EIJC18 & Dataharvest

The Dutch police has invested heavily in social media. A few thousand Twitter accounts, several Snapchat-cops and even 2 police vloggers. They want to be transparent about their daily work and difficult choices, but forget one thing: the privacy of suspects and victims. During a one-hour workshop we teach you how to spot and trace privacy concerns in social media messages of the police or other authorities. Some specific skills, that you can pick up during this workshop, are setting up your own database, geolocate the addresses of suspects and victims, and how to consider those privacy issues during your storytelling.

In Europe, more and more journalistic nonprofit projects and new models are emerging. The spectrum ranges from local news cooperatives to national and multinational research newsrooms. Can we learn from each other? Can we support each other? What are shared and what are competing interests? Is networking the thing? How can larger and older initiatives share knowledge with start-ups? The purpose of this round table is to gather and exchange experiences and to see whether and how we can network on entrepreneurial challenges.

The Wanna Cry virus was a wake-up call: In May 2017 the cyber-attack with the blackmailing virus affected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 100 countries. Hospitals, public administrations, businesses, even secret services were affected - how was this possible? The answer was proprietary software prone to attacks, provided by one company. The research by Harald Schumann and the Investigate Europe team indicates that EU public tender legislation is bypassed, public authorities are vulnerable to cyber-attacks and technical development is slowed down. The documentary has been aired on German tv ARD and is presented in an English language version. Harald Schumann of Investigate Europe will be present and introduce the film. http://www.daserste.de/information/reportage-dokumentation

FOI: Public relations companies have a large impact on media, public debate and lobbying efforts in all European countries. Their activities are often kept secret, and their influence on our democracy is difficult to explore. In this session, journalists show you how to use FOIA requests and datamining to get documents and data, that show how the public relations industry is working to influence journalists, politicians and people. This talk will also cover the use of machine learning and text mining in big data analysis of millions of news articles. The media survey company Retriever researches the impact of PR in the Norwegian news media. They have used machine learning to make it possible to follow the news story from its source and how it spreads. The same network model has been used to measure the degree of similarity between newspapers in Norway.

FOI: Being well prepared before filing your freedom of information request includes strategic planning on what to request when and where. Meet two experienced journalists both specialising in freedom of information requests and legislation including strategic requests across borders in Europe.

Digital Security: How do I prevent authorities from searching my equipment when crossing borders, and should I use the hotel wifi? This workshop covers the essential digital security considerations you need as a travelling journalist or photographer. Participants learn how to make a security plan before, during and after travelling.

Scientists and medical doctors are often sponsored by industry, in some cases leading to bias. This sponsoring is hardly transparent for journalists and citizens alike. Here we present and discuss two approaches to address that problem.

Pharmaceutical companies are regularly sponsoring medical doctors, and thereby potentially influencing their decisions. As part of a self-regulatory initiative, the European pharmaceutical companies are now publishing the donations they have given medical doctors. These publications are voluntary and incomplete. Still, by mining them, important insights into the influencing of doctors by pharmaceutical industry can be gained.

Another approach uses scientific papers as data source. In many journals, scientists are required to state any industry funding they have received. "Follow the grant" is an ongoing project to build a database of these statements of conflicts of interest and funding. Its aim is to help journalists, experts and citizens to systematically look for who is sponsoring research.

Housing prices are skyrocketing in European cities, journalists are beginning to look into the field. Investigative journalist Hans-Martin Tillack of Stern magazine keeps a critical eye on the implementation of the anti-money-laundering legislation that demands transparency about beneficiary owners - including of property. London based Private Eye has established their 'Selling England and Wales by the pound' database linking land registry data to specific addresses and generates stories. German investigative centre Correctiv has teamed up with Hamburger Abendblatt for a crowd sourcing campaign on who owns the city of Hamburg. Cat McShane is an investigative journalist who has collaborated with social scientists tracking the developments for tenants throughout Europe.