlements for separate lawsuits brought forward by President Donald Trump tied to editorial choices on their broadcast programming. Needless to say, both decisions create significant precedents that could prove consequential for journalistic integrity and independence.
Image: Screenshot, CNN
In July 2025, the GOP-led Congress stripped over US$1 billion from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, dealing a blow to public nonprofit outlets NPR, PBS, and their local affiliates.
More recently, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah lost her job after speaking out against gun violence on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
From a structural standpoint, the US media ownership landscape has, for decades, been plagued by consolidation. Media channels have become merely one slice of the massive asset portfolios of the conglomerates that control them.
It’s probably fair to say that producing costly and burdensome watchdog journalism isn’t exactly a priority for busy executives at the top of these holding companies.
Independent local outlets are a dying breed, too.
Studies have shown that news deserts — areas with little or no local coverage — are multiplying across the US.
This has dire consequences for democratic governance: News deserts often correlate with lower civic engagement, reduced voter turnout, and less accountability for business and political leaders.
What’s more, fewer local journalists means less scrutiny of local governments, which undermines transparency and enables corruption.
Half of all counties in the US only have one newspaper — hundreds have none at all. Image: UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
For these reasons, more readers seem to be getting their news from social media and podcasts. In fact, according to a new Pew Research Center report, one in five Americans get their news from TikTok alone. And in its 2025 Digital News Report, the Reuters Institute noted that “engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows.”
With this in mind, the US government’s latest framework for a deal for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social media platform’s stateside operations to a consortium of US-based investors takes on even more significance. Many of these investors are allies of Trump. They’ll get to control the algorithm — meaning they’ll be able to influence the content that users see.
At the same time, social media has also allowed independent journalists such as Torre to find an audience.
Granted, with past journalistic stints at both Sports Illustrated and ESPN, Torre is not exactly a pure outsider. Yet he’s far from a household name, with fewer than 200,000 podcast subscribers.
Luckily, he’s by no means the only independent journalist serving as a citizen watchdog.
In January 2025, freelance journalist Liz Pelly published her book “Mood Machine,” which details her investigation into Spotify’s dubious financial practices. Through her research and reporting, she alleges that the music technology company conspired to suppress legitimate royalty payments to artists.
Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5 News fame on YouTube runs one of the largest crowdfunded independent newsrooms in the world. His exclusive interview with Hunter Biden in July 2025 got him a type of access that established mainstream media couldn’t get.
In 2020, Canadian siblings Sukh Singh and Harleen Kaur founded GroundNews, an online platform providing news aggregation, curation, and rigorous fact-checking. All Sides and Straight Arrow News are similar bottom-up projects designed to expose media bias and fight misinformation.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit media outlet ProPublica has published award-winning investigative journalism through a distributed network of local reporters. Their Life of the Mother series, which explored the deaths of mothers after abortion bans, earned them multiple awards while prompting policy changes at federal and state levels.
All have surfaced meaningful stories worth bringing to light. Historically, these types of stories were the purview of newspapers of record.
Today, underground sleuths might be among the last bulwarks to abuses of power.
The work isn’t easy. It certainly doesn’t pay well. But I think it’s important, and someone has to do it.
Editor’s Note: This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Alex Volonte is an interdisciplinary industry professional with broad experience in multimedia entertainment, having initially worked as content producer for broadcasters and digital outlets across Central Europe. He is binational (Swiss/Italian) and fluent in all major Western languages. He holds a MSc in Media & Communications from the London School of Economics. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Journalism at the University of Florida, while acting as Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant at the College of Journalism & Communications.
