Summer Conference Events

Across Europe, secretive algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of welfare recipients. An international team of journalists led by Lighthouse Reports gained unprecedented access to an AI system designed to predict which welfare recipients were committing fraud.

Patricia Devlin’s investigations into crime and paramilitarism in post-Troubles Northern Ireland have left her with powerful enemies on all sides. At the CIJ she talks about how to investigate in sometimes hostile territory, and how to deal with the abuse and intimidation that follows.

In different ways, the i newspaper's Dean Kirby and Paul Morgan-Bentley from The Times forced the pre-payment meter scandal into the open, their investigations leading to substantial industry change. Both come to Summer Conference to talk about their methods, which in the case of The Times involved undercover video, and the impact of their work.

Private Eye investigative reporter Solomon Hughes recently exposed a loophole that allowed subcontracted "mini-umbrella companies" to avoid paying national insurance for staff of Covid-19 testing centres.

In 2012 a Kenyan called Agnes Wanjiru was murdered by a serving British soldier and her body hidden in a septic tank, a crime which was subsequently covered up. Winner of the 2022 Paul Foot award with her Sunday Times colleague David Collins, Hannah Al-Othman talks about how they worked with sources to bring the story to light, and their dealings with the police and the Ministry of Defence as they worked to investigative and publish it.

This session, led by an expert in leveraging the techniques of data journalism to produce deforestation and climate change investigations, takes attendees through the practice and pitfalls of covering the environment.

Earlier this year the journalist Daniel De Simone published a long-form investigation into the activities of a rogue, abusive MI5 agent, the end result of a months-long tussle between the BBC and the British government which ended with his employer being taken to court.

How do journalists go about investigating misconduct among media celebrities with many fans, and who might work for the same employers? Earlier this year, a joint investigation by reporters at the BBC and The Guardian uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct by the DJ Tim Westwood.

Romanian investigative journalist Emilia Șercan has won a niche reputation for uncovering plagiarism in the putative PhD theses of her country’s leading politicians. At the CIJ she talks about how she found the truth, and how to deal with the backlash; in her case, an organised, state-level campaign of intimidation and harassment.

Before the start of the war, Ukraine had a thriving investigative journalism scene, both on the national and local level. How did the war change it? What do Ukrainian journalists investigate now, especially when many were forced out of the country by the war?