IJEC is providing the newsroom CU-CitizenAccess, based in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, a space for recent investigative reporting articles while its site is under construction. IJEC has hosted stories from the online newsroom in the past. Recent stories: State data gives early warning of layoffs from larger companies, but lost jobs from small businesses go uncounted Longtime Champaign attorney’s compensation rose $100,000 before retirement; Total compensation for all city staff rose 4.5% Urbana doubled bonuses paid to its workers in 2022; Total compensation for workers rose ..read more

As with previous editions, the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium will be co-organizing the academic track of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. Here is the official call for papers. The Global Investigative Journalism Conference, scheduled for September 19-22, 2023 in Gothenberg, Sweden, will again feature an academic research track. Journalism professors and researchers worldwide are invited to submit research paper abstracts highlighting trends, challenges, teaching methodologies, new developments and best practices in investigative and data journalism. The conferenc ..read more

Headshot of Colleen King by Isabella Pennebaker, Photography Intern. After a successful run as the executive producer for MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, Colleen King decided to shift her career focus from broadcast TV news to education, pursuing her master’s in journalism and mass communication. Her new path has led her to become the inaugural director of the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media and a clinical assistant professor of journalism.  King, who joined the College of Media in February, looks forward to providing s ..read more

The Northeastern University School of Journalism and Comm Studies Dept is hiring an investigative/ data-oriented faculty member. The position is open rank, which means anywhere on the tenure-track to tenured spectrum. It is part of a cluster hire with Communication Studies and Design that builds on “recent developments in algorithmic accountability, new newsroom technologies and journalism tools, critical information studies, critical data studies, and universal design.” Information Justice refers to justice-oriented data investigations, data-driven media ecosystems analyses, impactful da ..read more

A historical take on every critical breakthrough from the 1950s until today This article was written for the European Journalism Centre and you can read the full version on their website DataJournalism.com It all started with trying to predict the outcome of a US presidential election. Many practitioners date the beginning of computer-assisted reporting and data journalism to 1952 when the CBS network in the United States tried to use experts with a mainframe computer to predict the outcome of the presidential election. That’s a bit of a stretch, or perhaps it was a false beginning because the ..read more

The College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has posted a listing for the inaugural Director of the Frank Center, which will help students develop as leaders in their professions by connecting them with experts and practitioners. By immersing students in professionals environments through internships and bringing media professionals to the university with speaker series and residencies, the director will help prepare students for their future careers. The Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media Director will also plan collaborations between ..read more

In 2013, three Russian academics and one journalist launched Dissernet, a project aimed at exposing plagiarism in academia. Last week Wednesday (Jan. 17, 2018) they released a report summarizing their findings and exposing the systematic nature of academic fraud in Russia. Dissernet report: The Structure of the Dissertation Industry in Russia “On our server we have 7,500 fake degrees, 500 universities issuing fake degrees, 4,500 fake scholarly papers and 522 journals that published fake papers,” said Dr. Andrej Zayakin, one of Dissernet’s founders. “There are 22,000 persons involved ..read more

The COVID-19 pandemic created a limbo in data gathering that has allowed researchers to highlight ambiguities normally glanced over, according to Shannon Mattern’s “How to Map Nothing” article, which was published in the Places Journal March edition. Mattern, anthropology professor at the New School for Social Research, points to various new visualization and machine-learning tools for “acknowledging and manifesting the gaps” in archivists’ collections. “Only recently have archivists — and theorists and artists of the archive — grappled with ways of acknowledging and manifesting the gaps in t ..read more

The 2021 Global Investigative Journalism Conference, originally scheduled to take place in Sydney, Australia, will instead be held online this November 3-5. Co-hosts the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas will hold the in-person conference in Sydney on October 14-18, 2022. Based on consultations with public health experts, GIJN and JNI found it unlikely that international travel will return to normal this year, or that vaccine distribution will be widespread enough to allow attendees from many countries. This No ..read more

This story was originally published by the Global Investigative Journalism Network. Also check out IJEC’s overview of investigative centers linked to universities. It was a trip to the University of California, Berkeley, that first got the Norwegian journalist Per Christian Magnus thinking. During his visit, in 2009, he learned of the Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, which teaches students muckraking by having them work on, and publish, their own investigations, in association with some of the top media outlets in the U.S. Per Christian Magnus (third ..read more