This document provides an overview of cross-border investigative journalism by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). It discusses ICIJ projects like Swiss Leaks and Evicted and Abandoned, which involved collaborations of reporters in many countries investigating issues like tax evasion and failures by the World Bank. The document outlines ICIJ's methods, including finding systemic global stories, collaborating to share findings across borders, and using data and virtual newsrooms to facilitate collaborative reporting. Tips are provided on sources of investigative data and tools for working with documents and scraping web pages.

1. 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

2. 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

3. ICIJ : What we do
● Cross-border investigations on development
issues, tax evasion, environment...
● Collaborative reporting, shared findings,
coordinated publication
● Global data

4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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.

7. ICIJ : The Team
Project
Project
Reporting
Publication
Data Editor
(Spain)
ICIJ deputy
director (DC)
Data analyst
(Costa Rica)
Web app developer
(Costa Rica)
Data
journalist
(France)
Data
checkers
Research editor
(Venezuela)
ICIJ director (DC)
Reporters (DC)
Reporting
Editor (NY) Online
Editor (DC)
Publication

8. Find systemic global stories

9. HSBC data

10. 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.

12. A global story with strong local angles

13. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
Collaboration
Training 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

14. Virtual Newsroom: Forum to share findings

15. Virtual Newsroom: Document Search Platform

16. Virtual Newsroom: Social Network Analysis

17. Data & reporting go together!

18. World Bank

19. http://huff.to/worldbank

20. 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

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

22. http://www.theguardian.
com/technology/2014/ma
y/09/is-the-pdf-hurting-
democracy

25. ...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

26. 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

27. http://www.icij.org/project/world-bank/explore-10-years-world-bank-resettlement-data
Searchable
database
+
Methodology
+
Raw data

28. Investigative data journalism:
where to start?

29. 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)

30. 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!

31. 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

32. Tools to scrape web pages
● import.io
● kimono
● Using Google spreadsheet (tutorial)
● Chrome scraper extension

33. Thank you!
cschilisgallego@icij.org

34. Questions?