Cross-border investigations : tricks & tips

Cécile Schilis-Gallego (@csgallego) -- Data Journalist at The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)

News Impact Summit - Warsaw - Sept. 3rd 2015

http://bit.ly/niswarsawICIJ

ICIJ : Who we are

● Non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. (but also Spain, Venezuela, Costa Rica, France, Greece)

● Global network of almost 200 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries

● Funded by foundations and individuals donors

ICIJ : What we do

● Cross-border investigations on development issues, tax evasion, environment...

● Collaborative reporting, shared findings, coordinated publication

● Global data

The ICIJ method

● Is it an issue of global concern?

● Is the system designed to protect people broken?

● Are we likely to get a result?

ICIJ : A few projects

Swiss Leaks: leaked data (HSBC files) published on February 8, 2015

170 reporters in 50 countries (DDJ Award)

60,000 leaked files

exposing how the Swiss branch of one of the world bank's biggest bank, HSBC, profited from doing business with tax dodgers and criminals around the world

ICIJ : A few projects

Evicted and Abandoned: public data (World Bank documents) published on March 16, 2015

50 reporters in 21 countries

6,000+ documents reviewed (unique database)

uncovering systemic failures by the World Bank and cases of mass evictions and human rights abuses by some of the bank’s major clients.

ICIJ : The Team

ProjectProject

Reporting

Publication

Data Editor(Spain)

ICIJ deputy director (DC)

Data analyst(Costa Rica)

Web app developer (Costa Rica)

Data journalist(France)

Datacheckers

Research editor (Venezuela)

ICIJ director (DC)

Reporters (DC)

Reporting

Editor (NY) Online Editor (DC)

Publication

Find systemic global stories

HSBC data

A global story with strong local angles

● The HSBC “Falciani” files: individual names (politicians, celebrities, businessmen) but NOT ONLY

● Match lists to find stories beyond the anecdotal: Sanctions list, politicians list, Clinton Foundation, etc.

A global story with strong local angles

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate

CollaborationTraining Advice

Finding stories, understanding data of their country, feedback,

reaching sources, writing stories.

How to search, how to understand the data, how to use better the online platforms. Security

in communication.Questions about the data. Q&A

Embrace the cross-border spirit

Virtual Newsroom: Forum to share findings

Virtual Newsroom: Document Search Platform

Virtual Newsroom: Social Network Analysis

Data & reporting go together!

World Bank

http://huff.to/worldbank

There is a lot to find in public data...

● Development aid is under-investigated AND global

● World Bank: many documents available

● No one had really done analysis on those documents...

● ...but the World Bank did not make it easy

http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/projects-portfoliohttp://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/docadvancesearch

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/09/is-the-pdf-hurting-

democracy

...but not everything

● The importance of local on-the-ground stories

● Data & reporting as two sides of the same coin

● A difficult conversation with the World Bank

Look at the big picture!

● The importance of the 3.4 million figure

● Stories had been written about local cases (they were our starting point) but no one looked at the policy and at whether the World Bank was abiding by its own standard

● An interactive to give the big picture and inspire new stories

http://www.icij.org/project/world-bank/explore-10-years-world-bank-resettlement-data

Searchable database

+

Methodology

+

Raw data

Investigative data journalism: where to start?

Data sources

● World Bank data (there is more!)

● The UN (UN comtrade, etc.)

● OECD / Eurostat

● Stock Exchanges (SEC, ASX)

● Compile new data (eg: Migrant Files)

A few tips

● Be practical

● Work around what you have (PDF, Html)

● REPORT on the data (understand the data as you would with any other source)

● Clean the data & check it!

Tools to deal with PDFs

● To search documents: Document Cloud, Overview

● For OCRing (Turning PDFs into searchable text) : Abbyy FineReader

● To extract tables: Tabula, Cometdocs

Tools to scrape web pages

● import.io

● kimono

● Using Google spreadsheet (tutorial)

● Chrome scraper extension

Thank you!cschilisgallego@icij.org

Questions?