2025-08-22 15:00:05
In this edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, covering stories from August 6 to 19, we look at an interactive analysis from The New York Times on Vladimir Putin’s renewed strategic momentum in Ukraine amid potential peace talks, the inconsistent tariff policies of US President Donald Trump, and a compelling Reuters piece that maps the hazardous journeys migrants take as they attempt to reach Europe via the treacherous Mediterranean crossing. Other pieces include an insightful snapshot from Bloomberg on the prevalence of betting companies as sponsors for Premier League football teams, the ongoing deadly hazards facing Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza, and a strong data-driven visualization by Diario Sur tracking the spread — and growing longevity — of wildfires in Spain.
Image: Screenshot, The New York Times
In the past week, both Russian and Ukrainian leaders have met US President Donald Trump in efforts to broker a ceasefire. A compelling New York Times interactive explored how Russia’s battlefield resurgence is shaping Vladimir Putin’s push for a deal on his terms, buoyed by lucrative enlistment incentives and a surge in weapons production. Drawing on data from Tatarstan, a region with some of the country’s highest soldier recruitment rates, the piece visualizes military sign-up bonuses, weapons factory subsidies, and the modernizing of Soviet-era bombs into guided munitions. Combined with incursion maps from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and frontline drone footage from Telegram channels, the analysis reveals how Moscow is refining its tactics and adapting after early missteps.
Image: Screenshot, Reuters Graphics
Italy has reported a sharp drop in irregular arrivals as proof that its migration policies are working, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the European Commission crediting deterrence measures. Frontex data shows crossings to the EU fell in 2024 and continued to decline into 2025, driven by fewer journeys via the central Mediterranean. But the Reuters Graphics team counters these claims with data: over 1,300 distress calls logged by Alarm Phone — a support hotline for migrants and refugees crossing in boats — and 3,812 deaths or disappearances, nearly half along this deadly route, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Using Frontex figures, satellite imagery, NOAA ocean analysis, and VesselFinder tracking, the piece reconstructed one dinghy’s ill-fated voyage from Libya with scrollytelling maps and videos from those onboard, revealing how policies hailed as a “success” magnify danger by limiting rescues due to updated Italian laws.
Image: Screenshot, Bloomberg
As the Premier League — the highest level in the English football league system — kicked off this week, Bloomberg Graphics examines the evolution of shirt sponsorships since 1992, when the league started. In the league’s early years, sponsors were largely tech or telecom firms, backing 18 clubs between 1992 and 2000. They included household names like Hewlett-Packard (Tottenham) and Brother (Manchester City), but many of those firms are now out of business. Bloomberg explained that back then, with international broadcasting limited, sponsorships catered to local fans in stadiums and on British broadcaster BSkyB — producing a patchwork of distinctly local brands sponsoring teams. This season, more than half the clubs feature gambling brands, marking the culmination of a trend which Bloomberg visualizes in a revealing streamgraph that charts sponsorship sector dominance over three decades.
Image: Screenshot, Le Temps
Switzerland has the fourth-highest tariff rate (39%) set by the US as part of President Trump’s mercurial global tariff program. Using data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the White House, Swiss French-language daily newspaper Le Temps created a series of data-heavy visuals looking at tariff rates of different countries, and compared how countries that do not have trade deals with Washington — and are running trade surpluses with the US larger than Switzerland’s — are enjoying more lenient tariffs than Bern. Switzerland’s gold exports to the US surged in 2024, artificially inflating its trade surplus and illustrating the extreme volatility in bilateral trade. Le Temps showed that basing tariff calculations on these volatile swings, by Trump’s misguided logic, means that Switzerland would have “stolen” anywhere between US$9 to US$57 billion a year. The newspaper also noted that the 2024 surge in gold prices was driven by investors’ flight to safe haven assets, in part because of uncertainty over economic policy given Trump’s return to office.
Image: Screenshot, Diario Sur
Spain is confronting large-scale wildfires, with devastating recent outbreaks burning thousands of hectares of land in the country. Across the Pyrenees, France’s Occitania region has endured its worst forest fire disaster in a century, consuming more than 16,000 hectares and leaving one dead and three missing. While major fires, those exceeding 500 hectares, are not a new phenomenon, and have gripped Spain in the past, analysis of EGIF data shows they now burn longer. Diario Sur’s data-driven piece drew on decades of records from Spain’s General Forest Fire Statistics, processed in Python to extract fire variables, which were then geolocated, and the differences between fire detection times and extinguishing times were calculated. Through data analysis and interviews with experts, the newspaper found that the decline of traditional land-use practices has led to the expansion of forests, and long periods of drought fueled by climate change leads to more dry biomass contributing to fires. One expert interviewed for the piece said that it is the intensity and scale of blazes that is a key contributing factor — often referred to as the “fire paradox” — where actively suppressing wildfires can lead to larger fires in the future.
Image: Screenshot, Nikkei vdata
Some 40 years ago, on August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into Mount Osutaka in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, killing 520 people in the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in history. Just 12 minutes after takeoff from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, the Boeing 747’s vertical tail failed, leading to rapid decompression and loss of control. Drawing on the official investigation report, Nikkei’s vdata team reconstructed the sequence of mechanical failures and crew responses, charting the doomed flight path synced with a scrolling timeline to visualize the 30 harrowing minutes of violent oscillations the aircraft endured before impact. It also contextualized the tragedy by comparing global aviation accidents and fatalities using data from the Aviation Safety Network.
Image: Screenshot, Dataphyte
In July 2024, Nigeria’s Supreme Court granted local governments financial and administrative autonomy, prohibiting state governors from withholding funds or interfering with councils to enable grassroots-driven development. A year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Dataphyte reported that 4.478 trillion Nigerian naira (US$2.9 billion) were disbursed across Nigeria’s 774 local government areas from July 2024 to June 2025, a steady rise in Local Government Autonomy (LGA) allocations from a figure of 2.26 trillion naira (US$1.5 billion) in 2022–23. But despite these substantial funds, Dataphyte’s analysis, using Central Bank of Nigeria data, showed these funds have been underutilized, and structural and administrative hurdles have limited their local impact.
Image: Screenshot, the Guardian
A Guardian investigation combining video analysis, bullet forensics, medical records from two hospitals, interviews with surgeons and humanitarian organizations — covering roughly 50 days of food distribution — indicated a sustained pattern of Israeli gunfire targeting Palestinians seeking aid. Researchers examined more than 30 videos showing gunfire near US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites, with machine gun fire audible on at least 11 days. Over 2,000 Palestinians were injured during the 48-day period examined, predominantly from gunshots. Recovered bullet casings and weapons analysis point to Israeli munitions, with the northern Rafah GHF site — a long road hosting crowds visible from space — emerging as a focal point of repeated attacks.
Image: Screenshot, The New York Times
In late June, US B-2 bombers carried out a series of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that housed the country’s uranium enrichment program. One of the central targets was an underground facility at Fordo, where Iran is believed to have numerous centrifuges buried in bunkers between 260 to 360 feet deep. In this analysis, The New York Times took a close look at the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs used, their possible pathways down into the facility, and the local geology of the rock protecting the bunker to try to understand how much damage the airstrikes inflicted. Their conclusion: the bombs likely did not reach the chambers housing the centrifuges, but the shock waves from the successive attacks did, probably causing “significant damage.”
Image: Screenshot, Forensic Architecture
Germany colonized Namibia in the 19th century and, after a campaign of ethnic cleansing, instituted a commercial farming regimen on the land that radically reshaped the ecosystem and the Indigenous peoples, leaving a legacy that extends to today. The digital investigation site Forensic Architecture did a deep dive into the character of the land from 150 years ago compared to now, using oral testimony, archival documents, and site photography. It found that native grasslands have been replaced by bush, scrub trees, and grazing for livestock, leaving less and less land for individual farmers as well as fewer animal species.
Image: Screenshot, South China Morning Post
Last month, the music world mourned the loss of the Prince of Darkness. Ozzy Osbourne, the legendary Black Sabbath frontman, shared one last triumphant show with a farewell concert in his hometown of Birmingham, UK, before he passed away. The South China Morning Post honored his life with a visually stunning tribute, charting his journey from childhood to global fame. They illustrate his renowned tattoos and create detailed treemaps of his best-selling albums, both with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist. Drawing on Ozzy’s autobiography, Spotify, and Chartmasters, the team also charted the posthumous surge in streams of his seminal solo tracks and Black Sabbath classics, celebrating the enduring legacy of a rock icon.
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.
2025-08-21 15:00:39
The first center of its kind ever created in Italy, Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI) has become a pillar of investigative journalism in a country where news media often lack the resources to embark on long, time-consuming probes and reporters face numerous challenges, from low pay to legal intimidation and risks to their personal safety.
A GIJN member, IRPI currently produces several stories per week thanks to a team of about 20 people, including 16 journalists, and has under its belt collaborations with hundreds of reporters around the world.
Its investigations typically combine an Italian and an international angle: some of its most recent efforts shed light on greenwashing by asset management firms, drug trafficking in the Mediterranean, and Russian oligarchs with properties in Italy receiving EU subsidies despite being targeted by sanctions.
In May 2025, IRPI was awarded the Difference Day Honorary Title for Freedom of Expression by two Brussels universities, under the patronage of UNESCO: The most recent of a long series of prizes attesting to the quality of the group’s work.
GIJN sat down with Cecilia Anesi, IRPI co-founder and center director, and Lorenzo Bagnoli, co-chief editor, to discuss the group’s history and where it plans to go next.
Cecilia Anesi, IRPI co-founder and center director. Image: Screenshot, IRPI
GIJN: Tell me about how IRPI saw the light and how it evolved over the years.
Cecilia Anesi: IRPI was born after some of us attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kyiv in 2012. There, we realized that unlike other news organizations from around the world, no major Italian outlet had sent their journalists: we were all freelancers, most of us very young. Back in Italy, we met again and decided to try and open a center for investigative journalism inspired by those that were present at the Conference, such as OCCRP and ICIJ. We founded a nonprofit association, similar to others that at the time were cropping up in various parts of the world to do independent journalism. We didn’t want this to be a “country club,” but a real workplace where we could produce investigative journalism professionally and sustain ourselves with it. That mission has only become stronger since March 2020, when we launched our own online outlet, IRPIMedia. We now publish our work on our website, instead of struggling to sell it to other newspapers for peanuts like we did before.
GIJN: How would you describe your place in the Italian media landscape today?
CA: We exist and operate on very different levels. On the one hand, we represent Italy in large transnational investigations, for example, Suisse Secrets or Dubai Unlocked. Secondly, we run investigations on national Italian stories, albeit without forgetting their foreign ramifications, which we cover with the help of freelancers abroad. Thirdly, we have started to play a coordination role in projects focusing on local issues, in parts of the country that have often been forgotten by mainstream media. We are frequently contacted by activist groups that want to shed light on something going on where they are. We don’t have the resources to follow up on all these requests, nor is it our core mission, but we do provide assistance to smaller collectives who focus on specific areas or topics, including by helping them secure funding.
IRPI launched their own online outlet, IRPIMedia, in March 2020. Image: Screenshot, IRPIMedia
GIJN: Looking at your website I was struck by the variety of topics you cover. What are your editorial priorities, how do you decide which stories you want to pursue?
Lorenzo Bagnoli: At the beginning that depended largely on our backgrounds. Several among us had always worked on organized crime with an eye on transnational stories, so that was a natural topic to focus on. Then we also became a point of reference for freelancers, because we pay a little better than other Italian outlets, we have a level of accuracy that is difficult to achieve elsewhere, and we always apply the same editorial process regardless of whether the journalist is a newbie or has 25 years of experience. In order to choose among the stories we are pitched, we try to understand whether or not they can be developed following our standard method: coming up with an investigative hypothesis, and looking at ways to confirm it or disprove it.
Lorenzo Bagnoli, IRPI co-chief editor. Image: Screenshot, IRPI
That said, in recent years we have also identified four areas of research we are particularly interested in: surveillance, migrations, organized crime, and the environment.
GIJN: How do you remain afloat financially? What’s your business model?
CA: At the onset, we were hoping to rely chiefly on core funding, where donors provide not for a single project but rather to support an outlet as a whole, and we did manage to convince some international donors that weren’t active in Italy and southern Europe to get involved and support our work. But more recently, this kind of revenue has dwindled, and in the last year and a half we have had to rely more on smaller grants for specific investigations. We have become pretty good at managing these projects, but with some 30 or 40 of them per year, each with its own deadlines and paperwork, we are overloaded with administrative work. However, this has allowed us to remain afloat.
Last year we also launched a membership campaign, which we hope in time will become one of the pillars of our operation. We invite our readers to support us with a donation, and in return they become part of a community, with a weekly newsletter, a Slack group where we share extra material and they can interact with us as well as with one another, monthly online conferences on current affairs topics or specific investigations, and master classes.
GIJN: How’s this membership campaign going so far?
CA: It’s going well, although growth is very slow. At the moment we have some 190 members. One of the challenges is increasing our reach and making IRPIMedia better known. We have seen that when we go to the ground to present our work, that has a positive effect on membership as well. But we have a long way to go, as things stand, the membership project costs us more money than it brings in. However the financial aspect is not the only one that matters. For example, at the beginning there was little interaction within the community, but that is changing for the better.
Image: Screenshot, IRPIMedia
GIJN: Resources available to independent nonprofit media have dramatically shrunk this year as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts to US funding, particularly via USAID. Have things gotten harder for you in the last few months?
CA: I’ll give you a two-pronged answer. On the one hand, yes, there is this dark cloud hovering over our industry, and we’d be crazy if we didn’t see it. On the other, concretely, we haven’t been impacted by the cuts to USAID, because we weren’t benefiting from it in the first place. But this is hardly good news, as it goes to show to what extent investigative journalism in southern Europe has been excluded from big international funding schemes. We weren’t doing well yesterday, and we aren’t doing well today.
LB: Just to add, one area that shows how conditions have worsened is collaborative journalism. Donors have fewer resources, we are getting paid much less, and investigations are less ambitious. It’s as if the golden age that followed the Panama Papers investigation was coming to an end.
GIJN: What other challenges are you facing today as investigative journalists in Italy?
LB: I’m loath to describe Italy as always being an anomaly on everything. The financial woes of investigative outlets, as we were saying, are common throughout southern Europe. I wouldn’t single out the Italian context as more challenging than others, with the exception of those who investigate organized crime and are very close to the territories where such illegal activities occur. They do expose themselves to a level of danger that remains specific to Italy.
CA: Also, as our articles show, these are transnational criminal organizations, so it’s not like if you are in Amsterdam, Bratislava, or London, you are safe, they can find you there as well.
I also don’t want to make comparisons with other countries, but I can say that, in Italy, a 2022 legal reform has strengthened the “right to be forgotten,” which means that we, like all Italian news media, find ourselves flooded with content removal requests from people mentioned in our articles — some of them legitimate, others completely baseless. This poses a double problem: it causes a loss of information previously available online, and it slows newsrooms down. The same law has also de facto made it harder for judicial reporters to get hold of court documents, including on mafia cases.
This new legal framework has encouraged the practice of intimidation lawsuits against the media. Italian journalists were used to criminal complaints over what they said or wrote, but civil lawsuits seeking financial compensation were relatively rare. Now they’ve become more frequent, not just against large broadcasters and newspapers, but also mid-sized and smaller publications. Some of us have spent months defending ourselves in the courts of justice, which took away precious time from journalistic activities.
GIJN: Earlier this year, it emerged that the phones of several Italian activists and journalists had been hacked with malware developed by an Israeli cybersecurity firm, Paragon. It remains unclear, at this stage, exactly who ordered the spying, and to what extent Italian government agencies were involved. How did you react to the news?
LB: We tried to ascertain whether our devices had been targeted as well. There are organizations that can assist journalists with this kind of verifications, in particular we turned to Access Now. We did this via our surveillance desk, which I coordinate and has been covering this area for several years, so it was the easiest way to proceed. It seems that we weren’t targeted, but we also know that we don’t know everything…
GIJN: What does the future look like for IRPI?
CA: We are trying to move on from this transitional phase, in which we have to rely so heavily on project funding. We want to be better known, more followed, and more supported by readers. We’ll also keep looking for core funding from European donors, but also from Italian ones. The latter at the moment are virtually non-existent, but what we write can be of use to both corporate and institutional actors, so a commercial development could be possible in that direction as well.
LB: In order to grow our audience and raise awareness about the journalistic value of what we do, we are betting on new products as well. We have a book about gentrification coming out, and we’ll continue to produce podcasts, which work very well. Some of the things we do are almost inevitably niche, but we’d like to open up that niche as much as possible.
Michele Barbero is an Italian journalist based in Paris. After several years at France 24, he currently works for French news agency AFP. His byline has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Foreign Policy, Jacobin, and Wired UK.
2025-08-20 15:00:20
Iconic journalists will rally the world’s watchdog community at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia in November, in a potential turning of the tide for accountability.
The co-hosts of GIJC25 — the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and GIJN member Malaysiakini — are excited and honored to announce that one of the keynote speakers at the conference will be Gustavo Gorriti, the courageous and pioneering director of Peru’s IDL-Reporteros. He will speak on the urgent challenges and opportunities facing the investigative community in a special session at the event, which will be held in Kuala Lumpur from November 20-24.
Having once been forced into exile, Gorriti continues to be the target of relentless legal persecution and smear campaigns for his team’s courageous investigations, including its stunning revelations of high-level graft in South America’s Odebrecht scandal. Due to his resolute refusal to disclose his confidential sources, to attend compromised inquiries, and to surrender his reporting devices, Gorriti has become a leading voice of defiance in the face of a growing global practice in which state organs “investigate the investigators.” A former judo champion who has survived everything from kidnapping to government harassment, Gorriti embodies the unbowed fighting spirit of GIJC25.
“In the midst of setbacks for democracy all over the world, this gathering sends the resolute, defiant message that investigative journalism is growing stronger in talent, tools, potent collaboration to expose and uncover crime, corruption, and disinformation,” Gorriti says.
GIJN will soon reveal other world-renowned keynote speakers for GIJC25 in the weeks ahead — so watch this space! That major keynote speech will address the future of the global investigative community and will be followed by an all-Asia keynote panel featuring Malaysiakini’s Steven Gan, Rappler Executive Editor Glenda Gloria, Wahyu Dhyatmika, CEO of Indonesia’s Tempo Digital, Nitin Sethi, founding editor of India’s The Reporter’s Collective, and other soon-to-be-announced investigative heavyweights from the continent.
In all, GIJC25 will feature more than 150 sessions, including expert panels, practical workshops, and networking opportunities, all dedicated to equipping journalists with the tools, techniques, intel, and collaboration channels to investigate wrongdoing in a world increasingly tilted in favor of powerful wrongdoers. More than 1,500 watchdog journalists from more than 100 countries are expected to attend.
The program lineup of more than 300 speakers will include the best in the business: award winners, data gurus, innovative editors, experts on urgent investigative topics, and courageous journalists who have exposed corruption and abuses of power in perilous press conditions. It will also include more diverse expertise than ever, from tips on investigative photojournalism by renowned conflict photojournalist Ron Haviv, to access to Indigenous data and colonial archives from Tristan Ahtone, editor-at-large at Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe. GIJC25’s esteemed line-up will also feature greater geographic diversity than ever: Joseph Poliszuk, co-founder of Venezuela’s Armando.info; Malek Khadhraoui, Tunisia-based director of Inkyfada; Helena Bengtsson, data editor at Sweden’s Gota Media; Athandiwe Saba, the South Africa-based managing editor of Code for Africa’s iLab; and Alia Ibrahim, co-founder of Lebanon’s Daraj.com.
The conference will reprise some of the most valued topic-specific digging tips from past events, such as the latest techniques from Pulitzer–winning investigator Martha Mendoza, cutting-edge follow-the-money methodologies from Miranda Patrucic, editor-in-chief of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), tips on navigating cross-border corporate data from Karrie Kehoe, deputy head of data and research of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), building cross-border collaborations to track war crimes from Hoda Osman, executive editor of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), and many more. Attendees will also hear from leaders charged with sharpening skills and impact for investigative journalists, such as Dinesh Balliah, director of South Africa’s Wits Centre for Journalism, Anusha Bradley, investigative journalist from Radio New Zealand, Namini Wijedasa deputy editor at the Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), and Craig Silverman, digital digging expert and co-founder of the Indicator (Canada).
“For me personally and for CLIP, the upcoming GIJC will be particularly powerful,” says Maria Teresa Ronderos, co-founder of GIJN member Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (El CLIP). “Dark clouds are gathering over the democratic world, yet this powerful conference — bringing together the finest in investigative journalism — will inspire us and guide us through the hard battles ahead.”
The 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference will also feature numerous sessions addressing the current context, including:
These add to the conference’s well-established track record of examining crime and corruption, the environment, safety and security, data journalism, human rights, academia, health, and multiple sessions on investigating urgent issues such as war crimes, misinformation, and Indigenous rights abuses.
“Let’s use this event to join forces to advance our skills and collaboration to be able to hold power to account in an era of deteriorating democracies and increased risk for investigative journalists,” says Emilia Diaz-Struck, executive director of GIJN. “This is about advancing investigative journalism and the power of the network at a time when things have turned in new and alarming directions, from newsrooms forced into exile to widespread sustainability challenges.”
Díaz-Struck also points out that many GIJN member organizations are actively helping individuals outside of their newsrooms or even countries — including fellows, freelancers, and civil society collaborators — attend and learn from GIJC25.
“This is very encouraging, and actually touching — they are sacrificing to help expand the reach of the community,” Díaz-Struck says. “We’re seeing members of different scales, sizes, and regions, supporting the conference and making it happen, based on their budget and capacity — helping fellows and journalists outside of their newsrooms come, as well as supporting members from their teams. That is another form of solidarity and collaboration at a moment of funding restrictions: journalists helping fellow journalists as much as they can. We are inspired and immensely grateful to every member, outlet, and foundation, as well as individuals, that make GIJC possible (full list of partners and sponsors can be found here).”
The investigative opportunities and, particularly, the threats posed by AI and its hunger for resources will be another area of emphasis for the conference. Having recently published the seminal book “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination,” Karen Hao, who leads the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, will be part of one of the pre-conference day events and also a speaker at GIJC, and tells GIJN of her excitement about empowering attendees in the crucial topic in Malaysia.
“I’m incredibly excited to attend my first GIJC and be among the best investigative journalists in the world,” she says. “Especially at a moment when the media industry and press freedom is under attack globally, I look forward to being in community with everyone and learning from one another.”
Some panels will also feature non-journalists who are world leaders in specialist fields, such as spyware supersleuth and Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert, whose recent book “Chasing Shadows,” about investigating the astonishing surveillance threat facing journalists and dissidents, is a chilling must-read for any reporter disliked by a government. Be sure to meet some of these extraordinary speakers in the hallways at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.
This will be the first time that the Global Investigative Journalism Conference will be held in Asia. Previously, GIJN hosted regional Asian investigative conferences in Manila (2014), Kathmandu (2016), and Seoul (2018). A fourth Uncovering Asia conference was planned for Kuala Lumpur in 2020 before it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it is fitting that GIJC25 takes place in this key hub of the continent.
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.
2025-08-19 15:00:56
Project Comprova, a collaborative fact-checking initiative in Brazil, has abandoned the labels “false,” “misleading,” “satire,” and “proven” in its verifications and adopted a broader approach to combating misinformation.
José Antonio Lima, the project’s assistant editor, said the change was motivated by the understanding that the previous approach focused too much on the content itself and neglected other essential components of misinformation, such as where it came from and what makes it credible to so many people.
“We realized that simply refuting allegations is not enough,” the journalist told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “Fact-checks now investigate not only the evidence and claims of viral posts, but also the creators of the content and their interests, as well as the tactics used to persuade people and lead them to believe what was published. The overall idea is to make the content more palatable in order to contribute to public debate, allowing people to make their own decisions, regardless of their partisan or ideological affiliation, based on true facts.”
Additionally, Lima said that in ending the use of these labels, they expect that at least part of the public most affected by misinformation will begin engaging with content that provides truthful information.
“The labels ended up acting as an obstacle or a barrier to the connection between verification and the public,” he told LJR. “We stopped using them precisely after we concluded that people have an aversion to content that contradicts their worldview.”
The changes, definitively implemented after four months of testing, represent a methodological overhaul of the initiative, which launched in 2018 and now brings together 42 media outlets from different parts of Brazil that work collaboratively.
Comprova has its own team of editors who gather suspicious content and send it to the group of fact-checkers participating in the project. Reporters from the media partners in the coalition volunteer to fact-check the content, which is typically verified by three journalists from different Comprova member outlets. After the investigation is complete, the journalists write a report that is submitted for peer review and is only published when at least three other participating newsrooms review and validate the investigation and the results obtained. The final article is published on the Comprova website with the brands of the outlets that participated in the entire process (the investigation and subsequent verification of the work done) and can be incorporated or cited by partner newsrooms in their own coverage.
In addition to the end of classification labels, a new way of thinking about fact-check headlines was also instituted. The proposal is that all headlines should be “truth-affirming” and avoid reproducing false information, even if it’s to deny it.
“In the current scenario, it’s difficult to imagine a public debate without misinformation. As some experts say, misinformation is no longer a flaw in public debate, but rather a characteristic that will be difficult to eliminate,” Lima said. “Therefore, in practice, we are committed to reducing the harm caused by misinformation. The issue of headlines fits into this.”
Reporter Gabriella Braz, part of the Comprova team from newspaper Correio Braziliense, said the biggest challenge of the new guidelines has been adapting the thinking and the way of constructing headlines and texts to explain to the reader that it is a piece of misinformation without saying that it is false.
“Before, articles would say: ‘It’s false that such and such happened.’ Not anymore. We have to think of a much more indirect headline, in a way, because we understand that this [false] label can alienate the very audience that fell for these pieces [of misinformation],” Braz told LJR. “This whole idea of telling the truth first, of not constantly using ‘false,’ or ‘misleading,’ or ‘not,’ really changes our mindset when it comes to writing.”
Beyond the text itself, the new format brings more reflection to the entire fact-checking process. For example, to account for all the elements that make up a piece of misinformation — who creates the content and the tactics used to make it credible — an in-depth analysis is conducted of the pages that produce the fact-checked content, the discourse used by these profiles, the way headlines and captions are created, and the content of other shared posts. All of this is dissected and can be used in the fact-checking.
“Because the misinformation chain itself is more complex today, this has required a much more reflective process from us,” Braz said. “During this process, we’ve seen many common characteristics, such as the use of warnings, ‘urgent,’ content that seems alarming. These characteristics, and also new techniques we see these profiles using, can serve as a warning so that people can learn to identify [misinformation] over time.”
Braz said she’s also become more empathetic toward people who believe this content and has sought to understand their reasoning. She said the content she produces now is much more educational.
“Just because we’re fact-checkers doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes glance at something and think, ‘Wow, I could have missed this if I hadn’t had the habit of researching,'” she added. “This is something Sérgio [Lüdtke, editor] and Zé [Lima, assistant editor] talk about: that sometimes people themselves are embarrassed about having missed it. So we can’t adopt this attitude that it’s false, that it’s misleading. You have to be more explanatory and tell that person that you understand why they missed it, but that now they can be alert.”
Researcher Taís Seibt, who has a Ph.D. in communication and information from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, said abolishing labels can be a path to dialogue and mitigate public resistance. The journalist has been researching fact-checking in Brazil for 10 years. She said that in addition to being a form of informative journalism, fact-checking is also a form of media literacy, and this channel of dialogue can be a tool against misinformation.
“Abandoning labels is a possible path. I don’t know if it’s precisely the future of fact-checking, but it’s a possibility to mitigate resistance to correction, which is most blatantly reflected in labels,” Seibt told LJR. “If you share information and someone responds with a fact-check indicating it was false, you feel exposed and may react to this exposure. The response is often to attack the correction and the correctors. There’s an emotional element to this reaction, just as there’s an emotional appeal in adhering to certain beliefs.”
Seibt also notes that in the current misinformation landscape, there’s a clearer understanding that isolated fact-checks have limited effect. This is because the misinformation narrative is already consolidated in the collective memory of people with a certain worldview. According to the researcher, it’s more difficult to circumvent this mentality using fact-checking as it was born a decade ago.
“There’s little point in labeling one piece of information as X; many others will do the same damage without checking. This is also why the research and practice of prebunking, which is a kind of ‘vaccine,’ is growing. You somehow prepare the audience for when misinformation appears, without attributing the correction to a specific piece of content,” she said. “This also has to do with media literacy and the educational role of fact-checking — I would say, of journalism in general.”
In this sense, Lima said that Comprova also aims to expand its ability to anticipate the spread of misinformation, among other things, by helping people identify AI-generated content. The fact-checking project also began verifying online scams in April.
“We also intend to reinforce to the public the importance of being aware of the persuasion tactics used to spread misinformation and how algorithms work,” Lima added. “The goal is to contribute to creating a healthier information environment, something that depends not only on initiatives like Comprova, but also on public authorities, the private sector, society in general, and every citizen.”
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published by the LatAm Journalism Review. It is reposted here with permission. You can read versions translated in Spanish and Portuguese by Teresa Mioli.
Marta Szpacenkopf is a journalist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and has written for Jornal Extra, O Globo, The University of Texas at Austin, Yahoo Brazil, and LatAm Journalism Review.
