As part of the Knight International Media Innovators blog, the ICFJ Knight team will round up stories focused on how their fellows are making an impact in the field. Find out more about the fellows' projects by clicking here.
Free Panama Papers webinar on journalistic collaboration, workshop on covering the U.S-Mexico border, and more from the Knight Fellows in this week’s roundup.
Free webinar on how to coordinate with international newsrooms for deep reporting
Check out our free Dow Jones webinar on May 25 and learn how to coordinate with newsrooms around the world on complex investigative reporting projects, like the Panama Papers. The discussion will be led by ICFJ Knight Fellow Chris Roper, African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) Managing Editor Amanda Strydom and ANCIR Editor Khadija Sharife. Working with nine newsrooms, ANCIR, an ICFJ partner founded by ICFJ Knight Fellow Justin Arenstein, has published a series of Panama Papers articles with stories from 14 African countries.
At a recent ICFJ event “Behind the Scoop: The Teams that Broke the #PanamaPapers,” Arenstein said hundreds of journalists were able to produce the ground-breaking project because they had built up a relationship of trust working on smaller collaborations. “Over a number of years there’s been a small movement of people building an ecosystem of trust across the world, learning to work with each other across international borders,” he said. More than 400 journalists, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, worked on the Panama Papers, which exposed offshore tax havens of the world’s elite. The panel also featured former ICFJ Knight Fellow Paul Radu, 2016 ICFJ Knight Award winner Miranda Patrucic, and Carlos Huertas, director of Connectas, an ICFJ partner in Latin America.
Register for U.S.-Mexico workshop on security for border journalists
Journalists from the U.S. and Mexico who report along the border are invited to attend two days of personal security workshops, organized by ICFJ Knight Fellow Jorge Luis Sierra. Sierra will provide attendees with personalized digital security risk assessments, as well as guidance on digital security tools for newsrooms, networking with sources in sensitive environments and physical training for journalists who may encounter violence when reporting. Former ICFJ Knight Fellow Javier Garza, an adviser to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, will also be a workshop speaker. Registration is required; click here for English and here for Spanish.
The 2016 ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award winners are…
This year’s recipients are Miranda Patrucic, a lead reporter and editor for the Sarajevo-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and the investigative team at Aristegui Noticias, a Mexican news site led by Carmen Aristegui, one of the country’s best-known journalists. Patrucic has played a pivotal role in reporting projects that led to resignations, prison sentences and penalties for top leaders in Europe and Central Asia. The Aristegui Noticias investigative team has written exposés of high-profile Mexican power brokers, including exposing a conflict of interest involving the Mexican first lady’s purchase of a US$7 million home on credit from a government contractor. Both winners were also involved in the international Panama Papers investigation.
The 2016 Knight Int'l Journalism Award winners are @MirandaOCCRP and @AristeguiOnline. https://t.co/BmRSt3tQG9 pic.twitter.com/UkOnXasDc2
— ICFJ (@ICFJ) May 18, 2016
Learn how to use Dataminr to discover stories before they break
Reporters can join a May 25 webinar, featuring ICFJ Knight Fellow Nasr ul Hadi, and learn how to use Dataminr to sift through real-time Twitter data to find the latest news. The webinar will explain how journalists can receive early warnings on breaking and trending stories, locate the first photographs shared on Twitter and discover hyper-local stories using Dataminr. As an ICFJ Knight Fellow, Hadi trained journalists to use Dataminr at The Hindustan Times, and now it has become one of HT’s “go-to sources” for finding stories.
InfoAmazonia founder named to 2016 GOOD 100 List
Former ICFJ Knight Fellow Gustavo Faleiros has been named to the 2016 GOOD 100 list by GOOD Magazine in recognition of his work as a pioneering geo-journalist. During his fellowship, he launched InfoAmazonia, a digital network that provides news and data on the nine-country Amazon region, and created GeoJournalism.org, an online resource for environmental data journalists and developers. GOOD Magazine reports on people, experiences and tools that positively affect society.
Leading as a woman journalist in an "all-boys network"
ICFJ Knight Fellow Catherine Gicheru started as a reporter and worked her way up in the newsroom to become the first female news editor of a major Kenyan newspaper and later the founding editor of another Kenyan news outlet. In an appearance on “Victoria’s Lounge,” a women’s talk show broadcast on NTV in Kenya, Gicheru said her newsrooms often present challenging environments for women because the journalism profession in Africa is dominated by men. “Sometimes you’re made to think that you have to be more like a guy, one of the boys, to actually make it through,” Gicheru said. “I told myself, ‘Nope, I’m not going to be one of the boys. I’m going to be the one on page one… That changes everything so that people see you for your ability, not for what is below your waist.’”
Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via dronepicr.