What we learned at the International Journalism Festival

In April, the Guardian’s Investigations and Reporting team were lucky enough to attend the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Here’s some stuff that we learned.

Earlier this month, the Guardian’s “Investigations and Reporting” (I&R) engineering team were lucky enough to attend the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. This is a five day conference covering a range of different topics related to the industry. The areas our team were most interested in were around investigative/data journalism and whistleblowing.

After exhausting the one Italian speaker in the team with an attempt at simultaneous translation on the first day of the conference, we stuck to the sessions in English. Here are our favourite bits.

Journalism for the public, by the public

Phil McMahon

One of the most inspiring sessions I attended was completely non-technical: a panel discussion on the themes of a report by Darryl Holiday titled “Journalism is a public good. Let the public make it”. In the talk we heard about the impressive work being done at Outlier Media. Outlier run an SMS service that residents in Detroit can use to find out urgent information. Questions could be as simple as “where can I get a Covid-19 vaccine?” or “who is my landlord?”, or more complex queries which a team of Outlier reporters would aim to respond to within 48 hours. In the same session we also heard from Megan Lucero at The Bureau Local about an investigation into Deliveroo where, instead of sending reporters in to interview riders, they hired Deliveroo riders to do the reporting themselves.

I’d recommend this talk, as well as a later session on“Why is journalism failing democracy?” to anyone looking for ways media organisations can break out of their bubbles and more effectively serve their readers.

Provenance and trust

Samantha Gottlieb

One of the most engaging talks I attended about the role technology is playing in journalism was the panel on digital provenance: “The need for digital provenance: how the Content Authenticity Initiative is addressing mis/disinformation”.

The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) was founded to tackle the problem of mis- and disinformation – from altered photography and video such as deepfakes, to misleading stories that claim a photo or video was taken somewhere it wasn’t – through content attribution. They are working with smartphone manufacturers to integrate technology into devices that can securely attach attribution data to images, and are working on an open-source image editing tool that can track and cryptographically store metadata showing edit history.

The panel discussed the importance of media literacy and rebuilding trust in journalism. There was consensus that while technology can be useful in identifying the provenance of digital content, the problem was not simply technological. Any meaningful solution to mis- or disinformation would need to involve trust initiatives and education around news literacy.

This panel made me curious about how visual content the Guardian publishes moves from the source to the reader. It led to an interesting discussion with our editorial tools team, who built and are responsible for the Guardian’s image management system, the Grid.

Related: How technology is powering environmental reporting

Exposing and tackling organised crime

Joseph Smith

For me, the most memorable talk was the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) presentation on the new organised crime.

The OCCRP is a transnational organisation based in Sarajevo that shines a light on criminals, the state, and the murky links between the two. In a novel twist, founder Paul Radu and Central Europe Editor Pavla Holcova cast the audience in the role of budding criminals and offered tips for success based on the OCCRP’s investigations into real-world criminal networks.

The insights Radu and Holcova offered were hard-earned. Holcova recounted how she had once smuggled herself into a prison to interview a gang leader by posing as a prostitute on a conjugal visit.

Their deadpan humour and playful tone belied the genuine dangers of their line of work. But they made it very clear that the growth of these modern, tech-savvy criminal enterprises has a corrosive effect on our societies.

Few are willing to put themselves in harm’s way for the greater good, but Radu and Holcova are among them. We all reap the benefits.

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Responsible collaboration

Sam Cutler

Recently the Guardian’s Investigations and Reporting (I&R) team has started to think about what we can do to improve secure collaboration. As software engineers working closely with journalists we have to take a very broad view of what is meant by “security”. This ranges from how to safely connect potential sources with our reporters to how we help hundreds of journalists share their research in a secure manner.

Two of my favourite talks from this year’s festival were ”Introducing the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s Logan source protection programme” and “Source communication under lockdown”.

The first talk was a combination of real-world stories of reporters working with sources in incredibly risky situations, and advice on technical considerations. A personal highlight for me was the focus on informed consent when working with sources and fixers. For responsible and ethical journalists it’s extremely important not to take advantage of a particular source. The panel touched on many of the intricacies involved when reporters have to make decisions for their sources in order to keep them safe.

The second of my highlighted talks provided a great deal of advice and information in a series of stories collected during lockdown. It’s always interesting to see what other organisations do when put in unusual circumstances, and it was heartening to see that a lot of the measures we took at the Guardian were promoted too.

Building stronger relationships with colleagues and readers

Sabina Bejasa-Dimmock

There were several great talks on innovation for news organisations, both from a reader-facing perspective and an internal tooling and processes perspective. I attended a talk called “What’s next for the business of news?” which looked at different approaches to reader revenue in an environment of declining ad revenue. The panellists were from the FT, The Wire and El Diario, which all have different funding models.

The panellists agreed that while these past few years have been extraordinary for news and had seen record interest and subscriptions, retention was more difficult, with many subscription services (and time!) to compete with. They explored “news-adjacent” offerings such as puzzles, e-commerce and events to subsidise the “public good” of news journalism.

In ”Newsroom innovation in a post-pandemic ecosystem”, the panel looked at how innovation could be done in the context of a time-poor newsroom and how important it was to create a structure for the process upfront to set up expectations for journalists and development teams. We have good relationships with our journalist stakeholders that have been built up over time and mostly in-person, but it made me think whether we can do more when kicking off projects where relationships will have to be built remotely.

Fergus Bell from Fathm said that sometimes the reader can be forgotten as the most important stakeholder in innovation. We should make sure that the reader is centred in the heady mix of ideas.

Lawsuits against accountability

Mario Savarese

One of the talks I found most interesting was ”Don’t SLAPP the messenger: the impact of abusive legal threats and actions against journalists”.

SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation”. SLAPPs are aimed at journalists with the intention of stopping them from exposing wrongdoing.

The talk began with Annelie Östlund, a freelance journalist from Sweden, giving an account of her experience facing one of these lawsuits for a series of articles that she wrote for Realtid, an online finance magazine. When Östlund approached an energy company in Sweden about some unusual-looking financial transactions, she was promptly contacted by lawyers to say that her enquiries could land her in prison. Östlund and her colleagues were ultimately sued for defamation – not in Sweden, but in London.

The High Court ordered on 11 May that the majority of the case be struck out, including all of the claim by the company itself, allowing only a claim by its boss in respect of damage suffered in England and Wales from the limited publication in the jurisdiction.

Targeting journalists with SLAPPs is a particularly vicious strategy which is alarmingly becoming more widespread. Claimants can sue journalists outside their jurisdiction, as was the case with Östlund. This can consume huge amounts of time and can have devastating financial consequences for journalists and news organisations.

The UK has become a mecca for SLAPPs: more lawsuits of this kind have been filed in the UK than the US and the EU combined. Encouragingly, the European Commission has recently taken action to improve the protection of journalists and a proposal for an EU law against SLAPPs has been put forward.

You can read more about the work of the Investigations and Reporting team at the Guardian in a series of blog posts from 2021 – start here.

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