Court records can be a true treasure trove, containing vital nuggets that can jumpstart your investigation or judgements primed for reporting. It can be tough enough to access court documents in our home countries, but how do you find records abroad, sometimes in secretive jurisdictions? This session will show you how to find legal judgements from arbitration courts to property disputes in places like Russia, UAE and the UK. We will show you how to access them (VPN may be needed), how we found stories in them,  and will get you started on your quest for legal leads.

Many journalists get lost trying to find information and data quickly in the institutional labyrinth that is the European Union. Finding specific amendments, understanding the issues surrounding a piece of legislation, establishing the position of specific member states in negotiations or the approach of the European Commission... so much information is unknown or inaccessible to the layperson - who will easily become discouraged from pursuing their EU investigation.

In this session, we will will use concrete and practical examples to show you how to navigate the institutional triangle (Commission, EU Parliament and the Council), as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union. We'll explain how to track the European legislative process, quickly find the relevant players, information and data you need. This won't be an ex-cathedra lecture, but a practical deep dive session, with, as a take away, a list of useful links organised according to journalistic needs. After the session, you are also welcome to join us in the EU Cafe corner for a further discussion or get your specific EU questions answered.

In this session, we will share tips on tracking lobbyists and understanding how the PR campaigns and people behind them influence public policy. We will look into the available databases, registries and other methods that allow us to track lobbyists, their networks, topics they work on and their influence and the EU level and beyond. Lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory will introduce you to the Brussels lobby scene and show you how available lobby data can help you to nail your stories. Ellen Ormesher from De Smog will talk how to investigate corporate influence through the PR industry. It's an industry which is loosely regulated and yet influences the wider public conversation, ensuring some topics are kept off the agenda, while affecting other policies and their implementation.

If you are denied access to information, you can fight for your rights in court. What can you gain, and when is it worth the hassle? Staffan Dahllöf has taken the Swedish state to court for denying access to environmental information, invoking the Aarhus Convention.Eva Belmonte has repeatedly challenged Spanish authorities in court, seeking transparency on multiple fronts: the passengers of official planes, the true cost of government-procured medicines, the identities of public advisors, and most recently, access to the algorithms governing social policy decisions. Alexander Fanta has sued the German government for documents about its support for Ukraine, and inspired a court case in which the New York Times fought for access to text messages between Ursula von der Leyen's and the CEO of Pfizer during the Covid pandemic. Tarjei Leer-Salvesen won an FOI request from the US State Department, when civilian vessels from his area turned up in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy. Hear their thoughts and tactics – and how they use the fight for transparency in their journalism.

Private finance data aggregators are a powerful - if often expensive - tool for understanding the investment and ownership structures of the funds or companies that are the subject of your investigation. With the right approach, they can also help generate stories by identifying suspicious or controversial flows of money. This sessions shows you how. We will share a case study from a recent series that revealed supposedly ethical public pension funds held investments in controversial businesses  - including tankers for Russian fossil fuels and crypto, all via opaque private equity intermediaries.

Last summer, Uber and Lyft "locked out" drivers from work in order to game the city's minimum wage law, a labor practice that was "unprecedented" according to economists who created the law. Bloomberg built an automated WhatsApp tipline to gather exclusive data (7,000+ screenshots from nearly 900 drivers) that showed how pervasive, widespread, and financially damaging this phenomenon was for drivers, as well as the impact on consumer fares and the economic gains for the companies. After Bloomberg's findings were published, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Uber and Lyft's alleged antitrust practice of limiting driver pay.

In this session, Bloomberg journalist Natalie Lung will share how they did it, share tips on how to maximize participation from sources through crowdsourcing, validate messy user-submitted data, and how to combine shoe-leather reporting with the affordances of automation.

In this session, we will show the methodology developed by The Guardian to gather and measure content published on TikTok during the UK election campaign. Using this methodology, we revealed how far-right Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, outperformed all other parties and candidates on the platform. We also exposed the political content shared during the campaign aimed at young audiences.
During the session, we will also show you how to set up accounts located in countries different to the one where the reporting team is based. We will also show the scraper for automatically gathering content associated with particular hashtags at various times over several days. TikTok is relatively hostile to scrapers, forcing us to resort to advanced scraping techniques including residential proxies. We will demonstrate how we identify the main content creators, using some metrics from TikTok as well as the number of videos recommended by the algorithm, and how we used the algorithm manually to find more related videos - and therefore Tiktokkers - similar to those we were investigating.

The arms business is booming. Between 2014 and 2023, EU countries have increased their defence spending by more than half, reaching €632 billion annually; the defence budget is set to explode in 2025. With defence budgets surging globally, how can journalists effectively investigate the defence industry? In recent years, two reporters from Investigate Europe have uncovered hidden aspects of the German Rheinmetall Group's operations, including its covert trade in ammunition factories. This workshop will share IE's insights and techniques, demonstrating how to investigate companies, employees, and trade flows in the defence sector. Participants will gain practical knowledge of investigative tools and strategies to uncover concealed practices which drive the arms industry's expansion.

In this session , three speakers present skills or tools that could be valuable in your next investigation.

1) How to create compelling before-and-after visualizations of satellite images using free tools. We'll walk through a basic workflow and share tips to quickly visualize change over time — no prior geospatial knowledge needed!

2) How to reveal metadata and other hidden information in PDF documents. We will walk our audience through the command line tool that can be used to explore PDFs in depth, and address issues that a journalist faces when they upload a PDF to an investigative tool like the open source Aleph and discover that the OCR has produced no text output.

3) How journalists can use AI to build a customized assistant that digs through a large number of documents. In this skillshare, you will get examples of a combination of skills and tools to screen, systematize, and analyse content in a cross-border investigation.

4) AI-powered search through audio - how do you find what you want without falling prey to hallucinations? Using the example audio transcription with Whisper, we showcase the issues of search through audio and how we've solved it in several recent use-cases.

Did you know there is a tool which can get around the protection of commercial secrets? Journalists have used it to access details on Russian bitcoin-mining near a NATO exercise, and to find out about privately owned salmon farms and overseas fracking operations. In this session you will learn about the Aarhus Convention.
The beauty of this tool is not only that it can overrule secrecy of business interests, but also the vague or wide definitions of "environmental information". Come and learn how this can be done, and what arguments to use to open otherwise closed doors.

In recent years, Telegram has evolved beyond a simple messaging application, becoming a platform for audiences to consume information and a tool for journalists to monitor and track conflicts, wars, and other incidents around the world.

However, alongside its general use, Telegram has become a widely used platform for malicious actors to spread disinformation and smear campaigns, spread hate speech and fear, and orchestrate influence operations aimed at shaping public opinion. This session will equip journalists with essential investigative techniques tailored for Telegram, providing a comprehensive guide for effective research. Journalists will learn about the tools and methods available to monitor, collect, and analyze Telegram data effectively.

If you have never conducted an investigation focused on Telegram channels, this session is for you.
It will also be valuable to those who occasionally report on manipulation and disinformation on Telegram. Experienced journalists who have participated in previous editions of this session reported learning at least one new tool, method, or tip for investigating Telegram.

What you will learn:
tools and tips for identifying, monitoring, and investigating public Telegram channels.
methods and tools for collecting Telegram data.
insights into the challenges of working with Telegram data and ways to leverage and interpret it.

If you already have a Telegram account, we will practice exercises together. It is recommended to have relevant API keys if you want to experiment with data collection in real-time.

Bluetooth trackers can help you develop interesting investigations. This team started using trackers while following two cars from Germany to Siberia, then a parcel from Prague to Moscow. In late 2024, they tracked more than 230 letters sent within Germany, using up to 80 trackers simultaneously. For almost 18 months they tracked 24 items of electronic waste from Germany to places as far afield as Pakistan.

In this session, the team will share the learnings and the technology behind all these projects and the scraping tools and software behind them. They will also bring some trackers and covers to inspire colleagues to use these devices, and share lessons learnt from ongoing collaborations in various countries where other journalists and newsrooms licensed them to help them move their projects forward.