Yet to navigate a complex digital environment in which more than two billion participants are constantly producing information, journalists — who are supposed to be at the forefront of news — are forced to learn their trade almost from scratch.

How can they compete with the crowd? It is a daunting challenge, particularly for many mid-career journalists. In fact, it starts with a simple but fundamental change in mentality; writing a story doesn’t end when it is published, but continues well after users finish reading it – if indeed they do.

The next step is to learn how to develop and use products that will help you report, verify and explain stories. You need flexible teams with varied specialties capable of adapting or creating tools to rapidly analyze data needed for investigations, capture what users are talking about and engage with them so they can contribute with their own expertise. You should connect with peers and other professionals to cover realities that go beyond borders and topics that require expert knowledge. Finally, you have the challenge to steer audiences and communities away from click-bait traps set by trolls, bots and con-artists.

Fortunately for journalists, there is a growing number of media and journalism schools and research centers investigating new trends, helping to understand digital disruption and its impact. With their newsletters, websites and interactive online training, among other resources, they can inform you about inspiring innovations, share academic research, spot threats, provoke critical thinking, highlight valuable journalistic endeavors, and report on moves in the industry that will affect how stories reach people. Their work equips editors and journalists to deal with the digital waves that have busted business and editorial models. It provides an important source of information for potential investors, philanthropists and inventors in the field.

Well-known English-language organizations sharing knowledge in this field include the Nieman Lab, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, at Harvard University. So far, it has focused on US-centered innovation, but it is now starting to publish in languages other than English and increasing its coverage of innovative media projects in other parts of the world. The University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas connects journalists in North and South America, helping them understand and take advantage of digital change. The Center produces weekly stories on new enterprises in Latin America, such as for example, “Daily Corruption”, a researcher’s project to build a regional corruption database sourced from newspaper coverage. It also offers free online courses on new tools and best practices, such as “Product management for journalists”.

Another well-established global English-language knowledge-sharer is the US-based Poynter Institute. It is a tech-savvy journalism education and innovation center, which also provides a news platform covering trends in media. It offers practical courses, for example, How to write sharper social headlines. The British, Brighton-based Journalism.co.uk, a for-profit online publisher, covers, also in English, innovation in the media industry, offers training, lists jobs, features press releases and organizes the News Rewired conference series. This piece on Dutch start-up The Playwall, which gives readers the option to pay for content by giving their opinions or extra information about a story, is a good example of the kind of stories they carry. Digiday, a platform with branches in both the US and the UK, aims to foster change in the media and marketing sectors. They feature reflections on the industry such as this podcast by Washington Post’s Chief Risk Officer, Jed Hartman, which invites publishers to stop whining about the Facebook-Google duopoly and start figuring out their own unique contribution to the information marketplace.

Specialized outlets are covering media trends and innovation in other parts of the world too. These usually publish their stories in different languages. For example, the ICFJ’s International Journalists Network (IJNet), highlights a variety of projects undertaken by their fellows in several countries. They recently shared a great piece on 8 key trends in local journalism in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. Similarly, the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), an international association of nonprofit investigative journalism organizations, has created regional feeds to share content across multiple platforms in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, as well as from across Africa. The European Journalism Observatory (EJO), a network of independent non-profit media research institutes, is publishing stories based on their research findings, such as this one on the surge of ad blockers in Poland, in up to 14 language.

Among the regional knowledge-sharers up and coming are The Splice Newsroom, a media specializing in the Asian market, and Jamlab, a platform from Wits University’s Journalism Department in South Africa, reporting on innovation across the African continent. Both start-ups publish original content in their area of expertise. For example, a recent Splice piece was: Asia’s top journalists and editors share their best advice for aspiring young reporters, while in Jamlab’s section “Innovator Q&A”, FrontPage Africa founder Rodney Sieh speaks of how this platform revolutionized digital media in Liberia.

With such a rich array of options, you can chose to subscribe to whatever source is most relevant for you, depending on your geography, language or interest. Just following a few could inspire you with new ideas and make your next trip to the digital galaxy that much more fun.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.

Facts and discourses can be verified across borders, since most information is searchable globally. Data-crunching software can enable a journalist to spot a criminal pattern or abusive commercial practices in minutes. The possibility of classifying and extracting information from massive sets of leaked documents in coordinated global investigative journalism efforts, have made it possible for reporters to provide evidence on  shady dealings on a global scale. Social networks, transparent government practices, public databases, image recognition, mapping, geo-location and open source tools – most of them free – have grown exponentially. They provide an opportunity to any citizen with a computer or a smartphone, special training and good intuition to expose lies behind wars. And free applications and software make it easy for reporters investigating a public interest issue to link a name with a phone in many places of the world, or track criminals’ movements by connecting their usernames and locations.

Of course, journalists still have to do the tedious digging and street reporting, cultivating sources, and clinging on to stories until they make sense. They must have the courage to resist powerful pressures to give up, even when these seem unbearable. But to be a true investigative reporter today; to be able to cope and respond to challenges posed by globalised and sophisticated trends of crime, corruption and environmental depredation, among other evils, it is indispensable to fine-tune the old philosophy with three new practices: be Open, Systematic and Safe.

To be ‘Open’ means to look beyond the borders of your country. While it is true that most people prefer local stories, finding the links to the outside world would probably make them better, as facts can be widely verified and contrasted. Hence, if a reporter finds a corporation polluting a river in her country, she can go to international resources, such as Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Investigative Dashboard, or to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Corporate Watch. She may find that this same company is owned by an industrial group with equally poor environmental practices elsewhere.

Sometimes a story is too dangerous or too complex for a reporter to cover it alone. So to be “Open” also means to collaborate, sometimes even with media competitors. Moreover, it implies that investigative reporters need to work with experts of other professions, which is partly what, for instance,  Finance Uncovered and Thompson-Reuters’ Reporting on illicit finance in Africa attempt to do in their cross-border investigations.

To be ‘Systematic’ entails a proficient use of tools and software to scrape data and clean it; to organise and visualise it so that the numbers can tell the story. This is what India Spend does so well to explain, for example, the magnitude of pre-trial detention in India, or what the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism did to profile this year’s candidates in the general elections. The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) has, among many other resources for investigative journalists, a complete list of tools to get anyone started on data journalism.

There is another side to practising a systematic investigative journalism. It means to look for information in an efficient way, for example, having at hand a template to continuously request public information and even inviting your readers to use it, like Atlatszo.hu does.  Investigative journalism of this kind can also mean systematically encouraging the public at large to help you complete investigations with data, documents, photos, like the OCCRP does with its OCCRP Leaks. Finally, reporters must be systematic in doing their searches. There are sites that help a reporter to connect a domain with a name; or see social media activity underway in a given place. These and many other tools and resources are explained by Paul Myers in his Research Clinic.

The third condition that an investigative journalist must include in their daily routines is Safety: physical, legal and digital. Watching out for yourself, your data and your sources in the digital environment is mandatory and there are many easy to use tools and tutorials – such as Tactical Tech’s resource-packed website – that can guide journalists. Physical security and legal protection are vitally important habits and below is a list of resources and organizations, which provide security advice and support to journalists.

The search tools, the global reach, and the efficient management of huge databases surely make today’s investigative journalist capable of going wider and deeper when fighting more complex and invisible abuses. Indeed, to take advantage of this potential, they must master new tools and make them part of their everyday journalistic practice. But, beware: for all the ingenuity of new digital tools at our disposal, investigative journalism is still about the story, getting it right, making it fair and uncovering wrongs to the public good that some prefer to keep hidden. And that has not gotten any easier!

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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Stories such as this one, when the sheer impact of the revealed truth rocks the audience, are occasional at best. In everyday journalism, however, to get the public to pay attention to your story, to make it not only truthful, but also credible and attractive, is a hard task. And it has become even harder in the digital era. Information flows constantly through our portable electronic devices, like a river of muddy waters, dragging the authentic pieces of story-telling together with the fake; the verified; and the gossip. So if journalists want to have any chance at succeeding in this battle, to keep people informed about what really happens and why, amidst the immense debris, they must not only find good stories, but must also elevate their story-telling to an art.

There are examples of this inventiveness all over the world. For example, there is the traditional long-form literary journalism, of which Latin Americans seem to be masters. El Faro in tiny El Salvador just won the Gabriel Garcia Marques Excellency Award for their moving stories and documentaries.  Other organizations, like Initium have created a data sounds project where average temperature for the last 131 years in Hong Kong is visualized and played as musical notes.

Others are turning to explaining and making things more understandable in a confusing world of multiple competing versions of every event. One of the first to try this was US Vox.com, with “explainers” in short cards, such as this one about the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The New York Times created The Upshot, with pieces like this one that shows people how to read the current conflicting polls on the US presidential election. In the South, GKillCity from Ecuador has tried a similar version of explaining cards like in this story about UN human rights recommendations to Ecuador. There are other tools to make things clearer to the audiences:  timelines about the history; maps to locate the events; or even crossing place and time in interactive multimedia like this one made by Kloop in Kyrgyzstan to show how a protected forest in the capital Bishkek is disappearing as developers expand on ever-stretching rules.

The best way to tell stories is conversation. In the recent coup attempt in Turkey, journalists of Medyascope explained to their followers in a live-broadcast on Periscope what was going on and how they understood it and bringing the makers of news closer to their audiences. The news bots are actually lots of fun, particularly for topics people get passionate about, like soccer and elections. Univision tried the Purple Bot during the party primaries and the number of its fans grew by thousands. You don’t have to be rich or sit in the Silicon Valley to develop a bot.

Two young Spanish entrepreneurs developed politi_bot in the chat application Telegram, and did a great job informing people about the latest elections in their country.

Bots imply that a journalist and a developer have sat together to think about stories: like in art, content and form become one concept.  The potential to communicate and engage depends a lot on how well the journalist and developer work together. The result of such team work could be games, such as this one developed by ProPublica in which the user not only knows about failures in health care services to treat emergency heart attacks in New York City, but can also personally experience the anxiety of the patients; or this one crafted by Caixin, in which users can help a mayor of a Chinese city reduce pollution. These games can say a lot more about what’s happening in your part of the world than many editorials.

Where things are tough, and telling truthful stories can cost you your liberty or life, many journalists have become experts in nuance and subtlety. And under such circumstances, good political humor is always truthful. See how Medialab from Armenia reveals their political scene through cartoons.

The name of the story-telling game in the digital era is to be creative, break molds, think about your audience and work with other professionals, such as artists and software engineers. The trick is to make the routine news of everyday a bit more fun and engaging; and the deep and dead serious, attractive and, yet, still believable.
This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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What these pioneers understand well is that this is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers of the traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family. The new fragmented audiences of digital outlets no longer gather around news-producers but around social networks, and no longer see why quality journalism has to be paid, nor how these payments help their guarantee the media true independence.

Crowd-funding helps journalism-producing outlets build a reliable community around a way of being.

Hungarians fund Atlatzo; Salvadoreans, El Faro; or inhabitants of Hong Kong, Factwire because they think good information is indispensable to survive as citizens. They know that if they support quality, well-verified stories, they will know what is really going on, and they will not be deceived with slanted or special-interest driven information.

There are however, cultural nuances in crowd-funding. In many places in the world it is still seen as a request for charity; as if the journalists were requesting a personal favor. And people may give them small change, like giving donations in church. Fortunately, this culture is changing. More citizens seem to understand that crowd-funding for journalism is a profoundly egalitarian exercise. They are growingly conscious that, as with food, they cannot only consume “junk” information.

If citizens only access information from contaminated sources, they will be unable to hold government or corporations accountable; unable to know when their interests are being harmed.

Crowd-funding is also a democratizing force because it gives power to its audiences. If they pay for the stories, they will follow them up and demand quality. Sure, the old business model that supported journalism was working, but in many parts of the world, it had been perverted by the excessive power it gave advertisers (including state advertising) over editorial content. It also left too much room for journalists to cosy-up to power. Now if citizens voluntarily fund a journalistic project, they expect something more than lazy journalism and they can speak more strongly to the journalists they fund.

Finally, crowd-funding can be a shield for journalism under attack. These same crowds that gave a journalism site money because they are convinced they need “organic journalism” made of healthy sources and verified ingredients to have a better life, could be the ones that go out of their way to defend it when under attack. For example, when there have been attempts to censor or intimidate Malaysiakini, a renowned independent media in Kuala Lumpur, its audience, who gave them half a million dollars for their new building, marched in the streets to protest. Also, as you will see in the examples below, crowds have helped pay for the defense of trusted journalists when these suffer legal abuse because they feel they stories they are telling are important and worth defending.

This story originally appeared in the May 2016 newsletter of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
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However, just when many were forecasting doomsday for journalism, stories of Davids against Goliaths spring about in the world: small teams of journalists using the same technologies developed by the giants to find sources out in the world wide open web, to produce stories that expose wrongdoings by mighty rulers and potent corporations. These reporters learn how to play with the available software, use social networks and chatting services to collaborate with each other across borders and also, to contrast information and then, publish simultaneously to give power to their punches.

For example, Bellingcat, a group of citizen investigative journalists, tracked the route of the Buk missile-launcher carrying the missile that was to down the Malaysian Airlines plane over Eastern Ukraine. They used Google Earth (as well as work on-site), to verify the locations depicted in photos posted by the public; satellite pictures (the purchase of which was crowd-funded) and photos of Russian soldiers on the social networking site VKontakte that enabled the investigators to determine to which military unit the missile launcher belonged. Bellingcat also used Checkdesk, a collaboration platform, to ask citizens to verify the authenticity of specific videos and photos posted in social media and Bridge, a crowdsourcing translation tool, for quick verification of significant events during the war in Ukraine.

Journalists of Rutas del Conflicto are completing a data-base of massacres in Colombia with the victims’ aid. They want every name to be right, to bring back some humanity to the insanity of a country still resistant to look at the real face of its own tragedy; Kenyan Joshua Ogure and his friends managed to use GPS to put their beloved neighbourhood of the Kibera in the outskirts of Nairobi on the map and discovered that 81 percent of the schools were considered informal and that the government had only built 4 percent of Kibera’s schools to host almost 60.000 students.

Other groups, such as Chequeado in Argentina, Africa Check in South Africa, Stop-Fake in Ukraine, follow public discourses of their leaders and fellow journalists, join forces with users and check them with publicly available data to help citizens sort out truth from deception. According to the Reporter’s Lab, there are currently 96 active fact-checking projects in 37 countries; the third Global Fact-Checking Summit will bring leading fact-checkers to Buenos Aires in June.

Despite the uncertain future, opportunity is knocking on the door of journalism. Millions of sources –from public databases and leaked documents to photos posted in social networks and experts and witnesses among the readers – are open to be used by journalists and techies. There seems to be no limit to what reporters can discover and verify across countries and topics to hold power accountable and unearth thorny truths.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
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