Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The EU hands out over a third of its budget to the agricultural sector every year. Under EU law data on subsidies are publicly available via the individual member states. However, the information is often difficult to access, analyze and compare across borders. The Farmsubsidy.org website contains fresh and searchable data on farm subsidies, obtained from national government agencies. In this session, you will learn:
- what's in the farm subsidy data ,- how to look through millions of recipients of farm subsidies; - crossmatch with other data to find story leads; - how to classify types of recipients (person/company/etc.) using machine learning models.

From spring 2025, large companies in the EU are legally required to disclose their impact on climate, the environment and human rights. These 'sustainability reports' contain a wealth of new data. Lobbyists did a lot to water down the directives, and the reports are full of jargon and legal language. Luuk Sengers, a seasoned climate and business journalist, has studied them, so you don't have to! In this session, he will show you where to look, what to look for, and what stories you can find in the data.

Understanding how companies are owned, controlled and managed is crucial for investigations. To reveal the real human owners with the right to share in a company’s income or assets, or the ability to control its activities, you need beneficial ownership data. Open Ownership drives the global shift towards beneficial ownership transparency and in this session we will share where to find and make use of up-to-date data on company ownership. We will also explain how journalists can find such information in unstructured data in a range of places.

As global tensions continue to rise amid shifting security dynamics, the need for transparent, reliable, and impartial data has never been greater. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has been at the forefront of independent research on conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament since its founding in 1966. Its comprehensive datasets serve as essential tools for policymakers, researchers, and analysts seeking to understand military spending patterns, arms industry developments, and their broader geopolitical implications.
In this session, SIPRI's researcher will share the methodology, scope, and significance of SIPRI's data on Military Expenditure and Arms Production. Understanding the databases reveals trends and stories within two of the most topical subjects of the past years.

The Investigative Commons is a collaboratively maintained repository of datasets and document archives useful for investigative reporting to ensure long-term access to evidence.

Currently, datasets (evidence) for investigative journalism are maintained by several media organizations and journalism networks; because of changing priorities of newsrooms and the specific funding situation of investigative journalism these cannot be considered reliable long-term partners for accessing the data. Furthermore we do not believe organizations involved in investigative research and publishing stories are the ones to take on the burden of providing access to evidence data long term (though it’s appreciated if they can do that for some time).

We want to launch this new project by showing the various available datasets and how everyone can use them. We will also explain how to contribute to this open, community-driven project, and discuss further plans and ideas from the community.

OpenSanctions is a global database of sanctioned companies and people; entities that have faced criminal or regulatory action, civil society watchlists, and an archive of global political office-holders.
We'd like to help reporters to integrate this resource into their journalistic toolkit. We will look at what information can be found, how to interpret the results, and how this database can be used in investigations. We will also look at how to  use our underlying open source technology for more advanced investigative graph building.