Our J-Lab guest this episode is Hannah Barnes, investigations producer for the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Hannah’s reports with science correspondent Deborah Cohen and her subsequent book about the rise and fall of the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) for children at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London are the result of intensive reporting, carried out across several years and based on more than 100 hours of interviews with Gids’ clinicians, former patients, and other experts. Gids was established to provide talking therapies to young people who were questi ..read more

Around 4,300 cases a week are heard in the family courts in England and Wales and the number of applications for children to be taken into council care has is around 13,000 each year. And yet remarkably little is known by most people about what goes on in family courts. In this latest episode, our guest is Louise Tickle, a multi-award winning freelance journalist who has reported extensively on domestic abuse, child protection and the family courts - and how the lack of scrutiny and transparency in these courts means many women and families are being tragically failed by the jus ..read more

New laws banning independent coverage of the invasion of Ukraine have forced many news outlets to leave Russia. Meduza claims to be Russia’s biggest independent media outlet even though its editors have been based, in exile, in neighbouring Latvia for most of the last 10 years. In recent years Meduza’s reporting has ranged from exposing the presence of Russian mercenaries in Venezuela to uncovering the machinations of the Kremin’s propaganda apparatus. Now it finds itself reporting the war in Ukraine, but just last week it had to evacuate more than 20 of its reporters from Russia In this episo ..read more

Our guest this time is Joshi Herrmann, who began the pandemic intending to write a book in the Czech Republic… but instead launched a venture in Manchester that shows there might after all be a viable future for good quality, local news reporting. In just 18 months, Joshi Herrmann has signed up 15,000 subscribers to The Mill, his weekly email newsletter. And thanks to funding from Substack, he has launched two more titles: The Tribune in Sheffield and The Post in Liverpool. In this episode, you'll hear Joshi explain the business model behind The Mill, describe how its journalism differs from t ..read more

In this episode, our guest is a journalist who has had three features shortlisted for this year’s British Journalism Awards – in one, she meets women who clear landmines in Lebanon, in another she talks to female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban, while in the third she reports on the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the controversial Napier Barracks With this kind of portfolio, you might expect Jessie Williams to be an experienced, veteran hack – but she is actually a young, freelance foreign reporter in the early stages of her career. Her features have been published in ..read more

Eliot Higgins is founder of online investigative collective Bellingcat which, over the last 10 years, has used open source investigation techniques to prove that Syria’s regime used chemical weapons against its citizens, find evidence of Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, and unmask the “kill teams” who poisoned Russian defector Sergei Skripal and opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In this episode, Eliot describes how he taught himself open source methods, outlines what makes Bellingcat different to conventional investigative teams and offers advice to early-c ..read more

If you've seen Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, you’ll no doubt have been astounded by the scale of the state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes. And in this episode of J-Lab – a podcast brought to you by the Civic Journalism Lab at Newcastle University – our guest is Nick Harris, one of the two Mail on Sunday investigative journalists who exposed Grigory Radchenkov, head of the Moscow lab who was at the heart of the scheme. But in the last few years, Nick has been reporting stories that show how widespread doping and medicalisation is across many sports in many countries. Just recently he ..read more

Annabel Deas, an investigative journalist who works for BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4, has just won the Orwell Prize for Hope High, a seven-part podcast documenting the year she spent with a community in Huddersfield where a number of children were being exploited by county lines drug dealers. Judges described Hope High as “British public service journalism, impartial and hard hitting, at its best.” In this episode, Annabel explains the background to her reporting, how she won a community’s trust and offers her advice to young or emerging journalists who want to do this kind of investigative wo ..read more

The appetite for showbiz and celebrity news has only increased during the last 12 months and our guest for this episode is Katie Hind, showbiz editor at the Mail on Sunday newspaper. In the last year alone, Katie has broken stories that forced Victoria Beckham to withdraw her application for government furlough money; that blew the whistle on James Norton and other celebrities for posting photos of their Audi cars on Instagram without telling followers they were freebies; and that revealed Rolling Stone Mick Jagger had sex with the actor Rae Dawn when she was just 15. In this episode, Katie ex ..read more

George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert of the Sunday Times Insight team have published the first major book telling the inside story of Britain's battle with coronavirus and exposing failures at the top of government which may have cost thousands of lives. In this episode, George explains the reporting behind the story and discusses the methods used by Insight – perhaps the most successful and certainly the best known investigations team in British newspapers. Insight's long string of successes stretches back to uncovering the Profumo affair, the thalidomide scandal, the discovery of Israel's ..read more