CIJ 2024 – a Year in Review
A year is a long time in investigative journalism, even more so when the world hurtles in dark new directions everywhere from the Middle East to Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait. For the CIJ, however, the last twelve months have been one of unprecedented domestic and global expansion.
From the fresh countries and regions being trained under our Open Climate Reporting Initiative, to the sterling work being done to train journalists everywhere in the world under our largely online Source Protection Programme, to the growing reputation of our programme to train some of the best investigative journalists in Latin America, we’re training more journalists and citizens than ever before. And not only that: we’ve been busy researching and developing whole new proprietary CIJ curricula to help make sure that training works, at the right pace, language and tone, for real investigative journalists wherever they are.
Then there’s our regular scheduled and bespoke training throughout the year, most of it still offered to journalists here in the UK. But in tandem with our growing international profile, our year-round training work now attracts many more clients in Europe and beyond.
Add to that the regular work of CIJ Summer Conference and our CIJ Lyra McKee Training and Mentoring programme at home, and a blockbuster new international CIJ Logan Symposium last month which quickly sold out at the Barbican, and we think we’re a small organisation on the move. But good journalists need data, so we thought we’d bring you some statistics to illustrate what we’ve been up to.
CIJ Year In Numbers
We try to reach as many people as possible, in the UK and all around the world. Our online training allowed us to reach far and wide. But when the events do take place in real life, we all know that coffee (and to some extent, tea) – is THE most important aspect of any event. So we make sure there is enough of it.
Number of people trained:
- Scheduled courses: 479
- Bespoke courses: 266
- Source Protection Programme charitable and bespoke: 307
- CIJSummer Conference: 250
- CIJLogan Symposium: 262
- Protecting Sources Training: 121
- CIJGlasgow training: 70
- Open Climate Reporting Initiative : 49
Number of cups of tea and coffee drunk by participants:
- CIJ Logan Symposium: 1560
- CIJ Summer Conference: 1000
- Protecting Sources: 472
- CIJ Glasgow: 140
- Open Climate Reporting Initiative: 100
CIJ Logan Symposium 2024
For the 10th anniversary we returned to the Barbican to deliver the 5th edition of our unique and provocative CIJ Logan Symposium. 262 of you joined us over the two days to hear from our friends at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and our investigative partners Disclose, Reporters United, The Public Source and Declassified UK, as well as a host of reporters, investigators and allies to take a look under the hood of journalism today and some of the external threats facing us and our sources.
Videos from all of the panels are now online; you can watch them over on the CIJ Youtube Playlist.
The Source Protection Programme (SPP)
As ever, we’ve had a busy year providing a veritable smorgasbord of security training for journalists around the world alongside our partners at Freedom of the Press Foundation. This year SPP focused on developing a series of short programmes to meet the needs of busy reporters and organisations with limited availability for longer engagements. We also built a special series of training to support journalists covering the huge number of elections this year, as well as delivered our first sessions for US reporters in collaboration with the Oklahoma Media Center.
But this year our focus was on the Protecting Sources conference we produced in November, in partnership with the A Culture of Safety (ACOS) Alliance and hosted at Bloomberg in London. Due to the success of the event we hope to reproduce it in some form next year – so watch this space. Next year we’ll redouble our efforts to roll out more bespoke charitable programmes for different regions including Latin America and Africa. The programme also has limited availability under our commercial stream to train journalists working for large organisations. If you would like to talk to us about a bespoke programme for your newsroom – get in touch!
Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI)
We closed the second implementing year of the Open Climate Reporting Initiative in March following our collaboration with 10 organisations in 3 regions, namely Brazil & Lusophone Africa, South Asia and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA).
Key highlights of OCRI Year 2 were our ability to nearly double the number trained in Year 1, going up from 225 to 444, and the 66 story projects published through OCRI’s support! We took some time to reflect on our 2-year journey by visualising OCRI’s footprint around the world and detailing what reporting climate change really means. Read here.
We also worked with 12 CIJ trainers in developing the Climate Investigations Course (CIC) (about which more later) which we’ll launch early next year – a brand new 4-module course put together in English, which will become part of our scheduled course offerings online from Q1 2025.
During the course of the year, we also delivered a core, region-contextualised and translated version (where applicable) of the CIC by working with 4 OCRI partners and 19 regional trainers in Anglophone Africa, Francophone Africa, Latin America and South Asia. The full CIC consists of 14 sessions within the 4 modules. We however identified 10 core sessions that were delivered during the in-person story lab workshops in Nigeria, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire and Sri Lanka. We trained 49 journalists from 24 countries across the four regions in 2024. You can read more about how OCRI broke new ground in 2024 here.
Climate Investigations Course
The icing on the cake of this last year’s hard work of research and development work on new courses is the brand new Climate Investigations Course (CIC). For most of the year we’ve been working with a stellar and truly global line up of experts to develop and refine it, building on our wealth of experience bringing skills and tools to environmental and climate journalists across the globe through the OCRI project.
Full details will follow in January 2025, but this new course will bring our expertise in a range of subjects from Data Journalism to Financial Investigation and OSINT to bear on the hard work of digging more deeply into the climate crisis.
CIJ Summer Investigative Journalism Conference 2024
We are pleased to say that the UK general election, which took place on the second day of #CIJSummer Investigative Journalism Conference, didn’t have a major effect on this year’s event! For the second year in a row, we were sold out long before the actual conference.
The 2024 Paul Foot Award winner Tristan Kirk, the Evening Standard‘s Courts Correspondent, was joined by the Paul Foot award nominees The Independent’s Health Correspondent Rebecca Thomas, and investigations reporter for the Financial Times Antonia Cundy.
Our annual Gavin MacFadyen Memorial Lecture Election Integrity: The Indian Electoral Bonds Scam was delivered by courageous Indian journalist Poonam Agarwal. See all 2024 speakers here.
The delegates were also able to choose between many hands-on classes and as always, one of the biggest complaints we had was that there were too many good things to choose from.
#CIJSummer 2025 will take place on 26-27 June at Goldsmiths: mark your calendars.
OCRI Focus Day
The CIJ Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) once again hosted an invitation-only event tagged OCRI Focus Day . It took place one day before the #CIJSummer Conference and brought together over twenty climate and environment journalists from all over the world. Participants and partners from year two of our OCRI Programme were joined by UK journalists specialising in climate issues.
The event discussed cases, tools and collaborations while also emphasising the need for journalists to sharpen their skills in data, digital technology and finance for improved climate reportage.
CIJ Glasgow Training
In September this year, we returned to Glasgow and the National Library of Scotland for our fifth regional conference. Free from the storm disruptions that had plagued last year’s conference, we had our highest turn out yet – around 70 delegates.
Martin Tomkinson spoke about his long decades of experience working as a journalist. Investigate Europe’s Maxence Peigné shared tools to investigate companies. Corporate and open-source intelligence analyst Sarah Cammarata showed techniques for investigating digital footprints, and supply chains investigation expert Tansy Hoskins explained how to track commodity flows.
In the keynote talk Imogen Barrer, Head of Investigations at ITV News, explained how Partygate grew from a small story to gaining national media coverage. After a day of talks, workshops and some lively discussions we rounded off the day with networking drinks.
#CIJLyraMcKee Bursary Scheme
We had another very successful year with our annual CIJ Lyra McKee Investigative Journalism Training and Mentoring Bursary Scheme. Nine trainees from all over the UK and Ireland took part this year.
The trainees were required to attend three training courses in person during the #CIJSummer Conference 2024, as well as take part in further online training and mentoring.
The programme culminated with the participants pitching their stories to three UK working editors. This year Emily Wilson, Head of UK News, ITV News, Basia Cummings, Partner and Editor, Tortoise, and Gareth Davies, Editor, The Bureau Local gave feedback on the trainees’ pitches.
The aim of the bursary is to fund the training and mentoring of aspiring and early-career journalists from poor and underrepresented backgrounds who live in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, thus helping them get into the profession. It has a fantastic success rate and our trainees this year were no exception. Thus far our graduates had their stories published, or secured jobs in a number of UK and international media outlets: BBC Scotland, Belfast Telegraph, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, ITV Belfast, The Northern Echo, and Tortoise Media to name but a few. We’re terribly proud of all of them!
CIJ Bespoke Training: Online and In-person
We continued working with newsrooms and research organisations delivering tailored training to address specific needs within their teams. There was strong demand for bespoke versions of our Financial Investigations course, which we were able to deliver to an investigative newsroom in the Middle East and to a team of investigators working across the titles in the FT Specialist group, including Investors Chronicle, FT Adviser, Banking Risk and Regulation and others.
We’ve also seen a lot of interest in bespoke versions of our OSINT training, which we brought to the Video News team at the Telegraph, covering a range of digital tools as well as dedicated modules on Geolocation and Social Media Analysis.
Alongside this work, we collaborated closely with the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), generously supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, to develop a bespoke course on Local Accountability Investigation. The course took in a wide range of subjects, from data to FOI, Company Accounts and understanding local authority structures. We delivered this course to two cohorts made up of members of the PINF network, in support of their ongoing work towards capacity building across the independent media sector.
This provision was primarily delivered online, but we are teaching bespoke courses in-person too, having finished up the year putting together and delivering a multi-day bespoke Data Journalism course on site at the Which? offices for journalists working across the organisation’s titles.
CIJ Scheduled Courses
This year we ran 35 scheduled courses, training 479 people. We kicked off with an in-person Radio Boot Camp in January, and saw the return of the CIJ core curriculum in the form of investigative methodology, data journalism, web scraping and digital tools training.
On top of this the Financial Investigations course we launched in 2023 continued to prove very popular, and we ran two coding courses in the autumn, one utilising R for data investigations, the other Python.
We also launched two new scheduled courses this year. The first is a two-hour workshop on supply chain investigations, using case studies to guide participants through the process of tracking commodity flows through data and shipping records. This new course ran twice in 2024 and already has two sessions booked in for early 2025.
The second is an in-depth multi-module Open-Source Intelligence course, building on the introductory Digital Tools workshop we run. The course covers OSINT best practice, social media analysis, fact-checking and verification, and geolocation and satellite imagery.
We’re excited to run it again in 2025!
Looking into the future
That’s a Christmas CIJ wrap. Next year, in addition to launching the CIC, we’ll be focusing on training more and more journalists around the world under our Source Protection Programme and Open Climate Reporting Initiative, and training even more journalists at home with our regular scheduled and bespoke training. Then there’s Summer Conference, this year in late June. Plus our annual regional conference, as usual, in the Autumn.
We hate to say it, but there’s no better way to stay sharp and up-to-date in investigative journalism – and to land your next job – than to take our training. Watch this space (and read this newsletter) to find out more and what we’re up to and where we’ll be. In the meantime, from the entire CIJ staff, we wish you a peaceful and jolly festive period, and a professionally rewarding new year.
Don’t miss our Festive reading, listening and TV list!
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Have a great holiday season!
From all of us at the CIJ