Lesson 13: International Investigative Reporting: An Introduction
So far this semester, we’ve looked at how what is happening in other countries often has something to do with US policies, whether political or economic. What does this mean for how we can frame and report international stories? What can we do reporting wise without ever leaving the US? Andrew Lehren will join us to lecture on the tools available to journalists working on investigations outside of the US and on how to develop international investigative stories.
Assignments
Reading assignments:
- Review the slides from Andrew’s presentation Mining US Data for International Stories (in shared drive)
- Watch (10min) this BBC investigation: Cameroon atrocity: Finding the soldiers who killed this woman
- Read how BBC revealed its findings via Twitter thread
- Listen to this interview with the Bellingcat folks (minute 1:53-25:05) on POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast
Agenda
- REVIEW OF LESSON 12
- DISCUSSION OF OTHER READINGS
- GUEST LECTURE
Review of Previous Lesson
- Ask students what their main takeaways were from the previous lesson
Discussion of Other Readings
- Today we’re touching on several of the themes we’ve been discussing all semester. We’ve raised a lot of questions:
- how do you do int’l reporting w/the skills you have?
- how do you do int’l reporting while knowing there are many disinformation campaigns out there, esp in int’l stories
- how do you do int’l reporting that doesn’t feel exploitative of our local colleagues who often reduced to the term “fixer”
- WHO HAD HEARD OF BELLINGCAT?
- WHAT IS THEIR SLOGAN?
- Bring truth to a post truth world
More and more media institutions are realizing that where other journalism jobs being cut, there’s funding here; NYT and BBC for example have set up units that operate like Bellingcat