Data-driven collaboration shows consequences of domestic violence

All women’s shelters full in this area. Nationwide research in Germany showed the surge in domestic violence during the pandemic and the lack of resources to deal sith the consequences.

In the midst of a national lockdown, already overcrowded womens’ shelters throughout Germany found themselves turning away dozens – sometimes even hundreds – of women in order to meet COVID-19 restrictions. While each federal state maintains its own system for funding shelters, there was an obvious national trend: Not enough space.

Join this session to hear how, during the lockdown, German investigative center CORRECTIV researched the surge in domestic violence together with 31 local media houses across Germany. They collected data, shared their research and began publishing nationwide from February 10.

From scraping to crowdsourcing, the session delves into Correctiv.Lokal’s data-driven approach to researching how womens’ shelters through Germany struggle to meet the needs of survivors of domestic violence. We’ll also talk about how we worked with local newsrooms throughout the country to bring our research to a wider audience.

The session takes place May 26 at 17:00 CET. See the full conference program and register

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Data Journalism Training – from nerdy to necessary

Arena/Dataharvest collaborates with the European Journalism Training Association on teachers’ conference on data journalism training .

2015 discussion on how to teach data journalism – by the table from left Delphine Reuter (Belgium), unknown, Peter Jonriksson (Sweden), Trine Smistrup (Denmark), (unknown), Stefan Candea (Romania).

Exactly six years ago today, Dataharvest opened a pre-conference meeting of a large group of data trainers from across Europe – pioneers, who had the skills and the overview to not just do data journalism but also teach it to others.

Nice to be reminded as we are just putting the finishing touches to what will be the one of largest gatherings about data journalism training in Europe so far: The annual teachers’ conference in the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), this year on data journalism, planned and organized in collaboration between EJTA and Arena/Dataharvest.

It is futile to try to put a starting date to data journalism or data journalism training. The Dataharvest conference grew out of a group of journalists, collecting data on EU farm subsidies since 2009. Across the world, journalists to a larger degree began to find, download, and analyse data around 15 years ago, and “Computer-Assisted Reporting” developed into data journalism. It was a new skill, and no-one knew how it should be taught.

“We initiated a survey in early 2015 to gather knowledge and experience on how data journalism was taught and trained,” remembers Arena’s director Brigitte Alfter. “Then we invited a group of around 20 data trainers and teachers for a one-day seminar before the 2015 Dataharvest conference, so they could get to know each other and share their experiences and training material.”

There were participants from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and a trainers’ meeting was part of Dataharvest over the following years.

Today data journalism is journalism, not a separate nerdy department hidden in a corner of the newsroom. Knowledge on how to gather, clean and analyse data is a skill that most journalists need, and data journalism is on its way into the curriculum in most European journalism schools.

EJTA president, Eric Nahon from Institut Pratique du Journalisme Dauphine in Paris, says:

“Data journalism and data literacy are becoming necessary to understand the world and the society we live in. Most journalists are kind of reluctant to use figures, numbers, or playing with statistic Then come the “nerdy ones”, using Excel, playing with R, talking about “scraping” etc. – but bringing very good stories and visualizations. This new field is something we had to look deeper into. And now is time to share and learn what we found.”

What are journalism schools struggling with in this connection?

“EJTA is about helping its members. So, when data journalism came up as a topic on informal discussions, it was clear that we had some teachers very good with data and some who were interested but did not know where to begin. So having practical sessions to focus on “how to teach/what to teach” is a good starting point for many EJTA members. And the more “advanced” colleague can pick some clever ideas to go forward on their own courses.

But I think the most difficult part of teaching data driven stories in journalism schools is… our students. Most of them are into words and not into figures and numbers. That needs to change, and that’s why we are talking about data literacy for journalists and about data driven stories. We need to find the stories behind the numbers.“

Why did you choose to collaborate with Arena/Dataharvest?

“That was a natural choice. Dataharvest is a famous and fine gathering of data journalist. It reflects the evolution of this peculiar field of journalism. Many of our teachers (professional journalists) are attending Arena/Dataharvest every year. It was obvious that a Mechelen-based organization would find a Mechelen-based “festival of journalism”.

The EJTA teachers’ conference is taking place online on May 20-21.

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Dive deep into data journalism at Dataharvest

Looking to hone your data journalism skills? This years data sessions at Dataharvest again offer something for everybody. Our trainers will help you get into the right data state of mind. Not sure where to look for the right numbers? We have got you covered too. Data you need does not exist? No problem! Just create your own datasets.

Scraping the web for information is a recurring feature of our conference, this year coming back as two beginners sessions: scraping from scratch and scraping without programming.

During the data journalism week we’ll host extra special sessions on data-collaborations and automated sharing with other newsrooms.

Looking for getting hands on and nerdy? Joining tables in the powerful SQL will make you a data combination wizard. Or consider taking a basic Javascript class for visual storytelling? Data cleaning on steroids – that is regex.

And put a finishing touch on everything: learn about the many ways you can tell your data story.

Register here!

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Who and what can hide in a website?

Websites may look like they’re designed to make information available to the public and to retain it for future verification and checkups. However, that’s often not really the case.

To start with, there’s a trove of very relevant information that’s normally hiding behind what you see when you open a website on your browser. Who registered and owns the website’s name? Is it an individual or a company? When was it registered?

Then, deleting, editing and modifying information on a website is really easy and it can be done without leaving any apparent trace. In effect, the people behind a website can try to quite literally rewrite their and the website’s history and remove content that’s relevant to the public interest. How can we check whether that has been the case? And is it possible to retrieve content that has been deleted or modified?

Join us in this session with Laura Ranca, who leads Tactical Tech‘s ‘Exposing the Invisible‘ project, to learn about the main methods, tips and tools to look for what’s behind a website – it’s Thursday May 20 at 10 am!

See the full program and register for the Dataharvest conference!

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Wood pellets from forest to furnace: Forests and environment pay the price

Looking for inspiring investigations related to climate? Maybe you have heard that wood pellets are an environment-friendly and CO2-neutral source of clean or green energy? Ah, well. Join us at Dataharvest 2021 for Fridays for Climate program to hear about Money to Burn, a cross-border investigation into biomass from journalists Hazel Sheffield, Piret Reiljan and Ties Gijzel who will present their investigation and findings.

Ties Gijzel

Register for the conference here

Save the date: May 21, 10:00 am CET

In 2009, the Renewable Energy Directive came into force across the EU, mandating that member states must start to transition their energy supply to renewable sources. Ever since, biomass, specifically wood pellets, has become the main source of renewable energy in the EU. The industry developed around the biomass often receive subsidies from the member states, while they operate without scrutiny or transparency.

Piret Reiljan

For three months, a cross-border team led by Argos, the award-winning investigative journalism platform of Dutch public broadcasters VPRO and Human, tracked the path of pellets from forest to furnace.

“We have combined many different methodologies in our work, at different stages of the investigation. We used open source geospatial tools through which we obtained valuable

Hazel Sheffield

data, but we also collaborated with scientists, university researchers, that helped us analyse and interpret the open source data that ended up being more complicated than estimated,” explains Ties Gijzel.

Join us to learn how the team combined an array of different methods to track deforestation, the extent of clear cutting and biodiversity loss!

Check out the “Money to Burn” investigation here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dataharvest Pop-Up: Meet the people behind “Cities for Rent”

Screendump from project video, made by Alexia Barakou and produced by Reporters United.

Are rents constantly rising in your city? Has it been increasingly difficult to find adequate and affordable place? Has home ownership become only wishful thinking?

High demand for flats across European cities has made housing a very attractive investment. While many people can’t find an affordable flat to live in, reports of a huge increase in investment flows into housing across Europe go hand in hand with stories of abusive practices by ‘corporate landlords’, companies that buy and rent out housing for profit.

Where is all that money coming from? Who are the companies and investors buying so much housing across Europe? How does this phenomenon affect people’s lives and homes in European cities?

During a period of more than seven months, a team of over 25 investigative and data journalists and visualisations experts from 16 European countries, have been working on the cross-border collaborative project Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate Landlords Across Europe. The project was coordinated by the Arena for Journalism in Europe.

Join us for a pop-up session  with Adriana Homolova, Hendrik Lehmann and Jose Miguel Calatayud on May 5 (10:00 AM CET).

Register here

In 2013, Madrid authorities sold more than 4,800 homes, originally intended as affordable housing, to companies controlled by American investment funds. One of the new landlords, American giant Blackstone, soon increased the rents – in some cases by doubling them over a period of three years. Many tenants ended up being evicted. 

In Lisbon, in 2017, two companies bought a building for 2.7 million euros and shortly after put it up for sale for 7 million as an “unoccupied” building, when in reality there were 12 families living there.

In Paris, London, Copenhagen and Berlin, tenants in homes owned by Swedish company Akelius have been complaining for years of abusive practices by their ‘corporate landlord’. In 2020, even the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing said that Akelius was abusing its tenants’ human rights.

Similar stories tend to repeat across Europe. Total investment into residential real estate in Europe has increased more than 700% between 2009 and 2020, from 7.9 to 66.9 billion euros, according to data by Real Capital Analytics. Corporate landlords’ are increasing their presence in different European cities, while the authorities rarely know how many homes those kinds of companies have acquired. (continued under the video)

Cross-border collaborative project Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate Landlords Across Europe is envisaged as the first step towards more cross-border collaborative research into the crisis of housing affordability and how it affects people’s lives. Join us to learn how the journalists involved went ahead and started building the databases of the corporate landlords in different European countries; who these big players are, and how they’re impacting our lives.

Read the stories

The investigation received support through IJ4EU fund for cross-border investigative journalism

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Fridays for Climate!

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

We are adding a new element to Dataharvest! We are happy to announce that this year we will be featuring lots of sessions with great investigations on climate, hands-on climate-data and OSINT training. The sessions will take place on Fridays during the main three-week program of Dataharvest, May 18-June 4.

Climate change is the story of our time, and also a cross-border story par excellence: emissions don’t stop at borders, energy companies operate across the globe, and  the main climate regulations and policies are discussed at the international level.

During out first climate Friday, on May 21, we will focus on the methodology of some of the great investigations looking into specific aspects of climate change, energy efficiency or environmental wrongdoing. Friday of May 28 will be reserved or the data stories and OSINT methods and training. You will also be able to get the guidance and mentoring support from data and OSINT mentors in the two-week period after the session during so-called “office hours” sessions. The closing day, June 4, will be dedicated to European stories. We will get a better understanding of how one can efficiently investigate climate and energy stories of European relevance, and where and how to find our next big research topics.

Last year, the focus of Dataharvest Digital was climate and energy. In 19 sessions (featuring 30 different speakers), spread over two “climate weeks” in September and November 2020, we zoomed into fossil fuel subsidies, discussed how big businesses sometimes benefit from green energy boost, learnt from experts who investigate shipping and aviation industry, looked into lobbying mechanisms and their impact on the European and the UK climate policies, tracked climate deniers across European borders and much more (you can check out last year’s climate program HERE).

We will be publishing more information on specific sessions in the next days – stay tuned! Climate sessions are supported by the European Climate Foundation.

Have you worked on an important investigation related to climate/energy sector that you’d like to present at Dataharvest 2021 Fridays for Climate? Let us know! You can get in touch with the Arena Climate Network project coordinator at jelena@journalismarena.eu

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OSINT – Investigative methods 2.0

Are you interested in exploring ‘investigative journalism 2.0’? 

Join us for a Dataharvest session with investigative journalist Ben Heubl on May 19 (11-12:30 CET) to learn about basic and advanced techniques and tools for gathering and analysing open sources intelligence.

Register for the conference

Register for the session: Open source intelligence skills for investigative reporters

During the session we will discuss how these new approaches fit into the toolbox of modern European journalists and explore several subjects specific to Europe. Ben Heubl will give you some basic OSINT tools and tips that you can use in your everyday work – such as how to geolocate a video or a photo,. 

We will also learn how to examine right-wing groups on the continent, and explore some social-media themes unique to Europe. “We will learn how reght-wing groups use Telegram channels and how one can do search across Telegram channels; how to find these people’s profiles and link their user names to their real identities across social-media platforms,” says Heubl.

Ben will also demonstrate specific examples of how OSINT can assist your reporting such as vessel tracking. “We have a thriving maritime sector, in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic, and one can do many stories – for example look into overfishing – if they know how to track ships,” explains Heubl.

Read Ben Heubl’s investigation: How Europe’s dark fishing fleets threaten West Africa

If you want to learn more about satellite imagery, refer to pieces: How new satellite data sources enhance investigative journalism and How to investigate Europe’s biomass industry with open-source data

Are you interested using OSINT while doing fast-pace news journalism work? Check out Ben Heubl’s tips on How to tell open-source intelligence tales for the news

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Pop-Up: Going undercover to prove backlash against women’s and LGBTQ rights

Photo: Christina Victoria Craft

Doctors on four continents, supported by US Christian right activists, are providing women with “dangerous” and unproven treatments that claim to ‘reverse’ medical abortions. This was proven in late March by reporters from OpenDemocracy.

How did they research such a personal and delicate matter? And how big is this problem in Europe? Find out in the second Dataharvest Pop-Up, taking place on April 21 at 2 pm CET.

Register here!

Undercover reporters contacted a hotline run by US Christian right activists and were connected to local doctors in their own countries who were willing to prescribe so-called ‘abortion pill reversal’ by phone or email.

‘Abortion pill reversal’ (APR) involves taking high doses of progesterone, a hormone, following the first of two pills used for a medical abortion. Health experts say it is unlikely to ‘reverse’ a medical abortion, and there are also concerns about using progesterone (in itself not dangerous) for this ‘treatment’. A US medical trial into APR was halted in 2019 after some participants were sent to hospital with severe haemorrhaging. The trial’s lead researcher said it was stopped because “It wasn’t safe for me to expose women to this treatment.” 

However, the US hotline connected reporters to local doctors who were willing to provide prescriptions in 12 countries, in Europe and beyond. Only in two countries  were local contacts unwilling to help women take this ‘treatment’, calling it unproven and possibly unsafe.

Join us for a session with Claire Provost, Tatev Hovhannisyan and Zeynep Sentek to learn how they followed the lead from the US hotline to specific countries and doctors around the world. They will share tips on how to go undercover while reporting (including how to prepare a good cover story), and how to combine this method with a data-driven investigation approach.

In the past, openDemocracy revealed Heartbeat’s links to anti-abortion projects around the world that use misinformation in their efforts to discourage women from ending pregnancies under any circumstances and established that groups linked to US Christian right groups have poured millions of dollars into activities of conservative groups globally, for example groups fighting LGBTQ rights.

Register here!

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The Dataharvest 2021 program is out!

The program for Dataharvest 2021 has just been published!

The 2021 conference will be an online event again – and we will meet for 3 weeks of conference and data skills training, followed by a number of masterclasses during the autumn months.

The conference weeks have overall themes: 1) Investigative methods, 2) Data journalism and 3) Crossborder journalism. These themes of course overlap, but they still define a focus for the discussions. Come and join in!

Every conference day has the same structure (except the last):

  • At 10 am we start out with a “Morning booster” – a short session, introducing a specific tool or area of knowledge. These session will last from 30-50 minutes.
  • At 11, we have the main session of the day, sharing experiences and working methods from recent investigations.
  • At 2 pm, a data skills-oriented session begins, typically a demonstration rather than hands-on. You will learn tools and get inspiration to your work on data sets.
  • At 5 pm, you are invited to an interactive session, where you are invited to participate with your thoughts and experiences. A “data sprint“ continues from week to week, and there are sessions called “Instant inspiration” where you can hear about an investigation and learn how you can make something similar in your own country.

And the very last day, on Wednesday June 3, we are proud to present a partnership with the European Press Prize, that will announce the winners of the annual prize at the Dataharvest Conference. The award ceremony will be in the late morning, after which the winners will present their projects. Save the date!

And the “grande finale” of Dataharvest 2021 is laid in the able hands of Quiztime, the international research group that posts an OSINT conundrum every day on Twitter. Can you find the answers to their questions? Find other Dataharvest participants from your city or country, get together physically or online and test yourselves against other groups!

After the summer holiday, we meet again for at least 5 masterclasses (more may be planned as we move along). Here you can go into more depth with different tools and areas. They will be:

We look forward to seeing you at Dataharvest 2021! Your ticket covers both conference and master classes – buy it here!

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