Massingir, a rural area on the border between South Africa’s world-renowned Kruger National Park and Mozambique, is a journalistic challenge. It’s remote, increasingly militarized and can be dangerous — as journalists on assignment for Der Spiegel discovered when they were kidnapped by poachers in 2015.
Kruger’s contested borderlands is a major new transnational multimedia investigation exposing a well-intentioned anti-poaching initiative that has degenerated into a ruthless land grab by politicians and business elite.
Our cutting-edge multimedia investigation into land grabs in the borderlands started with a traditional journalism team comprising of a local investigative reporter — with years of experience and good contacts in the area — a photographer and a videographer.
The visual brief included drone footage of the borderlands, in order to provide a birdseye view of areas where there are no roads, where access is limited, wild animals may roam and the bush is often impenetrable.
The aerial photos and video clips provided new perspectives and insights into vast tracts of uncharted land that can be hard to visualize from the ground and describe in words.
Further from-above insights were provided by satellite imagery, which helped us to geo-locate the new private game reserves along the border in an interactive graphic.
https://t.co/bBx8bY9Xnq was thrilled to provide #satellite imagery analysis to the @OxCIEJ report! These images show how community settlements have been erased from Limpopo National Park. About 13,300 families still living inside the park are awaiting resettlement. #DroneTuesday pic.twitter.com/NuALpcZ6Uh
— Radiant.Earth (@OurRadiantEarth) April 10, 2018
Using Google Earth satellite images analyzed by Radiant.Earth and designed with JuxtaposeJS, we were also able to create a slide then-and-now interactive showing places where community settlements have been moved over the years to make way for the game reserves.
Data research and analysis by Landmatrix helped to finetune our reportage and to build on a tool called Dominion that we started developing at the Global Editors Network Lab in Cape Town in November 2017.
All these elements were combined into a Shorthand package titled “Kruger’s contested borderlands”. It’s a great package that shines new light on an under-reported zone.
Here are some lessons we learned in the process:
- There is a difference between a drone journalist and a drone operator. The latter requires substantially greater briefing and editing than the former.
- Transnational investigations may require translations. Don’t assume the journalist can provide these, you may need to hire a professional translator.
- Deciding on the desired end product of data visualisations before gathering the data will speed up processes.
- Shorthand is great for packaging multimedia stories, but traditional third-party publishers can be reluctant to buy into the packaging.
The collaboration was produced by Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism in partnership with Code for Africa, AfricanDrone and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting. Funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with support from the International Center for Journalists. Find the investigations here.
Main image courtesy of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism.
This post originally appeared on Oxpeckers' Medium page and was reposted on IJNet with permission.