Investigative tools and tutorials

Investigative tutorials and techniques

The Center for Investigative Journalism has produced a number of handbooks.

This handbook provides an overview of advanced online search for investigative journalism. It provides guidance on newsgathering, contributor – finding, advanced search theory and methods and sources for establishing the veracity of digital content.

This handbook is for all journalists who want to master the art of interrogating and questioning numbers competently. Being able to work with figures and investigate numbers is not a new form of journalism but a skill that all journalists can acquire.

Data driven journalism is dedicated to providing anyone interested in getting started with data driven journalism with a collection of learning resources, including relevant events, tools, tutorials, interviews and case studies. The data journalism community and mailing list are dedicated to strengthening the community of journalists, designers, data providers and others, and encouraging collaboration and exchange of expertise.

This computational journalism course at the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong covers, in great detail, some of the most advanced techniques used by journalists to understand digital information, and communicate it to users.

Tools for investigation and analysis

ScraperWiki is an online tool for gathering, cleaning and analysing data.

DocumentCloud is a free online service that provides a set of tools designed to help journalists analyse and share source documents, and make it simple to publish those documents to the web.

Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data, by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or Freedom of Information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read.