Category: Trainers and panelists

Sharbil Nammour is a seasoned security and risk management expert, with deep expertise in both physical and digital threat mitigation. From Kabul to Kyiv, he develops and leads comprehensive risk solutions for international news organisations and journalists: training, crisis response, and hostile environment operations.

A Peabody Award recipient, Emmy nominee, and New York Bar attorney, his work integrates proactive digital threat modelling, physical security and safety into pragmatic solutions that safeguard reporters. Sharbil holds dual common/civil law degrees, alongside advanced certifications in pre-hospital trauma care and mental health first aid.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Null Hypothesis: Pragmatic Digital Security for Journalists

When the press is targeted, surveillance cheap, and devices compromise routine, assuming you’re secure – or worse, ignoring the threats – exacerbates the risks.

This session begins from the opposite premise: You are a journalist = you are already compromised — now what?

This pragmatic session is tailored for journalists working in or covering the Balkans.

The political reality, authority tactics and state-level surveillance across borders create a challenging digital environment.

Rather than offering false reassurances, or one-size-fits-all tools, we’ll walk through threat-informed behaviours and workflows grounded in the assumption that your devices, data, or communications may already be exposed.

We’ll explore the practical overlap between digital and physical security – how cross referenced data can reveal or predict your movements, how compromised contacts increase in-field risk, and how poor digital hygiene can lead to source exposure, detention, and mental exhaustion.

Participants will leave with an actionable framework to assess their personal exposure, prioritize what’s worth protecting, build out a stress management support response, and adopt enabling strategies that help return online agency to the journalist.

Protest Ready: Security, First Aid & Digital Defense

This focused session equips journalists with practical tools to stay safe while covering protests and civil unrest.

We’ll explore the specific threats reporters face from both crowds and authorities, and how to reduce risks through situational awareness, de-escalation and smart positioning. The session will also include a “mini-med” segment on treating the most common protest-related injuries in the field. We’ll connect the physical with the digital– covering how to protect yourself from surveillance, safeguard your devices, and minimize data exposure during fast-moving protests.

Drawing on real-world examples and recent protest coverage, this training blends operational know-how with actionable digital security steps so you can protect yourself, your colleagues and your sources.

Reade Levinson is a visual investigations reporter for Reuters, based in London. She was part of a team that was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for a series that revealed secrets behind the Nigerian military’s long campaign to crush the nation’s Islamist insurgency. She has also written about the weapons flow into Sudan, a massacre in Burkina Faso, stolen Ukrainian grain, the wealth of Burmese generals and the international trade in human body parts. Previously, she reported on U.S. immigration and policing from New York.

Her work with her Reuters colleagues has received several awards, including a Selden Ring Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, a Scripps Howard Award and an Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, among others.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Masterclass in Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Part 1

Whether you’re a complete beginner, or looking to strengthen your investigative skills, these two sessions are designed to teach essential OSINT tools and techniques to advance your research and reporting. In the first session, you will learn advanced search techniques, geolocation and image analysis, and how to leverage different satellite imagery providers to track and investigate events.

Masterclass in Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Part 2

On the second day, we’ll go over plane and ship tracking, identifying disinformation, and dive deeper into more advanced satellite imagery analysis and geolocation. The goal is that by the end of both sessions, you will feel comfortable using open-source skills regularly in your research and reporting to verify information and deepen your investigations.

Jonathan Soma is Knight Chair in Data Journalism at Columbia University, where he is director of both the Data Journalism MS and the summer intensive Lede Program. He lectures at Columbia on everything from basic Python and data analysis to interactive visualisation and machine learning. As an educator, programmer, and designer, he focuses on making unapproachable concepts accessible. He has worked with ProPublica, The New York Times, and others.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Data journalism: Gain a foundational understanding of the tools and processes of data journalism

Data journalism is a wide field, covering everything from visualization to machine learning and AI. In this session, we will examine a variety of data sources and tools that allow journalists to analyse and visualize data in all its forms, including spreadsheets, maps, and text documents. Since each data-driven story presents its own challenges and demands specific approaches, we’ll also examine how to skill up successfully once you’ve left the programme.

Advanced Data Journalism (Session 1): Data analysis and cleaning with AI and Python

Python is the ideal tool for data analysis when you’ve outgrown Excel and Google Sheets. In this workshop, we will explore how Python –with the helpful suggestions of an AI mentor – can transform your data journalism workflow.

We’ll learn to create reproducible, easy-to-understand “notebooks” that are powerful, yet simple to share and review. You’ll discover how to open various data formats – CSV files, Excel spreadsheets and web-scraped data – and master techniques to clean and convert them into analyzable formats.

By the end of this session, you’ll have the skills to handle larger datasets, conduct more complex analyses, and uncover stories that might otherwise remain hidden in the data. This workshop will empower you to take your data journalism to the next level, opening up new possibilities for insightful reporting.

Advanced Data Journalism (Session 2): An introduction to scraping with Python

Much of the world’s most interesting information hides in plain sight on websites, inaccessible to simple downloads. Web scraping offers a powerful solution, automatically extracting this data and transforming it into structured, usable datasets.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to harness web scraping for journalism, covering techniques like:

– Pulling data tables directly into Python

– Extracting news articles and search results

– Downloading hundreds of PDFs

– Automatically clicking “next page” dozens of times

We’ll also explore advanced scenarios, such as collecting social media posts and setting up automated scrapers for regular data updates – daily, weekly, even hourly.

By the end of this session, you’ll have the skills to significantly enhance the reach of your investigations.

AI: Do’s and Don’ts with Jonathan Soma: How to leverage AI responsibly in a modern, data-driven investigation

While every corner of the newsroom is buzzing with the possibilities of AI, it holds special potential for investigative journalists. We’ll look at:

– Automatically sorting and categorizing documents

– Extracting key information from texts

– Transcribing interviews privately and accurately

– Leveraging it to learn new skills

But for every benefit of AI, there’s always a potential pitfall. To ensure we are reporting responsibly, we’ll also examine how these tools are created and how they work, which will help us know when to set them aside in favour of traditional journalism and manual review.

Milica is an award-winning, investigative journalist from Belgrade. She has worked for BIRN since 2019 and, besides journalism, works on fact-checking, data analysis and digital security trainings for journalists.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Fact checking

The session will present participants with the basics of the fact-checking process and why is it important for their work.

Participants will be shown some of the most important parts of the fact-checking process. They will learn constitutes proof in the story and why, what the main challenges and pitfalls that can occur during the process are, how to prepare a story for a fact-checking – and why all of this matters and how it can impact their work.

Emma Thomasson is a British journalist, media adviser and trainer based in Germany. She specialises in leadership, communication, strategy and workplace wellbeing. Previously she worked at Reuters as a correspondent and bureau chief in multiple countries and also ran a global mentoring programme and a peer network. She works as a consultant and facilitator for several organisations, including The Self Investigation, helping to transform working environments and support teams.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Stress, burnout and other mental health hazards

We will learn how stress works and how chronic stress can lead to burnout, as well as how we can protect ourselves and our colleagues so that we can make journalists more resilient to a range of challenges, including online harassment.

We will discuss why journalists are particularly at risk of burnout and learn about other risks, such as vicarious trauma and moral injury. The session will include a mixture of theory and interaction, providing a safe space for an open discussion that will give participants the chance to share experiences and tips and explore ways to promote resilience and support each other.

Improving team communication, managing conflict

We will learn about common communication pitfalls and different styles of conflict management and share experiences of how to improve team dynamics.

This will be a very interactive session, where you will identify your preferred style of conflict resolution and explore what you can do to improve challenging relationships and cultivate assertiveness, while promoting team collaboration.

Alexenia Dimitrova is an award-winning journalist, OSINT expert and lecturer in journalism. She is a Member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and, together with the ICIJ team, a holder of a shared Pulitzer award (2017) for their work on The Panama Papers global investigation.

Dimitrova is the author of five non-fiction books (2005-2019) and the Guide for Investigative Journalists in Their Work with Whistle-blowers in SEE (2023). She is a co-author of the Manual for Investigative Reporting: Practical tips for a good investigation (2007) and two documentary films (2018-2019). She is also a founding member of the South East Europe Coalition on Whistle-blower Protection (2015) and a certified tutor in journalism by the BBC and SEENPM.

She has been training students and midcareer journalists around the world since 2003.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

101 Cross-Border Sources for Your Climate Investigation: How to Research Climate in the Digital Age

Sharing practical knowledge and tools on using global open records to research climate, Alexenia Dimitrova will present a large set of useful open-source web-based free-of-charge international climate public registers, platforms and databases, which can be used for cross-border climate investigations and reporting, if local or national authorities restrict climate information.

101 Open and Hidden Places to Investigate Your Country

This session will present a large set of useful international public registers, databases and archives, equipping the participants with skills to obtain and track information about their countries despite local authorities’ or entities’ restrictions.

Based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Azem reports on daily developments for BIRN’s Balkan Insight and Balkan Transitional Justice programme. He covers politics, rule of law and human rights, transitional justice, corruption and organised crime, producing in-depth analyses, investigations and features combining elements of traditional and data journalism and multimedia storytelling.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2025 Sessions

Geolocation and Visual Investigation

In this session, participants will explore how to harness open-source techniques and visual clues to uncover, verify and analyse digital evidence found online.

Through hands-on examples, the training will show how even the most ordinary elements in a photo or video can reveal the exact location of an event.

Attendees will learn how to cross-reference visuals with publicly available satellite imagery, maps, and metadata, and use investigative tools like Google Earth, Street View and reverse image search to build solid geolocation findings.

Based in New York as the investigative projects editor at Reuters, Blake Morrison has overseen and edited three projects that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: The Child Exchange, an investigation of America’s underground market for adopted children; The Echo Chamber, a special report that revealed how a handful of lawyers came to have an outsized influence in the U.S. Supreme Court; and Cheat Sheet, an investigation of how standardised tests used by universities  to determine whom to accept have been compromised by rampant and systematic cheating and other security failures. Projects he has overseen have also resulted in decades of jail time for individuals whose wrongdoing the Reuters investigations exposed. Prior to joining Reuters, Blake served as the investigations editor, deputy enterprise editor and investigative reporter at USA TODAY. His investigation of the impact of industrial pollution on schoolchildren spurred the U.S. government to launch a $2.25 million project to examine the air outside more than 60 schools across the nation. The reporting earned honours including the Grantham Prize, a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, the Fourth Estate Award, the America’s Promise Journalism Award, the Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize, the John B. Oakes Award and the Philip Meyer Journalism Award. Before joining USA TODAY, Blake spent six years as a beat reporter, investigative reporter and editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2024 Sessions

Let’s investigate: Sparking Curiosity and Creativity in Investigative Journalism:

This interactive presentation is designed to reignite our curiosity and creativity in the field of investigative journalism.

Generating Story Ideas, How to Investigate While Covering a Beat:

We will focus on how to generate compelling story ideas and conduct in-depth investigative work while covering a beat.

The Art of the Interview. Techniques, Strategies and Finding Your Own Style

This session will explore the techniques and strategies essential for conducting effective interviews. From developing a personal interviewing style to navigating difficult conversations.

Mastering the Pitch. Ways to Focus Your Story Ideas, Avoid Over-Promising and Imagine What Success Looks Like

Learning how to refine and focus your story ideas to create pitches that resonate with editors and audiences alike.

Refining Your Pitches: Applying Lessons from This Week:

Building on lessons learned throughout the week, this final session will guide participants in crafting a compelling pitch that captures the essence of the story.

AX Mina is part-time Program Director at The Self-Investigation. She is also a strategic consultant and leadership coach who’s supported news leaders and managers through programs with LION Publishers, The OpEd Project and the American Press Institute. She was a founding board member of the News Product Alliance and is a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications. She is a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher and lifelong mindfulness practitioner.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2024 Sessions

How to Avoid Digital Overwhelm: Mental Health Workshop

This course will teach you how to manage the digital distractions that drain your focus and impact your wellbeing, offering practical tips for reducing stress, recognising the effects of multitasking, and protecting your sleep for better rest.

Stress Management to Become a Better Journalist: Mental Health Workshop

In this course, you’ll learn to identify stress signals and risk factors for burnout, manage your stress levels while maintaining your inner balance, and practice taking mindful pauses during a busy workday to support your mental health.

Optional Relaxing Session: Gentle Yoga and Mindfulness

This optional relaxing session will offer participants a soothing blend of gentle yoga and mindfulness practices designed to foster relaxation and mental clarity.

Ali Fegan is an investigative reporter at SVT. Since 2008 Fegan has worked mainly as a reporter but also as a producer, host and researcher at Scandinavia’s largest investigative TV-show “Uppdrag granskning/Mission investigate’’. For the last couple of years he has focused on and participated in various international collaborations with media such as The Guardian, Bellingcat, Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung, an investigation of the UN, the Catholic Church, state corruption and human trafficking. In 2003 the hard-hitting investigation “Putin’s Shadow War’’ on Russian intelligence operations in the Nordic countries was published by the Nordic public service companies, including SVT.  Ali Fegan and his colleague Maria Georgieva took part as reporters. He has been nominated and won several national and international prizes such as Emmy 2019, IRE 2009 and 2019, Dig Awards 2016 and Prix Europa 2019.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2024 Sessions

Mission Investigate at Scandinavian Public Broadcasters

Ali Fegan and Maria Georgieva will join forces to deepen the understanding of how digging in databases combined with classic fieldwork can create ground-breaking and impactful investigative journalism.

Putin’s Shadow War: How Did We Do It

Ali Fegan and Maria Gerogieva will demonstrate how Nordic public service broadcasting effectively employs data and classic fieldwork by showcasing their Case study.