by Aleksandra Vrbica
The second day of the BIRN Summer School of Investigative Reporting in Ohrid, North Macedonia, started with lead trainer Blake Morrison’s wrapping up of Day 1, followed by a masterclass in open-source intelligence. This masterclass was led by Reade Levinson, visual investigations reporter at Reuters News.
Levinson showed participants how to improve their online search for images and data using different tools to find and verify publicly available information. Through practical exercises, participants learned useful tips and tricks on how to find data that is not easily accessible through Google.
She also explained how to use tools on social media to gain more information for investigations.
“The algorithms are getting better and better. When I did an investigation on the Nigerian army, I used TikTok,” Levinson said.
Participants had an opportunity to learn more about these tools through exercises, which included videos of the “Flamingo” revolution in Albania and the wildfires that broke out in Croatia this summer.
After Levinson’s masterclass, Jonathan Soma, professor of data journalism at Columbia University Journalism School, shared approaches to data analysis using the data tool Pandas and coding with the help of AI.
Together with Soma, participants did several exercises on coding basics in PDF files and learned how to find, analyse and change data in these files, using the Python programming language.
“All you need are patterns that you copy and change,” said Soma.
However, since journalists aren’t programmers, Soma showed participants how AI can make their work much easier, especially when data visualisation is needed.
“What you really want to ask ChatGPT and other AIs is to design the tool, which it will design for you. And for that, Claude is better than ChatGPT,” explained Soma.
In response to the question of why it is important for journalists to know coding basics when AI can do so much, Soma responded:
“Every single concept you know becomes a building block you can glue together. The more blocks, the stronger your foundation.”
The second day ended with Soma’s session on how AI transformed newsrooms, data and document-based investigation.
“Data journalism enabled small newsrooms to do really big investigations,” Soma said.