Resources / Tools

Journalists look at how data journalism has evolved throughout the years and the new, sophisticated tools to analyze troves of data.

DataJournalism.com offers a number of courses in data journalism, such as “Fundamental search for journalists," “Python for journalists,” “Going viral with social media analytics” and many others.

Instant Data Scraper extracts data from web pages and exports it as Excel or CSV files Instant Data Scraper is an automated data extraction tool for any website. It uses AI to predict which data is most relevant on a HTML page and allows saving it to Excel or CSV file (XLS, XLSX, CSV).

Convert your Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

Open source tool to clean data.

R for Journalism will help you to learn how to use the statistical computing and graphics language R to enhance your data analysis and reporting process.

Scraper for pulling tables out of PDFs

Free data sonification tool by Google News Initiative.

Detox your data.

Ghostery helps you browse smarter by giving you control over ads and tracking technologies to speed up page loads, eliminate clutter, and protect your data.

Jungle Disk provides automatic data backup, password management and security awareness training.

Keybase is a key directory that maps social media identities to encryption keys (including, but not limited to PGP keys) in a publicly auditable manner. Additionally it offers an end-to-end encrypted chat and cloud storage system

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority.

The browser extension Mailvelope provides end-to-end encryption for your existing email address.

My Data Done Right helps you generate, send, and keep track of your requests in order to access, remove, correct, or move your personal data.

Tresorit is the ultra-secure place in the cloud to store, sync and share files easily from anywhere, anytime.

Building a data culture in your organisation

The "Database of Databases" for international public records searches.

This is the Reuters list of the world’s top climate scientists. To build it, we created a system of identifying and ranking 1,000 climate academics according to how influential they are.

Archive live urls in case they change, saved publicly for all to see, or search for urls others are saving.

Web archive for checking deleted or amended websites.

Financial reporting data tool.

Finding business information.

Finding archived business information.

A place to make international research requests for journalists.

Tool for finding business information.

Collaborative production platform.

Finding people's addresses and sometimes phone numbers, based on where they were registered to vote.

Find people's relations.

Finding anyone's email or phone number, from LinkedIn.

Finding people that used to work at a company, to approach as a source.

Finding data on people when all else fails, aggregated information.

Insta tool description

Insta tool description

Baidu Maps is a desktop and mobile web mapping service application, offering satellite imagery, street maps, street view and indoor view perspectives

Bing offers more recent and higher resolution imagery than Google, e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Geographic Tools; Coordinate Conversion / Datum Transformation

Better resolution than Landsat

Descartes Labs is using its data refinery for satellite imagery. They are currently processing images from the major NASA and ESA satellite constellations. They do not charge journalists

Satellite imagery, derived data, and space infrastructure.

Dual Maps combine synchronised Google Maps, Aerial Imagery and Google Street View into one embeddable control.

EOS Landviewer provides free services for up to 10 images. More images and analysis are available to journalists at a discount.

The web portal provides a vast amount of content, grown and collected over more than a decade: Detailed technical information on Earth Observation (EO) missions; Satellites and sensors; EO data products & services; Online resources such as catalogues and library; Applications of satellite data; Access to promotional satellite imagery.

The Sentinel Applications Platform (SNAP) is a data analysis framework ideal for the exploitation of Earth Observation data.

The EarthExplorer (EE) user interface is an online search, discovery, and ordering tool developed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Here you can find resources for finding and using satellite images.

A wide variety of different spellings in various languages. Draws upon many sources, including NGA’s Geonames.

GeoVisual Search works on two different imagery catalogues, showcasing multiple resolutions, and national and global scale search.

Geograph is a concept and open source code for an online website to create a comprehensive collection of photographs capturing every part of given region.

Virtually any satellite imagery collected from NASA, NOAA, USGS, etc. is available.

Add a Bing Maps satellite imagery layer. Historical imagery.

3D modelled places in the Americas, Australia, Europe, North Africa, and SE Asia.

Here WeGo is a web mapping and navigation service.

Database of industrial facilities.

Map checking provides more recent satellite imagery than Google in, e.g. Iraq.

Mapillary is the street-level imagery platform that uses computer vision to fix the world’s maps. With computer vision, Mapillary connects images across time and space to create immersive street-level views and extract map data.

Mapotic is a mapping platform.

Old Maps Online are a useful addition to Google Streetview.

OpenStreetCam is a project to collect crowdsourced street-level photographs

A wide array of satellite and aerial images; broad search criteria; and other mapping and visualisation tools such as FIRMS for fires. Access to more than a dozen NASA data centres and associated satellite data products. NASA Earth Observations: More than 50 datasets on atmosphere, land, ocean, energy, environment and more.

Mapping stories across a geography

Allows querying Google Maps API for two specific places in precise distance from each other within a given radius. Useful for geolocating from photographs.

This set of guides and workbooks is designed to help newsrooms design and manage collaborative journalism projects.

Coronanewsroom offers stories, webinars, lesson and guide on how to run a newsroom in the time of COVID-19.

Free digital journalism courses with mixed media lessons, concise tip-sheets and practical exercises.

EJC's video courses

This tutorial covers how to geolocate an image (find where it was taken on a map), and then chronolocate the image (identify the time, using shadows visible in the image).

Free digital skills courses for all levels.

In this course we're going through some of the tips and tricks on how to make your own research faster and more accurate using Google's tools. We will go from advanced search through to verification, touching upon visualisation and finishing up with Geo mapping tools to help you tell your stories in a beautiful, interactive way online.

This course is a fast-paced introduction to global muckraking, past and present, and includes penetrating interviews with historians and investigative journalists.

It provides various courses for journalists, verification and vital tools such as Google Search, Scholar, Trends, and much, much more.

A leadership course that goes beyond the hype surrounding data by focusing on the practicalities of achieving business outcomes.

This course will introduce you to the potential of machine learning and help you reflect on how you can use it responsibly to enhance your journalism.

Learn how to scrape data off web pages.

The course is open for journalists or media professionals from the Western Balkans who are interested in using their mobile phone for complete production of powerful journalistic stories. The self-paced online courses are available in three languages – Macedonian, Bosnian/Serbian and Albanian.

This resource page features course content from the Knight Center for Journalism in the America's massive open online course (MOOC) titled “Online Harassment: Strategies for Journalists’ Defense.”

Learn how the GDPR helps to protect health data and get familiar with rights, obligations, risks and safeguards.

In this Podcastology series you'll get to know: how to produce a successful podcast; how to develop an audience; and how to promote your podcasts.

The GNI Digital Growth Program has been designed with industry experts and news publishers across the world to help small and medium sized news organizations grow their digital businesses, through a range of free playbooks, interactive exercises, digital workshops and labs.

Totem is an online learning platform that offers educational courses about digital security and privacy, and related tools and tactics for journalists, activists and human rights defenders in a safe, online classroom environment.

Tutorials on basic computer concepts, spyware removal, security, software, and operating systems.

Collection of links to resources, tools, data, and knowledge to support COVID analysis.

A crowdsourced resource for technologists building things related to the coronavirus outbreak.

First Draft’s resource hub has created and collected guidance to support accurate and responsible reporting on coronavirus, which will be regularly updated with new information.

Digital Security for Journalists

EJC's Data Journalism Handbook

Asset Disclosure

Supply Chains

Maritime Shipping

National, regional and international sites filled with advice and information, as well as governmental and nongovernmental sites that facilitate the filing of requests online.

A comprehensive guide for understanding health care, evidence-based medicine, clinical trials & handling medical experts &their testimonies.

The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 25,000 investigative stories, as well as more than 3,500 tipsheets from our national conferences, Watchdog Workshops, and on-the-road training on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories.

Data journalism dictionary

Tracking Coronavirus Disinformation on Twitter

Focus Groups guide

Newsletters guide

Membership Puzzle Project & Tow Center audience revenue glossary

Media technology resources

These are important guidelines on how the police should interact with journalists. Also, the tool offers overview on recent projects, education programs, information sources and dialogue settings to improve the relationship of police and press.

From money laundering to human trafficking, GIJN’s guide tells you everything you need to know about investigating organised crime.

As countries rapidly spend billions of dollars to fight the coronavirus pandemic, digging into government contracts is taking on a new urgency.

Here are six services with functioning, reliable databases used by journalists searching for expert sources.

The safety of women journalists online directly affects the quality of our democracies and the right of society to access a plurality of information. This #SOFJO Resource Guide responds to the gaps that exist in addressing the safety of women journalists online.

The Solutions Story Tracker® is a curated database of rigorous reporting on responses to social problems.

Bellingcat presents a wide array of tools and guides to conduct online investigations during this difficult time.

In this factsheet we identify some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far.

This book equips journalists with the knowledge to investigate social media accounts, bots, private messaging apps, information operations, deep fakes, as well as other forms of disinformation and media manipulation.

How best to deal with falsehoods and misinformation during this pandemic is one of many difficult tasks facing journalists and publishers.

Here are some tips to help guide and inform journalists who are working with whistleblowers.

These tips can help journalists be more effective in their investigations.

The use of open source tools, user-generated content (UGC), and advanced search filters has allowed reporters to break major stories on the COVID-19 pandemic from home quarantine.

GIJN asked leading journalists in our global community — including experts in investigating disinformation, supply chains, and open source tools — for their advice to fellow reporters on what we should be scrutinizing during the outbreak.

Safety tips for journalists who are planning to cover the COVID-19 outbreak.

Insights from First Draft's session on best practices and good habits to protect yourself during online investigations into coronavirus misinformation

If you are considering starting your own podcast, but don’t know where to begin, here are some tips.

Use this toolkit when you have problems accessing your data/account/device, when someone impersonates you, or intercepts your communication. It also offers a platform to learn about cybersecurity more generally.

Tips and tools that journalists can use to protect themselves, their data and their story.

The application provides step-by-step guidelines to using online tools for identifying misinformation in the Western Balkans. It is especially useful for journalists who encounter suspicious content on a daily basis in their work.

These ten tips will help you improve your news editing skills.

A handpicked list of tools and resources to help you build your digital story.

Cybersecurity tips for reporters working remotely in the time of COVID-19

5 interview tips every journalist needs

This guide is based on tips and techniques drawn from a November 2020 GIJN webinar, Investigating Sexual Abuse, and augmented by a GIJN Resource Center search of relevant case studies, useful organizations, and guides.

Useful tips for photographing documents, storing images, and recovering lost information.

Journalists are often on the frontlines of some of the world’s most challenging events, from crime scenes and road accidents to natural disasters and wars. Now, journalists around the world are working overtime to cover the COVID-19 pandemic.

A toolkit for reporting on complex problems.

JSAT is a free, survey-based self-assessment tool that offers practical solutions tailored to each newsroom’s profile and vulnerabilities. The survey takes about an hour to complete, and is followed by an instant diagnosis of an organization’s digital and physical security and resilience.

VPN Comparison is meant to be a resource to those who value their privacy, specifically those looking for information on VPNs (that isn’t disguised advertising).

An extensive dashboard listing mostly-free tools for data visualization and visual storytelling.

Fast text-based video editing.

EXIF Purge is a small portable application to remove EXIF metadata from multiple images at once.

Read, write, remove, and manipulate metadata for a vast number of file types.

Extracts metadata.

Image forensics tool.

Extract metadata.

Web-based image forensics tool.

Verification plugin to help journalists verify images and videos.

Extract metadata.

Extract metadata, online.

Planet is an explorer portal where anyone can download imagery of the tropics for environmental monitoring.

Forensic providing eight filters to detect still images alterations.

Locates similar images on the internet.

Extract metadata.

Extract metadata.

Reverse image search.

VFF is a web application that serves as a web engine to perform searches for faces over an user-defined image dataset.

VIC is a web application that serves as a web engine to perform image classification queries over an user-defined image dataset.

This standalone application can be used to do a reverse image search on a large collection of images.

Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.

This platform helps connect editors with journalists all over the world ready to fact-check, research and report from their regions.

Deskle is a collaboration tool for distributed teams, where participants see each other’s actions in real-time. It is also a tool for online collaborations and project management.

Evernote is an app designed for note taking, organizing, task management, and archiving.

Collaborative production platform.

Filestage gives teams the easy way to manage the content review process.

Slack is a cloud-based proprietary instant messaging platform.

Manage any workflow from your inbox.

Learn more about the four ways that journalism organizations can make money.

Tips for crowdfunding, global and regional crowdfunding sites, tutorials, free tools for campaigns.

Crowdfunding guide.

Recent cases have exposed the risks of democratic discourse manipulation on social media. There is still too little evidence of how disinformation, hate speech, bots and others influence the online debate. The Digital Democracy Monitor Toolkit helps civil society, journalists, researchers and anyone trying to research social media and democracy. Use this toolkit to get started with your own monitoring.

Download public Facebook videos. Copy-paste the URL of the video and download it in the available definition formats.

This tool is designed to provide a simple method to conduct Facebook intersect searches across multiple variables. Missing intersect options are due to Facebook limitations.

Live broadcasts around the world.

Graph searches.

Graph searches.

Find accounts by name, email, screen name, and phone.

Social Media Investigations - name, phone, email, username searches.

Tools for social media graphics, video, scraping, analytics and much more.

Advanced searches per Facebook profile.

Download Facebook videos.

Find posts on Facebook.

View interactions and activity of Instagram users.

Search Instagram and Twitter

Allows you to do a username search for stories already saved.

Tool for downloading Instagram stories.

Find other locations in Instagram’s database near a particular site.

Removes the overlay that displays over a LinkedIn profile.

Visualise and analyse your own LinkedIn network.

Sends you an email when a keyword is mentioned on Reddit.

Skype directory for finding and contacting people.

Searchable map of geotagged snaps.

A free platform developed to automatically detect political trollbots and untrustworthy accounts.

Web extension that is checking for bots.

Checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot.

InVID plugin provides a Twitter advanced search by time interval up to the minute.

Linking social media users together to find sources

A tool that you can use to visualise tweets and aggregated Twitter data on a world map.

Geobased Twitter search.

A command-line power tool for Twitter (it is an open-source command-line script written in Ruby)

Chrome extension to visualise Twitter conversations.

Find reach of tweets.

Advanced Twitter scraping tool written in Python that doesn't use Twitter's API, allowing you to scrape a user's followers, following, Tweets and more while evading most API limitations.

Search by date, keywords, etc.

Check bots.

Download anyone’s tweets, followers and likes in an Excel sheet.

Searches for a number of stills, not each frame is included (thus results may be left out).

It uses YouTube and Google APIs to generate location-based search results which are stack ranked by upload time

YouTube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+), and it is not platform-specific.