2026-01-18 08:26:57
https://isoj.org/isoj-announces-2026-dates-moves-to-september-and-drops-online-from-its-title/
2026-01-16 16:00:14
Just over two weeks into 2026, and the year has already delivered an extraordinary catalog of geopolitical upheaval, giving data newsrooms plenty to dig into. The shocking capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by US forces has dominated global headlines, sparking widespread analysis of its implications for oil markets, geopolitical norms, and whether this signals a new era of unpredictable foreign engagements. Our roundup features an El País piece examining the current shape of Venezuela’s oil industry. Beyond Venezuela, mass protests and brutal crackdowns in Iran have triggered internet blackouts, which the Financial Times explores. This edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, considering stories from the start of the year up to January 14, also highlights a mapping project by the Guardian explaining how wildfires are now destroying twice as much forest as two decades ago, a video analysis of the fatal shooting of a woman by an ICE agent in the US, and a Público analysis of TikTok videos uncovering the prevalence of false health claims often linked to natural foods.
Image: Screenshot, FT
As nationwide protests over economic hardship and political repression swept through Iran at the beginning of this year, the government imposed one of the most complete internet shutdowns in recent memory, cutting off users from the global web while selectively restoring a pared-down domestic network. The near-total blackout has silenced many online channels and hampered the flow of information about the unrest. The Financial Times used two key charts to document the digital shutdown — one visualizing the recent connectivity collapse using NetBlocks data and a second chart comparing internet blackouts during the 2025 Iran-Israel war and 2019 protests, when Iran’s walled-off National Information Network (NIN) proved insufficient to contain protest communication. FT’s analysis underscores how Tehran’s decades‑long investment in a parallel internet has repeatedly failed to contain dissent, and how activists and exiles have kept some information flowing via Starlink satellite connections, creating a small, resilient network that allows videos and news of the protests to reach the outside world.
Image: Screenshot, El País
After US forces attacked Venezuela and captured President Nicolas Maduro at the start of the year, President Donald Trump declared that US oil companies would spend billions to rebuild Venezuela’s energy sector. Once a top global oil exporter, Venezuela now produces only a small fraction of the world’s crude despite holding the largest known reserves on the planet. Drawing on data from Global Energy Monitor, Our World In Data, PDVSA — Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company — and data analytics firm Kpler, the newspaper El País visualized the paradox of the oil industry. Using circle charts, it contrasted global oil reserves from 1980 and 2020 across major oil-producing countries, while its line charts traced diverging trajectories of reserves and production. Despite its immense reserves, Venezuela’s output has collapsed to under one million barrels per day. Visualized in a Sankey diagram, the data also showed how Venezuela now sends most of its crude to China, often via “ghost tankers” that switch off tracking to evade sanctions.
Image: Screenshot, Público
In an age where social media is a go-to source for many when seeking health advice, users are often drawn to short videos promising quick, natural remedies. Portuguese outlet Público analyzed over 7,000 health-related claims across 1,860 TikTok videos, uncovering widespread misinformation on the platform. The team isolated health-related hashtags and used an AI model to determine if the associated videos contained any verifiable claims. A central AI system sorted each health claim and sent it to one of five specialized AI assistants, each focused on a specific topic, such as medicine, nutrition, and reproductive health. Following strict rules, the AI assistants checked whether the claim was true, misleading, or false, with journalists manually reviewing the verdicts. The story then plotted and ranked hashtags by the percentage of videos containing at least one false or misleading claim, highlighting that misinformation outpaced accurate content. A network-style map recreated TikTok’s content “universe,” clustering videos into six major narratives. The analysis showed that TikTok’s appeal to natural remedies is paired with both confirmation and authority biases, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of misinformation.
Image: Screenshot, Straits Times
Singapore is a global hub, where dense transport networks keep the city moving, and constant traffic noise is an inescapable part of daily life. The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that sustained noise above 53 decibels (dB) can harm health, and identifies road traffic noise as the second most damaging environmental stressor after air pollution, while Singapore’s National Environment Agency recommends that indoor levels stay below 57dB. To examine how closely residents live to these thresholds, The Straits Times measured noise inside 25 homes near major roads, MRT lines, and flight paths. Using high-quality sound equipment, the team recorded over 100 hours of audio divided into one-hour segments and plotted on decibel level graphs to illustrate the average hourly levels. The team also isolated louder sound events and analyzed their psychoacoustic features, such as sharpness and roughness, revealing why certain noises feel more intrusive, such as the screech of brakes.
Image: Screenshot, The Guardian
The Guardian mapped the increasing number of wildfires across the globe, showing that every day in 2024, fires consumed an area larger than Malta (120-plus square miles). Using data from the University of Maryland on global forest loss due to fire, the maps compared areas burned in 2024 with losses in the period between 2001 and 2024, highlighting some of the most affected forests. Research from the World Resources Institute showed that 2024 was the first time major fires swept across tropical, hot, and humid forests such as the Amazon, as well as boreal forests in Canada. The analysis focused on five regions: Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, Australia, and Canada, all of which have endured some of their worst fire seasons in decades as heatwaves driven by climate change fuel larger, longer, and more destructive blazes. Normally acting as carbon sinks, forests absorb carbon dioxide and regulate the climate, but in 2023 and 2024, they captured only a quarter of their typical annual intake, releasing vast amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere, raising the stakes for climate stability.
Image: Screenshot, ProPublica
When a SpaceX Starship test flight exploded over the Caribbean in January 2025, it had potentially serious consequences for commercial flights. Delta Flight 737, en route from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Atlanta, was forced into a sharp diversion after air traffic controllers warned of falling debris and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cleared a large section of busy airspace. In a visual investigation, ProPublica reconstructed how commercial flights were pulled into SpaceX’s testing orbit. Using flight-tracking data from OpenSky and ADS-B Exchange, reporters mapped aircraft paths against the FAA’s debris zone, tracing how planes were forced to abruptly alter course in the minutes after the explosions. The analysis identified another 20 flights making sudden turns, while dozens more were rerouted during the 86-minute airspace closure. The maps were supplemented with photos of recovered rocket fragments, passenger videos, agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, and air traffic control recordings to show how experimental launches repeatedly push risk into civilian airspace, and how little margin for error exists when debris weighing just 300 grams (around 10 ounces) can represent a severe threat to an aircraft mid-flight.
Image: Screenshot / Reuters
An officer from the US immigration agency ICE fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good in her car during street operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering protests across the country. Reuters analyzed multiple video sources of the incident, including footage from the officer’s mobile phone, annotating stills to reconstruct the sequence of events. The videos showed Good speaking to the officer through her rolled-down window before reversing, while the officer positions himself in front of the moving vehicle. One second later, as she begins to turn her car’s wheels away from him, he fires three shots through the windshield and open driver’s side window, two of which strike Good. The analysis could not determine exactly how the car and officer made contact; Reuters consulted experts who questioned why the officer placed himself in the path of the vehicle and whether lethal force was proportionate in a non-violent encounter, noting the actions require further review.
Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post
Three years after ChatGPT arrived, AI can do a lot — write, code, generate images — but a new analysis presented by The Washington Post, drawing on research from the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, shows it still can’t do near as much work as humans do every day. Researchers collected hundreds of real freelance assignments, such as 3D product animations, coding web games, and making architectural sketches, and ran them through the top AI systems: ChatGPT, Gemini, Sonnet, Grok, and Manus. The results showed that the best AI platform managed just 2.5% of tasks correctly. Mistakes were telling, such as dashboards with missing data, product designs shape-shifting mid-creation, and other visual design errors. According to researchers, AI struggles with memory and visual reasoning, and the Post’s summation suggests the AI labor takeover is still a long way off.
Image: Screenshot, Not-Ship
To kick off 2026, Amanda Shendruk at data newsletter Not-Ship scraped Wikipedia data to find the most-read English-language page for every day of 2025. Grouping pages into categories visually denoted by emojis, she found that just over half of all days were dominated by entertainment or recent deaths. Another chart ranked pages by popularity across each month, revealing patterns and surprising echoes: on January 7-8 last year, Greenland spiked in pageviews after Trump’s comments about the US potentially “buying” it. This year, he’s thinking about taking it by force. In 2025, Trump’s own page was the fourth-most read according to Wikipedia, while Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative activist, was the most viewed page.
Image: Screenshot, Kontinentalist
For Kontinentalist, Surbhi Bhatia examined how Bollywood’s dominant genres have shifted over three decades, tracing a sharp decline in romance in favor of action, thriller, and nationalist productions that have steadily risen in the past two decades. Analyzing the top 10 highest-grossing Hindi films each year between 1990 and 2024 using data from Box Office India, the story classifies 350 titles by primary genre using a large language model (LLM) trained on plot, cast, and narrative structure. They refined the prompts, asking it to detect tone, historical context, political themes, and intended audience impact. The findings are presented through color-coded, image-based grids of movie posters, anchoring the data in familiar cultural icons while showing changes in favored genres over time. These visuals revealed romance giving way to hyper-masculine action dramas, political biopics, and military films that mirror India’s increasingly nationalist climate. Paired with a time-series plot tracking cinema foot traffic, the analysis shows how theatrical attendance has shifted across genres, with post-pandemic audiences drawn to action films. It also traced how leading stars’ careers have moved from romantic leads to action heroes aligned with the government, signaling Bollywood’s growing intertwining with state ideology.
Hanna Duggal is the writer of GIJN’s fortnightly Top Ten in Data Journalism column, and a data journalist at AJ Labs, the data, visual storytelling, and experiments team of Al Jazeera. 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.
2026-01-15 16:00:30
In 2024, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) produced a stunning investigation that showed gig workers in the Global South were unknowingly building AI systems used to suppress dissent in Russia. The project revealed that unwitting workers in East Africa and South Asia were paid to perform small data tasks — uploading photos, labeling images, and drawing rectangles around human bodies from CCTV footage — that were used to power AI-driven facial recognition systems deployed to surveil and detain Russian dissidents.
In a panel titled Investigating Algorithms at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, veteran journalists on the AI beat revealed that the unguarded online discussions of data gig workers offer a rich source of leads for broader stories on everything from labor exploitation to government surveillance and algorithm deployment abuses — just as they enabled the TBIJ project.
The panelists added that labor exploitation was one of several undercovered topics at the training data end of AI development — and that another, brand new investigative frontier was the threat of “data poisoning” (more on that below.)
“Investigating labor rights around big tech can be really rewarding,” said Jasper Jackson, managing editor of Transformer. “Not only do these investigations give you good insights into how these tech systems are created, they also give you human stories: how the work impacts them, and also how the often unknown impacts of their work makes them feel.”
The GIJC25 session also featured Gabriel Geiger, an investigative journalist with Lighthouse Reports, Lam Thuy Vo, an investigative reporter at Documented, and Karol Ilagan, chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of the Philippines – Diliman.
Panellists also highlighted a Time Magazine investigation from 2023 by Billy Perrigo as recommended reading for journalists seeking ideas on how to investigate AI labor exploitation in the Global South. In addition to identifying outsourced “ethical AI” recruitment companies and wages of under $2 per hour, Perrigo found that thousands of workers in Kenya suffered mental health issues after labeling troves of deeply disturbing online content to help make one major AI chatbot less toxic.
Jackson, who was an editor on the TBIJ story, revealed that data input workers were increasingly recruited by subsidiaries of tech platforms in “insecure situations,” such as refugee camps and informal settlements, and that their labor was often purloined to intimidate dissent. For instance, one expert source told Jackson’s team that facial recognition integrated into Moscow’s 178,000 CCTV cameras was being used for “preventive detentions” aimed at “intimidation to discourage future protest participation.”
This TBIJ investigation discovered that gig workers in Africa were being used to help train the Russian government’s use of AI to identify and target protestors. Image: Screenshot, TBIJ
“These people had no idea what they were feeding their data into,” noted Jackson, who is now managing editor of Transformer. “When we think of LLMs, we think of them hoovering up databases and the content of the internet, but remember that a lot of the data that goes into algorithms and AI systems actually require humans to do a lot of work. In particular, labeling it, which gives the context that helps machines learn what they’re ingesting. Big tech has created this distributed workforce. For instance, some of this data input work is quite common in refugee camps, which, weirdly, is a way to earn money when you can’t through normal state means, or where all you need is access to a computer that often well-meaning organizations will provide.”
Notably, the TBIJ investigation also revealed the investigative value of a detailed database from Russian human rights group OVD-Info, which not only showed that facial recognition was used in the detention of 454 people who protested the jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2021, but that an additional 19 people who simply attended his 2024 funeral were also detained using the same technology. Reporters also identified sanctioned tech companies that had continued to recruit workers abroad, highlighting the importance of checking sanctions databases such as OpenSanctions and Sayari.
What originally enabled the investigation, Jackson noted, was a sense of online solidarity between workers in places such as the Philippines, Turkey, and Kenya, as they tried to help each other understand the strange data tasks they were assigned in their remote locations.
“We were able to find this story because of the workers themselves, who were just discussing how to do these new jobs, and sharing tips and help to their fellow co–workers,” he explained. “They were making YouTube videos on how to input this data, and posting on Reddit and Facebook forums.”
In an ingenious piece of detective work, TBIJ reporters were able to confirm that data input work was being tasked after the date that sanctions were imposed on the tech company employer — by zeroing in on daily news headlines that flashed across the top of the phone screens of workers in the tips videos.
Ilagan said it was important for newsrooms to demystify algorithmic systems, and to think of them in familiar terms — such as recipes for a meal.
“We often know the input and the output, but often we don’t know the recipe — or how the input became the output,” she pointed out. “For a lot of countries — in Southeast Asia in particular, where there are few established tech reporting beats — investigating algorithms might feel unfamiliar or intimidating.”
Panelists said underused sourcing paths for algorithmic labor investigations included:
Jackson’s recent explainer on how repressive regimes are increasingly using the weakly regulated facial recognition tech industry for repression also serves as a useful orientation on the topic.
For investigations into the output harms of algorithms — from bias to misinformation — Geiger said a combination of creative public records requests, systematic “black box” testing, and traditional reporting are best practices to follow.
His recent Lighthouse Reports investigation into Sweden’s use of AI systems to assess welfare recipients found that its model discriminated against women and minority groups.
Notably, his team experienced “relentless” refusals to open records requests from Sweden’s Social Insurance Agency (SIA), despite the country’s proven track record of information transparency. In a clever test to demonstrate the government’s willful obstinacy on algorithm data that stonewalled newsrooms elsewhere could emulate, the team requested information that the SIA had already published in its annual reports. When even that already public data was withheld, they could show readers the government’s level of overreach in marking AI data “confidential.”
GIJC attendees also laughed when learning that a Swedish official accidentally cc’ed Geiger on an internal email chain complaining about his dogged reporting, saying: “Let’s hope we are done with him!”
In the end, Geiger’s team came up with an ingenious workaround to the SIA’s stonewalling. It found an independent supervisory agency that had already studied SIA’s risk-scoring algorithms, and then requested the underlying SIA data from that auditing branch. (See the fascinating, full methodology from the Sweden’s Suspicion Machine investigation here.)
This Lighthouse Reports investigation looked into how Sweden’s social security agency deployed a fraud detection algorithm that unfairly profiled people with certain demographic characteristics. Image: Screenshot, Lighthouse Reports
On issues of bias and stereotyping, Geiger emphasized that algorithm investigations need not be technical, and can simply involve reporters making scores of basic requests of chatbots or platforms, and recording the results in a spreadsheet.
“If you conclude that ‘I’m just not going to be able to get Facebook’s recommendation algorithm,’ you can instead observe how the system behaves in the real world,” he explained. “You may not need some fancy statistical experiment: just two people using a systematic, consistent methodology to come to an interesting conclusion.”
Added Lam Thuy Vo: “With social media algorithms, it is not necessarily important to know how they work; it’s probably better to figure out what they promote, and what they don’t. Investigate the system not in terms of how it works, but by finding adversarial experiments to prove the system does harm.”
The panel also drew attendees’ attention to a recent joint study from the UK, which revealed a previously unknown threat to AI systems and, ultimately, users: that bad actors can quietly “poison” large language models that increasingly dominate economies with just tiny amounts of bad data. Produced by the Alan Turing Institute, Anthropic, and the UK’s AI Security Institute, the research found that as few as 250 malicious documents — say, fake Wikipedia pages or social media accounts with embedded trigger phrases — injected into training data can cause even giant AI systems with 13 billion parameters to distort the truth or harm the public. In short: the study demolished assumptions that manipulating major AI platforms would require millions of seeded documents and vast expense, and showed, instead, that the same “trivial” amount could serve as a back door to hijack almost any AI system, no matter its size. Helpful sources on this topic include the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab and American Sunlight Project.
Jackson recalled how journalists in 2024 were initially confused when millions of patently absurd propaganda articles appeared on the internet that nobody was reading. Researchers quickly found that the purpose of this “Pravda Portal Kombat” disinformation campaign was not to manipulate humans, but rather to manipulate AI systems. Jackson said the fact that small, easily camouflaged campaigns involving just 250 documents could distort AI system outcomes represents a threat that every journalist should be aware of.
“Data poisoning is really unexplored and can have some massive implications,” Jackson warned. “It can affect the outputs — and given the power we’re giving these algorithms and AI models, that’s a worrying possibility.”
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor for GIJN. Rowan was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.
2026-01-14 16:00:27
It is not easy to catch Ritu Sarin for an interview on the sidelines of journalism conferences, and almost not at all when she is busy in the newsroom. A familiar name in investigative journalism in India for over four decades, Sarin is an award-winning journalist who focuses on internal security, corruption, and money laundering. Based in India’s capital New Delhi, she is the executive editor of news and investigations at The Indian Express, a daily newspaper whose tagline is “journalism of courage.”
Sarin began her journalism career in 1982 as a magazine reporter. India was coming out of The Emergency — a turbulent two-year period marked by press censorship and a curtailing of civil liberties — and reporters were once again finding their feet. When sitting over cups of tea in press clubs around India, journalists who participated in and witnessed the journalism of the 1980s sometimes fondly reminisce about the good old days of shoe-leather reporting and no-nonsense editors. It was in this environment that Sarin got her start.
After cutting her teeth in two different magazines she began working at The Pioneer, one of the oldest English-language Indian dailies. In 1996, Sarin moved to The Indian Express, where she continues to work.
A member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999, she has worked on several global collaborative projects including Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files and the FinCEN Files. She is also a founder-member of ICIJ’s Network Committee, a member-led body that guides the global network of journalists on reporting practices and collaborations, and in 2023, she joined ICIJ’s board.
Sarin was a speaker at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November 2025. Shortly afterwards, she spoke to GIJN about her investigative work and shared tips for conducting investigations. The interview has been lightly edited for style.
GIJN: Of all the investigations you’ve worked on, which has been your favorite and why?
Ritu Sarin: It is difficult to choose from stories done over a four-decade period but there were many: At the Delhi Recorder, the magazine I began journalism with, there was a cover story titled The Smuggling of Sex, probing how Bangladeshi girls were being “sold” on the India border and how many ended up in brothels. For Sunday magazine, I took my first flight out of Delhi for an assignment in the aftermath of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy. I reported from outside labor rooms of government hospitals on the number of physically-challenged children being born to victims in localities where the toxic gas had leaked.
At The Indian Express, where I have now worked for three decades, too, it is difficult to choose. There were several espionage breaks; in 2011, an investigation stemming from a letter that India’s then Finance Minister wrote to the Prime Minister alleging that bugs had been planted in his offices; there was an investigative series of fake cases with identical “evidence” being registered under the Official Secrets Act. More recently, in 2023, there was a story on allegation of gang rape by top bureaucrats in the Andaman and Nicobar islands and in mid-2025, I traveled to several states to track down “mule account holders’’ through whose bank accounts huge sums of money were parked after being stolen via cyber attacks and digital arrest frauds.
GIJN: What are the biggest challenges in terms of investigative reporting in your country?
RS: India offers a spread of subjects for investigative reporters. However, there are challenges. One is the shrinking access to sources, whistleblowers, and top government officials or members of the ruling party. The other is unverified, often, inaccurate news being circulated on social media which reduces the credibility of mainstream, legacy media. Yet another challenge for investigative reporters is the advent of AI and the lurking dangers of landing fake data and documents, which are increasingly becoming difficult to authenticate.
All the above are the challenges we encounter. To offset such disadvantages of a tougher working environment, reporters need to get back to shoe-leather journalism; do more spot reporting and thus, reduce dependency on documents and data which may have come from secondary sources. One more challenge is the falling engagement levels with readers and viewers. This is especially disconcerting for investigative reporters who may have spent weeks and months on a single story.
GIJN: What is your best tip for interviewing?
RS: I prefer a conversational instead of an interrogative style for interviewing. I recall an exclusive interview I did with former President Zail Singh in 1987. During the chat, he admitted to the huge sums of money the opposition had offered him to dismiss the-then government of Rajiv Gandhi. I recall trying to be nonplussed when he said this. Had I reacted with astonishment, he may have asked me to keep the portion off-record. The interview created a furor.
The lesson from this: pretend to be nonplussed when you land a scoop. Don’t alert the subject. Another tip: along with well-researched questions, anticipate replies and be ready with supplementary questions. Also, keep data and documents handy to show — not share [with] — the subject. Once he or she realizes you have all this, chances are more beans will be spilled.
GIJN: What is a favorite reporting tool, database, or app you use in your investigations?
RS: The tools depend on the task at hand. It could vary from a scrutiny of open source Indian repositories like those of the Registrar of Companies (RoC) or reports of the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG). Then, depending on the assignment, you may need to go to paid foreign sites for downloading details of offshore companies or, maybe, use the ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks dataset. There are many lists of datasets and tools available and at GIJC25, a session by Martha Mendoza added another useful one: a compilation of 21 US sites which answers the question: ‘What is Washington doing in your country?’
GIJN: What is the best advice you’ve gotten thus far in your career and what words of advice would you give an aspiring investigative journalist?
RS: Best advice: file and forget. Never ruminate over how a story is being packaged or how it will impact. Move on to the next one. To an aspiring investigative journalist I would say: be ready for the long haul and enjoy the building block experience. Also, be honest with your sources, subjects, and editors alike.
GIJN: What is the greatest mistake you have made and what lessons did you learn?
RS: Once I was to meet a top source from an intelligence agency for a very important follow-up story for The Indian Express and made the mistake of mentioning to a colleague that I was due to meet him. That was a blunder. Just when I was leaving the house to pick up the promised documents from his office, the intelligence chief called me, named the same reporter and chided me for letting her know we were meeting. Our meeting was cancelled. Lesson: resist name-dropping and never reveal the nature of your acquaintances and contacts, especially those from the security or intelligence establishment.
GIJN: How do you avoid burnout in your line of work?
RS: One, it goes without saying you need to keep in touch with multimedia trends and technology shifts. Two, retain the confidence that you alone can give the best and specialized treatment to the story at hand and treat it with a fresh flourish. Three, be physically fit and most important, be in touch with your peers. Investigative reporters tend to work in isolation, but it is equally important to remain in circulation.
GIJN: What about investigative journalists do you find frustrating, or do you hope will change in the future?
RS: What is trying and stressing is dealing with sources who suddenly start ghosting you and thus, deny you the last-mile pieces of information or evidence for an investigation.
Neha Banka is an independent journalist based in India, and primarily reports on the Asia-Pacific with a focus on the Korean Peninsula. She also reports on foreign policy, borders, migration, public health, religion, Indigenous communities, climate and the environment. She has reported from several countries around the world, producing original ground reports on a wide range of subjects. Banka has had work published by Haaretz, Al Jazeera English, and The Indian Express, among other outlets. She has never reported directly to Sarin.
2026-01-13 16:56:36
Newsrooms and humanitarian organizations have something in common: staff rarely join for the paycheck. They commit to demanding, sometimes dangerous work, usually for less pay than they could earn elsewhere. They put up with difficult hours, high stakes, and emotional strain, often because they are motivated by a desire to contribute to a broader social mission.
For journalists, that mission is to provide the public with reliable information about what is happening in the world. For NGOs like Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF), it’s to provide urgent medical care to people in crisis. In both cases, that dynamic poses a particular set of challenges for those steering the ship.
Dr Natalie Roberts is the executive director of MSF UK. She joined the organization in 2012 after working as an emergency doctor in Britain’s NHS, and has since coordinated operations in conflict and crisis zones across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Pakistan, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic. In 2016, she became Head of Emergency Operations for MSF in Paris, overseeing MSF’s emergency response programmes worldwide. She was named executive director of the UK branch in 2022.
I spoke with Roberts about what it takes to run a mission-based organization, and what newsroom leaders can learn from her experience.
One reality of running a mission-based organization is that while the broader purpose may be inspiring, much of the daily work is not. Like all organizations, these places depend on a healthy dose of administrative, procedural, and logistical tasks that are often a bit mundane.
“People often join the organization because they believe in our social mission,” Roberts says. “But if you’re running a humanitarian operation, the reality is that there’s a huge amount of day-to-day bureaucracy that needs to be done — stuff that seems quite boring, but is essential because the risks are particularly high in this work,” she says, referring to the safety protocols for staff and patients, and the careful oversight of donated funds needed to avoid risk of fraud or mismanagement of finances.
“That means that I actually need people on the team who are quite pedantic about the details.”
Roberts notes that new recruits often arrive with a “save the world” vision and find themselves discouraged within a few months, when the reality of their role turns out to be largely administrative.
“The way I’ve found to get people through that dip is to actively talk about the social mission, a lot,” she says. “But talking about the general mission isn’t enough. You also need to make sure you are linking everybody’s specific job to that mission, so everyone can see how they have their role within that.”
What you don’t want, she says, is a dynamic where there are “the special people” — in MSF’s case, the doctors on the frontlines, and in newsrooms’ cases, the star correspondents or investigative reporters — who are “out there” doing the “real work”, while those in more administrative or support roles are treated as an afterthought, even if unintentionally or subconsciously. In MSF’s case, those support roles might be teams in fundraising or logistics, while in a newsroom, it might be those working in copyediting, distribution, or fact-checking.
To counter this, Roberts makes sure that “people get regular updates about MSF’s impact, and that all the managers at different levels of the organization translate that impact to their specific teams’ work.”
In both humanitarian work and journalism, another risk is that the mission starts to blur the line between personal and professional responsibility. Roberts is clear about the importance of work-life balance in this context, just like in any other organization.
“It’s important to be clear that despite the mission, it is also just a job, whether you’re at a desk in London or operating in the field in the Central African Republic. Everybody is paid a salary – it’s not the best salary in the world, but everyone is paid to do a job, just like any other job,” Roberts says. “We therefore expect a certain level of performance, but as employers we also have a responsibility to make sure our staff are able to disconnect at the end of the working day — and that should be true no matter how stressful the situation you are working in is.”
Dr Natalie Roberts. Image: Screenshot / MSF
As the executive director, she emphasizes that part of her role is to set that culture from the top. “Of course, I can’t be the one saying ‘Okay, you should go home now’ to every individual person at their desk. But I have to set that culture — and I also then need to make sure that there are structures in place to allow it to actually happen, which are respected all the way through the managerial line.”
Here, she cites MSF’s increasing focus on vicarious trauma training, and newly instated compulsory team sessions after particularly distressing events, like the death of a board member in Gaza last year. “It’s part of creating that culture where it’s not a shameful thing to say you feel upset.”
She also makes it clear that you don’t have to be working as a surgeon on the frontlines to want a break from the stress of the job: “People [in the London office] can sometimes feel guilty about saying, ‘I’ve got to go and pick up my kids from school now,’ or complaining about working on a bank holiday, while knowing that others are living through trauma,” she explains. “So you have to be super explicit at the top level that anyone can feel [that they need to disconnect] at times, regardless of what role they’re in.”
Roberts also points out that being attuned to boundaries is important not just for staff, but for leaders themselves. “When I first came into this role, my colleagues from previous roles would still be contacting me and expecting me to be able to do something about a problem they were facing now that I was the director.”
She quickly realised this was unsustainable. “I try to make sure that I’m directing them to the right place, rather than me taking it all on myself, because actually, that makes the problem worse. If I’m taking on every individual problem, then I won’t be able to raise my head above water to get that temperature check of what’s going on in the organization as a whole.”
Roberts notes how she has seen leaders who become enmeshed in every individual detail lose the wider perspective needed to steer the organization as a whole. “You have to set boundaries. It’s the only way you can have any longevity as a leader.”
She contrasts this with her previous role as head of emergencies at MSF, where being on call 24 hours a day was inherent to the role: “I don’t know anybody who’s managed to do that job for more than three years, at least not without some long breaks built in,” she says.
At the same time, she notes that leaders can’t retreat too far from the frontline either.
“As the director, part of my job is to understand what MSF’s social mission is and should be today. I do that by receiving debriefings from my teams, attending meetings, and visiting sites — because sometimes you can’t really understand a situation from a bullet point summary,” she says. “It can be really difficult to fit that in with the fact that I also need to attend regular board meetings, run management team meetings, and speak to the press, but it’s important to keep that connection to the fieldwork.”
One solution she has found has been creating a Deputy role to her position, a role which didn’t exist before her leadership. “It means she can step in when I am away, which allows me to spend time on the broader things outside of the day-to-day business.”
The relationship does require some work and intentional communication to make sure both of them are in step with each other, and Roberts emphasises that mutual trust is required to make it work: “I trust the decisions she makes while I am away, and it’s also important that when I come back, I support her decisions, rather than going, “I wouldn’t have done it quite that way.”
Another delegation initiative that MSF UK has launched under Roberts’ leadership is the Staff Forum, a mechanism where staff get together to raise concerns about workplace problems, and, crucially, to collectively propose solutions to those problems. A member of the leadership team attends to listen, but does not propose solutions; the staff instead identify potential actions themselves, and highlight where they might need the management’s support to implement those.
“It’s still in its early days, but it’s been a good way of creating a culture where people try to identify solutions as a team, rather than escalating every problem upwards.”
Perhaps Roberts’ most transferable lesson for newsroom leaders comes from her reflections on leadership skills more generally: “The classic path at MSF is that you arrive as a medical doctor and if you’re good at that, or if you work in dangerous places, then you’ll get promoted. And then all of a sudden, your job is a lot of management and admin and budgets, which nobody ever taught you to do.”
The risk is that “you could be an amazing doctor, but if you don’t learn the skills of leadership, it’s difficult to do the job [of management and leadership] well.”
In newsrooms, the same pattern often plays out: Talented reporters are promoted into management roles with little preparation for the very different skillset required.
Roberts’ advice for those who find themselves newly (or not) in leadership roles? “Embrace some of the managerial culture that exists outside in other organizations — and recognize what you don’t know.”
This article was first published by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. It is republished with permission.
Priscille Biehlmann is the content editor for the Reuters Institute’s Newsroom Leadership programmes, where she is responsible for drafting course material, helping with the design and delivery of courses, and reporting on leadership in journalism. Prior to joining the Institute, she worked in academic publishing on media and journalism textbooks, and as a science and culture journalist.
2026-01-12 16:00:18
Following the 2024 uprising and the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government, an interim administration assumed power in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, attacks on the press continued, as two of the country’s journalists were killed in 2025, and at least 297 journalists were charged with crimes such as murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, and terrorism. Additionally, at least 24 journalists have been jailed, with five still detained.
In the final month of 2025, in a brazen assault, the head offices of Prothom Alo and Daily Star, two of Bangladesh’s most influential media outlets, were vandalized and set on fire. As a result of the damage, the two newspapers were unable to publish on December 19. This marked the first time in the history of the two newspapers that they failed to publish a daily edition.
A Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) report stated that influential government and political figures have pressured at least 20 senior media professionals, including editors and news leaders, to change roles, resign, or face dismissal. Several outlets have also experienced layoffs.
Despite these ongoing pressures, no media institutions have been closed during this period. In fact, several outlets that shut down under the previous government are now awaiting approval to resume operations.
As of 2025, Bangladesh ranked 149th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Free Press Index, a slight improvement from 165th in 2024.
However, media ownership in Bangladesh remains concentrated among pro-government business groups, who often limit investigative journalism. Public trust in mainstream media has decreased. According to RSF, internet-based media are playing an increasingly significant role in news dissemination.
To address these challenges, the interim government established a Media Reform Commission to bolster press freedom, but its recommendations have yet to be implemented.
Amid these developments, international media have published several high-quality investigative reports on Bangladesh, holding the government and powerful actors accountable. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi journalists have made notable efforts to challenge authority, reporting on corruption, human rights violations, trafficking, and irregularities in agriculture, the environment, and the energy sector.
A student-led protest against the Bangladeshi government in the summer of 2024. At several demonstrations throughout the summer, students were gunned down by police. Image: Shutterstock
A joint BBC and BBC Bangla investigation revealed that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina personally authorized lethal force to suppress anti-government demonstrations last year. The BBC, after reviewing a leaked audio recording, reported that Hasina ordered security forces to “shoot protesters wherever they find them.”
According to a UN investigation, at least 1,400 people lost their lives in the protests and violence during July and August 2024. The international tribunal set up to try crimes against humanity in Bangladesh has already sentenced the former prime minister and home minister for the July-August 2024 killings.
In their defense, the prime minister’s party leaders stated that the leaked audio recording “does not reflect any illegal intentions on the part of Sheikh Hasina.”
The BBC report stated the leaked audio was recorded on July 18 at the then-prime minister’s official residence. BBC audio forensic experts verified its authenticity, found no evidence of editing, and concluded that fabrication was highly unlikely.
Image: Screenshot, The Daily Star
According to an investigation by The Daily Star, between 2016 and early 2025, the Bangladesh government acquired systems capable of tapping phones, tracking locations, and monitoring thousands of communications from a central command center.
The newspaper reported that the police, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and the National Telecommunications Monitoring Centre (NTMC) jointly purchased surveillance equipment to develop a nationwide platform that monitors, analyzes, and stores large volumes of internet and telecommunications data from all citizens, creating a real-time central surveillance system for multiple agencies.
In addition, RAB and the police acquired devices for targeted eavesdropping, mobile phone and vehicle jammers, and GPS trackers.
While The Daily Star report noted that this equipment can help prevent crime, gather intelligence, and address national security threats, it found experts who warned that, without transparency, it could also be used to suppress political opponents and monitor ordinary citizens.
Image: Screenshot, Netra News
Netra News recently reported on ongoing military operations against the Bawm community in the Bandarban District. Since 2022, 19 members of this ethnic community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts have been killed and 59 detained without trial, drawing attention from human rights organizations and raising concerns about civil rights violations. The report highlighted security force actions and deprivation of rights inflicted upon the Bawm people.
Netra News also found that 11 Bawm women have been imprisoned for more than a year as of 2025 and cited an Amnesty International report that identified at least 30 Bawm women and children who had been arrested during military operations from April 2024 to May 2025, including an eight-month pregnant woman.
The report documented how the movement and livelihood of the Bawm people have been restricted under the banner of conducting operations against a designated terrorist group founded by a member of the Bawm community. Residents now require army permission to visit markets, and six Bawm neighbourhoods are deserted.
Image: Screenshot, Star News, YouTube
Numerous allegations of abductions and disappearances have been made against various law enforcement agencies in Bangladesh. From 2009 to 2024, nearly 1,900 people have been reported missing, and the fate of approximately 350 of these individuals remains unknown.
The Star News TV channel investigated the fate of these missing individuals, and its reporting alleged that many victims were killed, and their bodies disposed of in the Bay of Bengal to avoid detection.
Star News’ investigation included accounts from eyewitnesses, trawler drivers, survivors, and sources within the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). These sources identified some officials involved in disposing of bodies after killings, reporting that between one and nine people were killed at a time and that approximately 200 bodies have disappeared in this area.
Image: Screenshot, Prothom Alo
Just 20 years ago, the island of Sandwip’s sweet potatoes were in high demand across the country. However, sweet potatoes are no longer able to be cultivated on Sandwip. In addition, crops like sesame, chilli, potato, watermelon, and winter vegetables have disappeared from this fertile alluvial island — and rice is now only grown four months of the year.
An investigation by Prothom Alo identified seven main reasons for Sandwip’s agricultural decline: extreme heat, increased soil and water salinity, lack of freshwater for irrigation, irregular rainfall, prolonged drought, frequent storms and floods, and emerging diseases and pests. Each factor is linked to climate change.
Prothom Alo also surveyed local farmers and consulted agricultural, climate, and government experts. The team found that farming has declined by 20% over the past 20 years, forcing many farmers to change professions.
Image: Screenshot, Rest of World
Smart monitoring and automation are rapidly expanding in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment industry, leading Dhaka factories to deploy devices to digitally monitor sewing speeds for targets and productivity gains.
This report by the Rest of the World dug into the negative effects of digitalization and automation in the Bangladeshi garment sector. The new tracking technology has increased stress and anxiety, particularly among female workers, and has led to job losses. Workers report that failing to keep pace with machines puts their jobs at risk, and the pressure is so intense that many cannot take breaks.
Although factories have adopted these technologies to boost production, workers’ incomes have not increased proportionally; any wage gains have resulted mainly from labor organizing.
Image: Screenshot, The Daily Star
A cement production complex at the Dhaleswari and Shitalakshya estuaries in Munshiganj has occupied parts of both rivers, significantly disrupting natural flow and the ecosystem, according to four government reports revealed by The Daily Star. While the cement company has denied any illegal encroachment, it declined to provide proof of land ownership on either side of the rivers.
The report highlighted that, before the cement factory was established two decades ago, Dhaleshwari was a vibrant river that supported local livelihoods. Since its founding on a small plot around 2005, the complex has slowly expanded each dry season as more sand has been dumped into the river.
Image: Screenshot, Jamuna TV, YouTube
In Bangladesh, the government sells LP gas cylinders for less than half of what private companies charge for the same fuel. However, most people struggle to find locations where they can purchase government gas at this price. Jamuna TV’s Investigation 360 exposé revealed widespread corruption, with government officials at various levels involved in a four-decade-long scheme to divert subsidized gas onto the open market.
Jamuna TV published its initial report in April, followed by a December update. After the first story, the Ministry of Energy launched its own investigation that made nine recommendations for action to curb these illegal sales. Despite these measures, the illegal practice continues, with government-subsidized gas still being sold via private vendors at higher prices.
SK Tanvir Mahmud is the Bangla editor for GIJN. He previously worked as a deputy chief reporter for Prothom Alo and CNE for Independent Television Digital. He has also led multimedia and social media strategy initiatives within major newsrooms and shared his expertise as an adjunct faculty member at two public universities.
