2025-11-14 16:00:38
Every country produces data, but not every country produces it in an organized manner. What matters is not just the volume of data, but how it’s standardized and structured. The messiest or most data usually comes from manual systems — processes run by humans without standardization. These systems are not only slow but make verification difficult and can lead to major errors.
Even countries that produce massive amounts of data often have datasets that are inaccessible, fragmented, or lack metadata:
For investigative journalists, this means looking beyond the content of a dataset — considering how it was produced and structured is equally important. Why should journalists care about messy data markets? Because, just like big companies, public institutions, and NGOs, journalists often see only part of the story. The goal is to uncover what is hidden.
In this context, investigative and data journalism require different approaches depending on the type of data. Structured data — organized, often numeric, and table-based — is ideal for analysis, comparison, and visualization. Today, however, much of the digital world consists of unstructured data: emails, social media posts, customer reviews, videos, audio files, and other irregular content.
These datasets can be treasure troves of information, but their messy nature makes deep analysis difficult unless they are cleaned and organized. Today, around 80% of digital data is unstructured, posing a significant challenge for journalists: before conducting meaningful analyses or uncovering stories, the data must first be cleaned and organized.
According to market research firm DataIntelo’s 2024 report, the global unstructured data analytics market was valued at US$7.92 billion in 2024, and it’s expected to reach US$65.45 billion by 2033. This growth is driven by the huge expansion of digital content and AI integration. However, technological advancements do not automatically make data easy to work with — the need for thorough data cleaning is greater than ever.
Even in data-rich countries such as the US or China, messy data, missing metadata, and inconsistent formats make analysis challenging. PDFs, scanned documents, non-standardized Excel files, and restricted-access databases are all examples of data cleaning stories journalists must tackle.
Journalists often encounter Excel files, PDFs, complex tables from open data portals, or raw social media datasets published by various institutions. These datasets are typically inconsistent, incomplete, or erroneous. Coders can handle these issues with Python, R, or SQL — but not every journalist codes. Even without coding, failing to engage deeply with data can lead to serious errors.
GIJN’s Struck by Lightning: A Quick Lesson on Cleaning Up Your Data illustrates this perfectly. Using a large dataset of lightning strikes, it highlights how minor differences in the “activity” column — like “roofing” versus “working on the roof” — can result in misclassification. The article demonstrates that visualizing data without cleaning it first can produce misleading results and stories, making datacleaning not just a technical task but an ethical responsibility for journalists.
Fortunately, there are tools and resources to make these processes easier. GIJN’s Using Pinpoint to Organize Unstructured Data explains how the Pinpoint tool helps organize unstructured datasets. Working with messy data can feel like climbing an endless mountain, but such tools make it easier to extract meaningful insights from text, documents, and files.
Quartz’s data cleaning guide provides journalists with a framework, exploring the causes of poor data quality, missing metadata, and conflicting sources, and suggesting how to achieve reliable, meaningful datasets.
These examples show that data cleaning is not merely a technical skill — it’s a fundamental step for trustworthy journalism. Below we discuss the process of data cleaning.
Data cleaning (or data wrangling) means identifying and correcting errors, filling gaps, removing duplicates, and resolving inconsistencies in a dataset. This process ensures that data is reliable for analysis and reporting.
For example, if a city’s spending table lists the same department as both “Ankara Belediyesi” and “Ank. Bld.,” calculating total expenses becomes impossible. Similarly, mixed date formats or missing rows lead to misleading results. Dirty data produces dirty stories. That’s why cleaning is one of the most critical, though invisible, steps in a journalist’s investigation.
The main goal of cleaning is preparing data — deciding what datasets you need, what formats to use, which rows and columns to adjust, and documenting every step. Tracking processes, performing error checks, and maintaining documentation are all part of a sustainable workflow.
In recent years, no-code tools have been developed to allow journalists to clean, organize, and analyze data using visual interfaces. Instead of writing complex code, these tools provide drag-and-drop features, filters, and automatic cleaning suggestions, freeing journalists to focus on storytelling rather than technical details.
Even without coding, cleaning data should follow a logical sequence:
Imagine downloading a city’s 2025 spending table in Excel with the following issues:
Date |
Department |
Expense Item |
Amount |
12/01/24 |
Financial Affairs |
Cleaning Service |
25000 |
13.01.2024 |
FINANCIAL AFFAIRS |
CLEANING |
25.000,00 TL |
15/01/24 |
F.Affair |
Garbage Collection |
12.5 |
16/01/2024 |
Financialaffairs |
CLEANING SERVICE |
25,000 |
Example: Cleaning a City’s Expense Data
Problems:
Cleaning Steps:
After cleaning, the data is ready for analysis: categorize expenses, calculate totals, and visualize trends.
Below you will find accessible and practical tools for journalists, along with their advantages:
It is one of the easiest tools for data cleaning. In a spreadsheet environment that almost everyone is familiar with, powerful cleaning operations can be performed with simple formulas and filters.
Uses: Deleting duplicate rows, correcting text formats, and standardizing dates.
Example:
=TRIM(A2) → Cleans unnecessary spaces in the cell.
=PROPER(A2) → Adjusts upper/lower case letters.
Image: Screenshot
The “Remove Duplicates” tool in the “Data” tab identifies repeating rows.
Advantage: Free, cloud-based, easy to share.
Disadvantage: May slow down with large data sets.
| An alternative GIJN article on the subject and my recordings, which are in Turkish but can be accessed using subtitles.
My Data Is Dirty! Basic Spreadsheet Cleaning Functions |
OpenRefine is the most widely used free data cleaning tool among data journalists. Formerly known as “Google Refine,” this open-source program can organize thousands of lines of data in seconds. I use it frequently in my classes.
Image: Screenshot
For example, you can convert records like “Istanbul,” “İstanbul,” and “Ist” into a single standard format.
Data types: CSV, TSV, Excel, JSON, XML.
Advantage: Simplifies complex cleaning tasks and provides powerful filtering.
Disadvantage: Seems technical at first setup, but is easy to learn with a few examples.
| My training record, which is in Turkish but can be accessed using subtitles: |
Microsoft Excel’s “Power Query” add-in provides significant convenience for traditional Excel users.
Image: Screenshot
Advantage: A natural transition for Excel users.
Disadvantage: Limited support in older versions, may require a paid license.
Learn to Automate Everything with Power Query in Excel
AirTable is a hybrid system between a spreadsheet and a database. Users can visually organize data, categorize it, and create related tables.
Advantages: Suitable for teamwork, aesthetically pleasing and intuitive.
Disadvantages: The free version has storage limitations.
How to set up automated data cleaning routines in Airtable
Trifacta Wrangler (Alteryx Cloud)
This is a powerful cleaning tool at the enterprise level. It provides AI-powered recommendations; it detects data errors itself and offers correction options.
Usage area: Cleaning large data sets, automatic conversion.
Image: Screenshot
Advantage: Saves time, supports complex data sources.
Disadvantage: Focused on the paid version, the interface is in English.
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. This is a common problem journalists face: public institutions sharing data in PDF format.
Tabula converts tables in PDF files to Excel or CSV format.
Image: Screenshot
Advantage: Free, open source.
Disadvantage: Errors may occur in complex or visual PDFs.
| My training record here: #1.2 Tabula ile PDF Dosyalarından Veri Kazıma |
Filtering and Conditional Cleaning
In Google Sheets or Excel, you can use “Conditional Formatting” to highlight abnormal values in color and quickly spot errors.
Formula-Based Automation
Cleaning can be automated using simple formulas instead of code:
Data Validation
In AirTable or Sheets, you can ensure that users only enter data in specific categories. This maintains consistency in the long term.
Best Practices and Ethics
Data cleaning is not just technical — it’s ethical. Journalists should maintain the original meaning while ensuring accuracy and consistency.
Data journalism and investigative reporting are not just about technical skills. Understanding, organizing, and validating data directly affects the accuracy of your stories. New tools make cleaning accessible to journalists without coding. Think of yourself as a storyteller, not an engineer — but remember: every strong story depends on solid data. With the right tools and methods, even non-coders can clean data and turn it into reliable news.
Pinar Dag is the editor of GIJN Turkish and a lecturer at Kadir Has University. She is the co-founder of the Data Literacy Association (DLA), Data Journalism Platform Turkey, and DağMedya. She works on data literacy, open data, data visualization, and data journalism and has been organizing workshops on these issues since 2012. She is also on the jury of the Sigma Data Journalism Awards.
2025-11-14 14:00:56
With its launch just a few days away, excitement is rapidly building for a week of practical investigative tips, rich networking, cultural treats, and a new mental frame for accountability journalism at the first-ever Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Asia.
Representing the largest gathering of international investigative journalists every two years, this event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, will include everything from visionary insights from multiple Nobel Prize laureates and fantastic food to compelling documentary screenings and many new potential journalistic collaborators. Perhaps GIJC25 will trigger another blockbuster collaboration? Or reveal new global techniques developed by Asian watchdogs? Or change your journalism with a simple new security protocol or amazing free tool you’d use every day? Or, who knows — perhaps catalyze another Muckrakers journalists’ rock band?
As registered attendees prepare to pack suitcases, laptops, and contact books, here is a quick guide on what to expect, how to navigate the conference, and last-minute must-do’s.
For some local context, it might be helpful to know our conference is happening on the heels of Malaysia hosting the ASEAN Summit, an important regional geopolitical gathering. And you might be curious about the latest updates on former Malaysian PM Najib Razak, who was embroiled in the 1MDB scandal — there are not one but two Netflix shows that examine the massive corruption case.
Complete the Malaysian Digital Arrival Before You Go: All travelers entering Malaysia (except for Malaysian citizens and permanent residents, Singapore citizens, and certain other trailer categories) are required to have completed the Malaysia Digital Arrival Card (MDAC) online within three days of their scheduled arrival in the country. Don’t forget to complete this simple process before setting off! While day-of-travel applications are allowed, it’s a good idea to do this a day or two before you depart.
Bring a ‘Type-G’ Power Adapter: The primary power sockets in Malaysia are for Type-G plugs — three rectangular pins in a triangle pattern. Also, the standard voltage in Malaysia is 240, so you may need a voltage converter in case your device is strictly rated for a lower range. But if your devices support a range of 110 – 240V, you should be fine. (Most laptops charging cords have a built-in voltage regulator.)
Packing for Weather. Consider packing a small umbrella, a light rain jacket, sunblock, and breathable cotton clothing, as Kuala Lumpur’s weather in mid-November is typically hot and humid (average maximum of about 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit), with frequent afternoon rain showers.
Plan Your GIJC25 Sessions on the Sched App. For a great way to view and plan your session attendance at GIJC25 — featuring more than 150 panels and workshops, and more than 300 speakers — and potentially connect with fellow attendees, download the GIJC25 Conference App or search for “GIJC25” or “Global Investigative Journalism Conference” in the Sched event directory. (Please also check out our GIJC25 Code of Conduct Guidelines.)
Airport Transport: Note that Kuala Lumpur International Airport is relatively far from the city center, at about 50km (30 miles). Probably the most convenient return option is the KLIA Ekspres airport rail service, which offers a frequent, non-stop ride of about 28 minutes direct to the KL Sentral station in the city.
To get from the KL Sentral station to KLCC (12 minutes), follow the clearly marked signs to the Rapid KL LRT Platform, purchase a one-way token at the ticket machines, and then board the regular LRT trains in the Gombak direction (not the Putra Heights direction). KLCC should be the fifth stop.
Cash: While major credit cards should suffice for most purchases in KL, it is advisable to have a small amount of cash in local currency for small street vendor transactions.
For an Airport Taxi (about MYR 100 one-way to KLCC area): first purchase a coupon from the airport taxi counters — which can be found at International Baggage Reclaim, Level 3, Main Terminal Building. Metered taxis can be hailed outside of Level 3.
Above all: you can expect to be immersed in — and reconnected to — the global investigative journalism community: more than 1500 fellow watchdog reporters and editors from over 100 countries and territories.
The Venue: Situated alongside the iconic Petronas Towers at the heart of the Kuala Lumpur City Center (KLCC), the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre will be the hub for GIJC sessions, exhibitor wares, and several cultural and networking events.
Merch & Mingle. Meet global investigative allies, browse the watchdog-related books and merchandise, and learn of new opportunities.
Ample Free Wi-Fi around KLCC:
Childcare and more: Once again, we will be offering professional childcare at GIJC. Furthermore, you will find lots of practical information on the GIJC25 website:
Various partners and members from the community have organized special side events during the conference days. More information can be found here.
Thursday (6pm): If you’re at the Convention Center on Thursday evening, November 20, follow the signs to the Welcome Reception, for a few hours of local flavors, investigative camaraderie, and great conversation in a relaxed setting.
Friday (8pm): On Friday evening, November 21, join fellow attendees for social networking and drinks at the Traders Hotel SkyBar (The Traders Hotel adjoins the convention center) – and enjoy stunning views of the city and Petronas Twin Towers. Tip: Be sure to arrive early, as capacity is limited to 200 guests at a time.
If you aren’t networking with fellow muckrakers over a light meal at lunch break on Friday, then enjoy a specially curated cultural showcase that highlights Malaysia’s vibrant heritage.
For a longform video journalism experience, check out GIJC25’s documentary screenings: Check your program on Sched for soon to be released screening times, and look forward to being inspired by the following four outstanding video-format accountability projects — together with two panel discussions on this medium:
These will be accompanied by two documentary panels: From Investigation to Screen (at 1:30pm Saturday, November 22) and Storytelling: Strategies to Develop Video Investigations (at 1:30pm Sunday, November 23.)
Sunday (1:30pm): Indigenous News Alliance launch. If you are an Indigenous journalist, or a reporter or editor hoping to elevate Indigenous narratives and perspectives in future, then join this launch event for the new Indigenous News Alliance (INA). In addition to launching a cross‑border network of Indigenous newsrooms from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, this will also be an informal networking session on the global challenges and opportunities for deeper coverage of issues facing Indigenous communities, and a rare chance for brainstorming and collaboration.
Sunday (6pm): Join the global investigative community for the social event of the week: GIJC25’s Banquet and Awards Night, beginning at 6pm. This is a seated gala dinner featuring cultural performances, a look-ahead to GIJC27, and the in-person awarding of GIJN’s Global Shining Light Award — which honors investigative journalism carried out in transitional nations, under perilous conditions.
For those not attending the conference, we will be publishing reported recaps of certain panels throughout GIJC25 and also uploading select session recordings to GIJN’s YouTube channel in the days and weeks following. Follow along the tips, tools, and real time conference coverage using the #GIJC25 hashtag on social media, or check any of GIJN’s social media platforms.
2025-11-13 15:00:45
On the afternoon of Friday, November 7, as the 21st edition of the African Investigative Journalism Conference (AIJC) drew to a close, a visibly content Beauregard Tromp, the AIJC convener, appeared before the audience gathered in the main plenary hall to conclude what he described as one of the “best ever” gatherings of African watchdog journalists.
Beauregard noted that while planning for the conference, which had more than 455 attendees representing 45 countries, 37 of them in Africa, he had deliberately opted to look beyond “the best and brightest minds in investigative journalism” to attend the conference and “step outside our own echo chamber and look at ideas and inspiration from persons and organizations working adjacent to the journalism industry.”
And the tone was set at the opening of the three-day conference, which had the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, as the keynote speaker. Now working as the Gambian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Bensouda challenged the investigative journalists before her to preserve the sanctity of facts in their reporting.
“The craft of investigative journalism is at its heart an act of disciplined inquiry. It demands evidence over assumption, verification over sensation, and balance over bias,” she said. “In a world awash with misinformation, this discipline becomes not only a professional standard, but a civic duty. The investigative journalist must navigate political pressures, legal challenges, and ethical dilemmas while preserving the sanctity of facts. Each exposé, each documentary, and each report must contribute to the architecture of public trust.”
The conference indeed had several sessions in which participants learnt how to use the latest tools to dig up facts. In one such session, Youri van der Weide, a trainer with Bellingcat, an independent investigative organization, demonstrated how he was able to identify a reclusive administrator of a Telegram group called “White Uncle in Africa,” which recruits agents for Russian paramilitary operations in Africa and enjoys posting horrific images to lure potential new recruits.
Van der Weide detailed the effectiveness of facial recognition tools such as Pimeyes, the observation of clues like tattoos or shoes in the images of his subject, analysis of YouTube metadata, and consulting databases such as Intelx to uncover the name of the former member of the Russian Air Army managing the Telegram group.
In another session, South African journalist Catherine White, founder of Cat White Media, who “absolutely loves TikTok,” showed her audience how to give their investigations greater reach by harnessing TikTok’s power. She explained, with examples, how the first three seconds are crucial in grabbing and maintaining the audience’s attention, and which words to avoid.
“TikTok can help journalists reach broader audiences, simplify complex issues, and invite direct interaction with viewers, all while maintaining journalistic integrity,” White explained.
The juxtaposition of intensive open source intelligence (OSINT) sessions with audience engagement advice showcased the diversity of topics covered at AIJC. Participants attended workshops, seminars, and panel discussions ranging from exposing carbon credit deal profiteers to anti-rights movements in Africa, and protecting whistleblowers to investigating AI models for sustainability.
In a session moderated by GIJN’s Africa Editor, Benon Herbert Oluka, panelists discussed the impact of the withdrawal and reduction of foreign funding on newsrooms, as well as the resilience-building measures deployed by various watchdog journalism outlets across Africa.
“Journalism is not enough,” said Nolwazi Tunisi, program director for Southern Africa from the Media Development Investment Fund. “We need to learn new skills. You need to be able to think about business, think about models, think about how to lead your team. It is more than financial viability. Think about your journalism as a product that has value. Diversifying your income or revenue is no longer an option. Otherwise, your organization will die. It may not happen this year, but it will happen.”
Joe Ageyo, editor-in-chief of the Nation Media Group, the largest media house in sub-Saharan Africa, said that journalists need to address the funding constraints challenge by forging “new compacts — between journalists, civil society, philanthropies, and even the private sector.” But he added that solutions to the sustainability challenge “must also be re-imagined from within.”
“We need new revenue models, cross-border data partnerships, reader-supported models, memberships, and university collaborations that bridge academia and newsroom investigations,” he said. “We must learn to monetize credibility, to treat trust as currency.”
At the end of day one of the conference, a special event brought participants together in an emotive march in support of journalism safety. Participants carried placards bearing messages as they took part in a symbolic march from the main conference venue to the large hall, on the same campus, where the evening’s event was to be held: the Carlos Cardoso conference, organized for many years by the Committee to Protect Journalists and AIJC.
Twenty five years have passed since the Mozambican journalist, after whom this lecture is dedicated to issues of press freedom on the continent is named, was assassinated in his country. This year, his friend Fernando Lima recalled the main points of the fearless work of this investigative journalist who was not afraid to take on sensitive issues that caused discomfort beyond Mozambique’s borders.
Thank you to our delegates for an energetic and engaging start to the 21st African Investigative Journalism Conference. Are you ready for day two?
📸🧵 Day one of #AIJC2025 in pictures. pic.twitter.com/QPfXwtwP17
— African Investigative Journalism Conference (@AIJC_Conference) November 6, 2025
Another seminal moment of this year’s conference was day two’s keynote session, during which Kenyan writer and journalist Nanjala Nyabola addressed the issues of “false gods,” those political figures, from the late Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi to the current head of state of Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who present themselves as saviors but end up governing in a way that punishes their people as well as journalists. Later, Nanjala suggested that to detect these “false gods,” you just have to analyze their reaction to the prospect of losing power.
Ahead of the conference, the Wits Centre for Journalism (WCJ), collaborating with the Association for a Critical and Investigative Press in Norway (SKUP), and Bellingcat, hosted 20 leading investigative journalists from 13 African countries for a three-day OSINT masterclass.
A similar pre-conference session on digital safety was hosted by ACOS Alliance, Thomson Reuters Foundation, the South African Editors’ Forum (SANEF), and other partners, while Human Rights Watch (HRW) engaged investigative journalists in a post-conference session aimed at offering a platform for watchdog journalists to interact with HRW researchers investigating human rights violations on the continent.
“The lack of accountability by African governments for the excessive use of force in handling civil protests, the abusive responses to intensifying conflicts including in Sudan, the DRC, and the Sahel, and the growing repression of dissenting voices including journalists, social media commentators, and activists in several countries, have emboldened state and non-state actors to carryout significant human rights atrocities across the continent,” noted Mbong Akiy Fokwa Tsafack, the associate communications director for Africa at Human Rights Watch.
The highlight of the conference for many was, perhaps, the African Investigative Journalist of the Year Awards night. For the past three years, AIJC has also hosted the awards at colourful gala dinners, and this year was no exception.
Dewald van Rensburg (seond from left) of the South African investigative journalism unit amaBhungane won the 2025 AIJC African Investigative Journalist of the Year Award for his series of investigations titled City of Gold. Image: Courtesy of AIJC
South African journalist Dewald van Rensburg of the investigative media outlet amaBhungane was named African Investigative Journalist of the Year for his investigative series, The Laundry: City of Gold.
“Van Rensburg’s work showed how this dark corner of the gold “industry” grew into a multi-billion rand drain on the fiscus – and how the key role-players engaged in financial manoeuvring to launder their funds offshore”, commented the AIJC organizing committee.
🏆 NEW: South Africa’s @DewaldvanRensb1 named 2025 African investigative journalist of the year at gala award ceremony held last night in #Johannesburg.
Read more: https://t.co/qgKt0qkwaN
Congratulations to all finalists for your well-deserved recognition 👏 #AIJC2025 pic.twitter.com/VhvJd8rwtu
— African Investigative Journalism Conference (@AIJC_Conference) November 7, 2025
West Africa dominated the other positions, with The Gambia’s Mustapha K. Darboe of The Republic taking second place for his investigation, titled The Assets of Former Dictator Go for a Song, while third place went to Ghanaian journalists Seth Bokpe and Edmund Agyemang Boateng of The Fourth Estate for Forest Invasion: The Scramble by PEPs to Acquire Mining Licences in Ghana’s Forest Reserve.
Over the years, the AIJC has diversified, with, for example, the introduction a few years ago of French interpretation, which has made the conference more inclusive for French journalists. Similarly, two years ago, the organizers introduced a new category of participants under the age of 30, which has also opened the door to very young journalists, some of whom come from very hostile regions, such as Balkissa Mahamane from Niger, a country currently under military rule, and from a region, in the southeast of the country, that has been facing terrorist attacks for years and where independent journalism comes at a high cost.
NEW: In case you missed the live announcement at #AIJC2025, we’re excited to reveal that the conference is taking flight in 2026, heeding the call of the continent’s journalism community in making the event more accessible.
✈️ Read more here: https://t.co/sKGEphsd8D pic.twitter.com/PdIkyuAYJx
— African Investigative Journalism Conference (@AIJC_Conference) November 10, 2025
The dates for the 2026 edition are already known: November 10 to 12. The location is also known. This time, for the first time in 22 years (excluding the COVID-19 period), the conference will be held outside South Africa, to make it more accessible to participants who often struggle to secure visas to Africa’s largest economy and to bring it closer to those coming from the northern or western parts of the continent. It will be held in Kenya, a country that has abolished visas for most Africans, with the Aga Khan University in Nairobi set to host. As they say in Swahili, Tuonane huko (see you there).
Maxime Domegni is GIJN’s Francophone Africa editor and an award-winning journalist with years of experience in investigative journalism. He has worked, among others, as editor-in-chief of the Togolese investigative newspaper L’Alternative. He has also collaborated with different media organizations, notably with the Swiss-based Fondation Hirondelle as West African Correspondent for the justiceinfo.net website.
2025-11-12 16:00:42
Imagine you’re an employee at a tech company or governmental agency and you’ve noticed practices that you suspect are illegal or dangerous to the public. Personal reasons to not share the evidence with a journalist might include: “I only have pieces of evidence;” “Maybe I’m the only employee concerned;” “I could be harassed if my identity is revealed;” “My Non Disclosure Agreement could be a problem,” and “My employer’s internal surveillance system could track me down.”
All these concerns contribute to what experts say is an evergreen barrier to whistleblowing: the “first-mover” problem. Even the most courageous whistleblowers — such as former Uber executive Mark MacGann — admit that they waited many months to disclose their evidence of malfeasance because they were waiting for other concerned colleagues to step forward first.
But new employer AI and surveillance protocols — and the additional risk of losing lucrative tech salaries — have now raised the stakes for potential leakers. As a result, journalists and civil society groups must provide insiders with comprehensive solutions to lowering the bar for reaching out, and, ideally, demonstrate to the person that they’re not alone.
One innovative new service to address all these issues is a nonprofit called Psst.org, which is entirely designed with the real-world needs of potential whistleblowers. Indeed, it states: “Psst lets you deposit the information and get help without having to go full ‘whistleblower.’” It offers a secure digital safe for even small disclosures, flexible or immediate pro bono legal support, and — in an innovative twist — it can eliminate both the first-mover and the vulnerability problems by patiently matching an individual’s initial concerns with those of other employees at the same organization, all while respecting the wishes of information-sharers.
Jennifer Gibson, co-founder of Psst.org, told GIJN that the service has already received roughly 100 whistleblower support requests in its first year, including submissions by 55 concerned employees to a beta version of its encrypted safe.
One of these disclosures was from the former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who recently filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly ignoring major security flaws in its messaging service. In addition to disclosure advice and forging an attorney-client relationship, Psst also helped Baig find an employment lawyer to litigate the case without personal cost.
In its first case, the organization helped a Microsoft whistleblower expose that company’s “Big Oil” AI contracts, as described in The Atlantic by tech investigator Karen Hao, the best-selling author of “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race For Total Domination.”
This nonprofit service was highlighted in a Journalist’s Resource webinar panel this year on Dealing with Leaks in the Age of AI and Disinformation, featuring Mark MacGann, Paul Radu, co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP,) and former Forbidden Stories editor-in-chief Sandrine Rigaud. (Full disclosure: Rigaud has since been appointed Program Director at GIJN.)
Rigaud noted that leaks from two primary sources — hackers (including civic-minded hacktivists and ransomware criminals) and concerned employees with privileged access to data — have both been affected by AI. For instance, while the volume of leaks from hacked data has increased dramatically, she said hacked or supposedly hacked evidence can be more easily and convincingly forged by AI systems; a problem requiring greater verification through traditional reporting methods.
In January 2022, MacGann carried two suitcases full of hard drives, phones, and documents relating to Uber’s lobbying and safety practices to a Geneva hotel room for a first meeting with a Guardian reporter. The more than 100,000 records he disclosed led to the collaborative Uber Files investigative series.
However, in the webinar, MacGann cautioned: “Cases like me schlepping up suitcases full of hard drives and hard-copy documents — that’s just not going to happen anymore because of the intense digital and physical surveillance of employees, and the increased hostility toward people speaking out in favor of democratic principles.”
He added: “We need to make it easier for whistleblowers to remain anonymous, by providing the technical solutions for the delivery, the matching [with other whistleblowers / journalists], and the verification of leaks.”
MacGann said that promising technical solutions to promote anonymity and safe disclosure included an initiative to repurpose a hyper-secure survey tool, MyPrivacyPolls, as a whistleblower portal, called MyPrivacyPolls Gray. While still in development, the tool — created by the Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard — leaves no digital breadcrumbs, and can deliver leaks directly to a registered journalist’s email inbox with zero data storage on any server, and which requires no login or identity disclosure from the whistleblower. This project was inspired by Dr. Latanya Sweeney, a public interest technologist at Harvard Kennedy School, who told GIJN that whistleblowers had noted to her team that the MyPrivacyPolls survey form architecture offered some security advantages over existing whistleblower channels.
“We were talking specifically about what Frances Haugen had done in leaking the Facebook documents — taking these photographs, uploading them to Google Drive, and seeking to provide them to a reporter,” said Sweeney. “The way she did that involved a lot of trust in Google, and we were, like: ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea!’”
In contrast, MyPrivacyPolls Gray offers a more secure alternative, Sweeney explained. “A journalist goes to MyPrivacyPolls and makes an account, and a form, and they publish the URL — the form ID. Whistleblowers out in the world can then go to that URL, and we guarantee [their leaks] will show up in the email inbox of the journalists who created it,” she said. “And neither we nor anyone else would know about the submissions.” Sweeney did concede that more work needed to be done in connecting concerned employees with specific journalists.
However, MacGann said Psst’s system was already addressing many of those very same technical challenges, while also solving the first-mover problem, by matching potential whistleblowers with like-minded colleagues they might not even know about, perhaps a few office cubicles away.
On the so-called demand — journalists’ — side of the leak relationship, Rigaud noted that being open about leak sources remains crucial in establishing trust with your audience. “Its important to be transparent and invite readers to assess what we’re sharing with them,” she said. “A few years ago, when a journalist got a leak from a hacker, they’d often describe it as coming from an ‘anonymous source.’ That’s less and less the case now.”
She added: “The fact checking element is easier with a source like Mark MacGann, who is ready to help you understand and verify the documents. Unfortunately, this is the exception.”
Currently, Psst has some notable limitations. It is only offered in English, and, for now, is limited to disclosures from the tech industry and governmental agencies.
However, its website represents an explanatory masterclass in understanding personal employee concerns, with statements such as: “Remember, this isn’t solely on you. Other people are also coming forward… If their info matches yours in any way, it organically brings a picture into view, and takes the onus off you. You’re no longer alone at your desk,” and “We do a triage of sorts — finding you the support you need on the legal, media and psycho-social side of things.”
Neither does Psst push a “hard-sell” approach for disclosure. Prospective whistleblowers are offered several options: they can be wholly anonymous; can passively deposit information while waiting for a “match” with a similarly concerned anonymous colleague; can get free advice; or connect with a journalist if they choose.
A planned archiving option to allow people to anonymously and securely park pieces of information in a virtual “safe” — and decide what to do later — is not yet operational.
“Of the options available, the majority or people so far have been wanting to speak to a lawyer right away,” Gibson revealed.
Meanwhile, a GIJN test of the safe deposit process reveals that employees are relentlessly reminded to never use a work-provided device to engage with Psst resources, and instead use a personal device with supplied security conditions. Likewise, they are also advised to consider avoiding HR hotlines for their complaints. Concern for every scenario of whistleblower risk defines the service, and potential clients are offered a Signal number to call for urgent support.
“At the moment, the term ‘whistleblower’ has so many negative connotations; you say it, and so many people get scared,” noted Gibson, who previously served as legal director at The Signals Network, another whistleblower protection group. “We’ve kind of asked these individuals to out themselves on a sacrificial altar for all of us, in order to tell us information we should already know about the harm a company or government is doing. The trend we’re seeing is that people have fewer and fewer big pieces of the puzzle.”
“Unfortunately, I think the lesson the tech industry learned from the Frances Haugen [Facebook whistleblower] case was not, ‘Maybe we need to do better,’ but rather ‘We need to lock down our information better and surveil our employees better,’” she added. “We saw people coming for help who had important information, but not enough to risk everything.”
Gibson believes the new environment described by MacGann and Rigaud requires more collective disclosures, rather than individual heroism, to achieve both safety and accountability.
She said the Psst safe was loosely modelled on the encrypted Callisto Vault tool within Project Callisto, which was designed to collectivize reporting of sexual assaults by college students by matching unique identifiers of serial perpetrators.
“What we’re hoping is that, one, collectivizing will make people safer, and two, it should increase the number of people who speak up,” she explained “We decided: let’s put a lawyer in every room with a whistleblower, and help them figure out how to move forward. Raising red flags should not have to be a heroic act.”
Although she cannot disclose details, Gibson said the matching system has already found at least one employee with similar concerns and information as an anonymous colleague — but that Psst needs to raise awareness about this feature.
“My hope is that by the end of year two, we’d have a couple of hundred requests coming in, and more people using the matching function in the safe,” she said.
Notably, the vast majority of new clients to the service wish to remain anonymous.
Said MacGann: “My advice [to potential whistleblowers] is to preserve your anonymity. Once you’re a named whistleblower, that completely transforms your life. But if we can get this technology to a place where it’s a completely discreet app, and it’s not wasting the journalist’s time or the lawyer’s time, that’s what we all aspire to.”
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-11-11 16:00:53
Newspapers started putting up paywalls on their websites in the mid-2010s, offering access to all or some of their content through paid subscriptions to make money after years of decline in advertising revenue and circulation, as media and eyeballs shifted to consuming news online.
But a campaign by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is calling on news outlets to drop their paywalls for reporting based on FOIA requests or public records. This strategy, it argues, might be an effective way to respond to increasing attacks on the press, funding cuts, and opacity of government action, particularly in the US. By providing access for as many readers as possible, they can keep more people informed about the actions of the federal government and attempt to hold it accountable.
“They’re public records for a reason. They don’t belong behind a paywall,” said Caitlyn Vogus, senior advisor at FPF. “If citizens can’t get access to facts and truth, democracy doesn’t stand a chance.”
Moderating a FPF webinar titled Unpaywalled: The Case for Making Public Records-Based Reporting Free, Vogus added: “Now more than ever, free access to reporting based on government records isn’t just important, it’s essential… But paywalls often stop people from accessing that reporting, and the vast majority read the misinformation or propaganda instead.”
While there is a press freedom and public interest argument for making this kind of reporting more widely available, newsroom leaders from the tech-focused outlets WIRED and 404 Media told webinar attendees that they had discovered other benefits to this tactic as well — such as greater trust, “instant” new subscribers, and increased traffic.
“When we announced it… that bet paid off above and beyond what I could have possibly imagined,” said Kate Drummond, the global editorial director of WIRED.
Vogus and Drummond were joined by Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Joseph Cox, an award-winning investigative journalist and one of the founders of the tech journalism outlet 404 Media.
Convincing news outlets to make their reporting free might not be easy, Vogus acknowledged. “Reporters need to get paid, and newsrooms need to survive,” she said. “But the news isn’t just a business. It’s enshrined in the First Amendment and serves a vital role in our democracy, or what’s left of it,” she added.
“We know FOIA-based reporting is costly. It’s time-consuming. But we also know for a fact that transparency builds trust and trust builds readership and readership leads to more traffic and subscriptions. When WIRED did it, they instantly got a wave of new subscribers,” she added.
In March 2025, WIRED announced that it would drop its paywall for articles driven by public records. Since 404 Media was founded in 2023, it too has made articles based primarily on public records requests freely available to all readers.
Cox and Drummond explain they have similar reasons for doing this — a focus on the public interest and the importance of cutting through misinformation.
Cox was for many years a reporter at Motherboard, VICE magazine’s technology vertical, where he estimates that around 30% of his investigations were underpinned by public records and FOIA requests. “VICE was a public website, based on an advertising model,” Cox explained. “I just got very used to the idea — and saw the benefit of — publishing public records, linking to them, and for readers and potentially, sources, being able to access them.”
When launching 404 Media, the team wanted to continue that tradition of openness, even though the site, to remain sustainable, has both a free tier that requires email registration and a paid tier for full access. “There’s just something about being able to have a government document that you know is real, you got it from the government through a FOIA request or a lawsuit, and then you can show that to readers… we didn’t want to get in the way of that,” Cox said.
In WIRED’s case, Katie Drummond explained that its decision to drop the paywall was sparked by their reporting on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Elon Musk-led government force that made huge cuts to US federal agencies and funding, including effectively shuttering USAID. (DOGE cuts targeted government departments that handle FOIA requests, and the department has also denied requests to hand over its own documents under FOIA.)
That decision came against a backdrop of more and more misinformation, inaccurate journalism, and propaganda reaching the eyes and ears of readers, she explained. “We need to run a sustainable business too; WIRED relies on subscriptions to fund our journalism and support our newsroom. But we felt like this was one thing we could do as a show of good faith.”
Drummond added: “So it felt like for us a no-brainer, that within the constraints of the business that we need to run this, there was something we could do to make sure that as many people as possible were were exposed to this information, and were gaining an increased understanding of what was happening inside the federal government during the DOGE era, and then, of course, in perpetuity after that.”
The question for newsrooms considering following suit is whether they can remove their paywall for this type of reporting and still make money that supports the outlet overall? Cox and Drummond said that if anything, this initiative gave them a financial and subscriber boost.
Drummond noted that not everything WIRED published is based on public records, and that they still produce a great deal of journalism that sits behind a paywall.
“We made a calculated bet that our audience would show up for us when we did this,” Drummond recalled. “There was an outpouring of goodwill and good faith on social media… We saw a huge increase in subscribers on the day that we made that announcement, and then in the days following we got hundreds of emails from people thanking us for doing it and letting us know that they had subscribed because we had done that.”
While Drummond noted that “results are not guaranteed” and these findings are limited, she said the move has been, “additive to the business rather than anything taken away, from a financial point of view.”
Good faith was also a factor for 404 Media’s experience, said Cox. At the top of their site’s articles based on public records reporting, there is a box explaining that it’s free and asking readers to subscribe or donate if they want to support more of this kind of accountability reporting.
“This can actually bring in subscribers, even though it’s not required,” he said. “The idea of good faith comes up a lot, especially at 404 Media, where, for example, we also took a bunch of our coverage of ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], all about the technology they use, and we translated that into Spanish and published it without a paywall.”
“We want people to access this information and it does pay off, I think, journalistically, ethically, and business-wise as well in the end,” Cox added.
He also noted that 404 Media, where appropriate and safe, links to the public records in their articles. For Cox and his team, the ethical obligation to make those kinds of documents more available to readers outweighs any concerns about giving away materials that competing sites might use in their reporting. The speakers noted another argument for making FOIA-reporting unpaywalled: the process of gaining access is still more onerous than it should be — and it has not become any easier.
Harper explained that there is also a larger, civic responsibility that compels the press to provide free access to FOIA-based public documents for everyone. “We can’t fully engage in the democratic process or with the government if we don’t know what that’s doing,” she said. “And so curtailed access to reliable information limits our ability to have policy debates about immigration, health care, climate change, you name it.”
Watch the full Freedom of the Press Foundation webinar below:
Alexa van Sickle is a journalist and editor with experience across digital and print journalism, publishing, and international think tanks and nonprofits. Before joining GIJN, she was senior editor and podcast producer for the award-winning foreign correspondence and travel magazine, Roads & Kingdoms.
2025-11-10 16:00:12
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia, GIJN is publishing a series of short interviews with a globally representative sample of conference speakers. These are among the more than 300 leading journalists and editors who will be sharing practical investigative tools and insights at the event.
Lina Ejeilat is the co-founder and executive editor of 7iber, an award-winning online magazine based in Amman, Jordan. Launched in 2007 as a blog and citizen-media platform, 7iber evolved into a professional magazine by 2012, with a dedicated team of journalists, editors, and multimedia producers publishing hard-hitting investigations and critical analysis on underreported issues in Jordan and the Arab region. Formerly a reporter for Thomson Reuters in Amman,
Ejeilat now also teaches reporting and data journalism at the Jordan Media Institute, and leads training workshops for investigative journalists across the region. In 2023, she won WAN-IFRA’s Women in News Editorial Leadership Award for the Arab region.
Ejeilat will speak on the panel Global Health Under Siege: Exposing Corporate Lobbying Tactics at GIJC25, which will reveal new strategies by multinational corporations to undermine public health regulations, and share investigative and collaboration techniques to expose them.
GIJN: Of all the investigations you or your team have worked on, which has been your favorite, and why?
Lina Ejeilat: I have many favorites, but there’s one that stands out the most because of the unexpected impact that it had. In 2017, our colleague Shaker Jarrar uncovered that three areas inside Jordan, most of which was very fertile agricultural land, were under Israeli control because of a clause in the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Accords of 1994 that granted Israel “special rights” in these lands — practically leasing them for 25 years, subject to automatic renewal and completely undermining Jordanian sovereignty over them. The details of the treaty were not accessible to the public, nor were the details of the land being under Israeli control, so he had to find sources inside parliament (which ratified the accords in 1994) to get access to the treaty and its annexes, and inside the Department of Lands and Survey, so we could visually recreate exact maps of these areas. He also collaborated with Palestinian researchers who had access to Hebrew-language archives and documents. The investigation was picked up by local and regional media, and sparked widespread public reactions. It inspired a grassroots campaign over the course of a year that resulted in Jordan officially announcing that it will not renew this lease and would regain control of these lands. It’s very rare for journalism in Jordan to have this kind of impact on politics.
GIJN: What are the biggest challenges for investigative reporting in your country?
LE: The biggest challenge is undoubtedly the extremely restrictive political environment and shrinking civic space. Over the past 10 years, we have seen growing restrictions on media, freedom of expression, and all forms of public political engagement. There’s very little access to information or open public records. And Jordan’s cybercrimes law has made it very easy for public officials to sue journalists for defamation and libel.
GIJN: What reporting tools, databases, or techniques have you found surprisingly useful in your investigations?
LE: In the absence of open public records or accessible data, we have learned to mine and manually build datasets. For example, in an investigation we did on the parliamentary election results in Amman’s third district, we knew that the Independent Electoral Commission — the official body responsible for the elections — wasn’t going to publish the detailed ballot count. So we had a team of six reporters go to every polling station in the district at the time ballots were counted and take a photo of the results sheet. Then we manually entered this data into a spreadsheet. This allowed us to do an extensive data analysis and to produce a very rich and nuanced story that would have been impossible otherwise.
GIJN: What’s the best advice you’ve received from a peer or journalism conference — and/ or what words of advice would you give an aspiring investigative journalist?
LE: At the very first GIJC that I attended, back in Johannesburg in 2017, I attended a fantastic session by Martha Mendoza, titled “What Washington Is Doing in Your Country.” This year when we worked on a story about the thousands of young Jordanian men who were making a long and dangerous journey to immigrate to the US through the Mexican border, we went back to the data sources she shared, and we were able to prove that there had been a spike in the number of Jordanians seeking asylum in the US in 2024 and 2025.
Another piece of advice that I recently heard from a veteran journalist, and that resonated very much with me, was this: one of the most important skills you need to cultivate is how to shorten the distance between an idea and the execution of this idea. I think this is very important, especially for those of us who work on investigative stories and “slow” journalism, because, while it’s very important to give the story the time and space it needs so it can be thoroughly reported and narrated, it’s also important to preserve a sense of timeliness and to resist the urge to keep working on one story indefinitely.
GIJN: What topic blindspots or undercovered areas do you see in your region? And which of these are ripe for new investigation?
LE: There is no shortage of underreported areas in our region, and one thing I’ve learned throughout my work at 7iber is that oftentimes you will find great ideas for investigative stories in everyday issues. In recent years, we have expanded our coverage of health and environmental issues. Health is one great example of an area that sits at the intersection of public policy, socio-economic justice, corporate accountability, sustainability, and climate change. By paying closer attention to everyday struggles of people around us, we’re able to identify important stories to investigate.
GIJN: Can you share a notable mistake you’ve made in an investigation, or a regret, and share what lessons you took away?
Some years ago I worked on an investigation about labor violations faced by female teachers in private schools. The original story was meant to be about the gender pay gap in private schools, and an independent national commission had recently published a study about it, stating that the pay gap between men and women in private schools was 42%. The published study did not include the raw data, and at some point in the reporting process it occurred to me to request it. I was surprised to find serious flaws in the conclusions, first because they were comparing different types of workers in private schools, not just teachers, and without ensuring that they were comparing salaries of people with the same qualifications doing the same type of work. But more importantly, the number of the men in the sample was way too small, and the more stark finding was that a significant number of women surveyed were getting paid salaries well below the legal minimum wage. I realized that this is where the real story was, and pursued it.
This taught me that you should always ask for the raw data, and that averages can be very deceptive and hide important stories underneath. But my regret is that even though our main angle was 27% of female teachers were getting paid below minimum wage, we still included a comparison with men in the data visualizations and we shouldn’t have. Just because it was in the commission’s study doesn’t mean we needed to include it.
GIJN: Can you share an example of the kind of technique or insight you plan to highlight for GIJC25 attendees — or otherwise what you yourself are looking forward to in Malaysia, whether in terms of networking or learning about an emerging reporting challenge or approach?
LE: GIJC is always a place of great inspiration, and I often come back with new ideas for stories and new techniques and tools we can use. At the last GIJC, for example, I was deeply inspired by a panel on investigating health-related issues, and ended up reaching out to one of the speakers and collaborating with her in our health journalism fellowship program. I’m looking forward to new inspiration this year. I’m also planning to seek out insights and advice from other media outlets on how they are dealing with challenges related to AI bots and changing reader-behaviors, since it’s something we have been grappling with for some months now.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
