Bespoke Training

As academics who attended this course, we felt that OSINT and Information Security courses are absolutely essential for us, both to learn new skills but also to understand implications of data and data security beyond the standard training that we recieve as researchers. We are committed to keeping up with the training and will build OSINT into our Centre’s events and future training activities.

The courses were delivered in an accessible and engaging way, and we appreciated the way the examples were tailored to our research.

It was a pleasure working with the team at CIJ to deliver their ECOSINT training module to our virtual cohort of Indigenous journalists who are working on investigative environmental journalism projects. The trainer directly responded to questions about their reporting projects, demonstrated clearly how to use a variety of free tools and helped our cohort think creatively about using OSINT tools and techniques in their work. I would recommend this training to other newsrooms and teams, and hope to bring CIJ back in the future for our other programs!

Over the years, ITV News journalists have benefited greatly from several different training courses provided by The Centre of Investigative Journalism. From valuable techniques on how to carry out an investigation with the ‘Story-based Inquiry Method’, to key skills in ‘Finding Stories with Data’, to the latest ingenious tips and tricks in ‘Digital Tools for Investigation’ – our teams have learned an invaluable amount from TCIJ training. We’re very grateful to be able to tap into TCIJ’s extensive network of expertise in so many different fields of journalism.

I learnt so much on Jonathan’s course, from the Excel basics to cleaning and sorting data and to how to send out FOIs more efficiently. All the resources he showed us were incredibly helpful and will be invaluable to finding stories and telling them in the best way possible.

This course gave an excellent and clear insight into how to use Python, tailored to our project ideas.

I thought the training was excellent – engaging, interesting and full of useful information. I enjoyed it a great deal and am already thinking of how to use some aspects in our conversations with stakeholders here in Armenia. So our most sincere thanks to Leila and Jonathan for delivering such good sessions, and to Beth and Tom for dealing with all the organisation and planning.

FFA is proud to partner with the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ). Through engaging and interactive trainings, CIJ has supported FFA’s efforts to build the capacity of CSO partners and journalists to raise awareness on pertinent sustainable finance issues and cross-cutting themes like climate change and the energy transition.

IDI’s team of corporate accountability researchers found CIJ’s training to be extremely valuable. It expanded our investigative tool box in important ways. In particular, the open source intelligence training was cutting edge and accessible. We’ve integrated many of the techniques we learned into our research methodology.

The bespoke Financial Education training course the CIJ put together for us was incredibly useful and practical. It will be invaluable in helping us to investigate companies that profit at the expense of Scotland’s workers and public services.

Our team of journalists have had two training sessions with CIJ – Digital Security and Companies House – and found both extremely useful. We feel it’s important to continually update our skill sets and CIJ offers a wide range of expert tutoring which is invaluable for investigative journalism.

Many thanks to the CIJ for organising a terrific data journalism programme. My colleagues who attended are raving about it. This was a typical, and entirely unprompted, response:

“I’m now looking forward to seeing more data-rich investigations across our titles that deliver more valuable, actionable stories for our professional audiences.”