Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Live journalism is emerging as a powerful global trend, reconnecting audiences with journalism in an engaging, interactive way.

In this session, participants will explore how journalism can transcend traditional formats and captivate live audiences. After an introduction to the genre — its evolution, impact, and the key players worldwide — we’ll dive into Headliner’s unique approach in Germany, showcasing Reporter Slam (a fast-paced, entertaining format) and JIVE (a magazine on stage), alongside inspiring international examples.

Then, we’ll break down the core principles of live journalism, analysing curated clips from live shows to identify what makes them work. Participants are encouraged to bring a story (printed or digital) that they believe could be adapted for the stage. Through hands-on guidance, they will learn to:
✔ Select the appropriate format and tone
✔ Identify visual and auditory elements to enhance storytelling
✔ Structure a compelling narrative arc for a live audience

No prior experience required!

By the end of this session, participants will have a good grasp of different live journalistic formats and first practical tools to start re-imagining their own stories for the stage.

Telling stories live to those around us, using our voices, is probably the oldest storytelling format of all. Live Journalism, on the other hand, is a more recent but fast-growing phenomenon, with new groups emerging in different countries every year.

While there's no single definition of Live Journalism, most often, it involves journalists and other storytellers performing on a stage in front of a live audience.
This year, Dataharvest will present a Live Journalism show, produced by Christine Liehr, co-founder and managing director of Headliner, where we'll experiment with ways of bringing to life journalistic investigations done by the Dataharvest community.

Stay tuned for more details on this show – and how you can be part of it!

Data and visualisations are now everpresent in journalism, particularly in investigations and in cross-border collaborative projects (where often "data" is the common language). Additionally, diverse software and platforms provide us with different opportunities to reach our audiences, who are also more and more used to seeing data visualisations.

In this session we'll ask how we can continue to be innovative and creative in producing and publishing data visualisations, and how we can benefit from developing interactive visualisations, even including simple online games that push the boundaries of data storytelling.

Come to this session to get inspired. And do bring your own ideas and questions, so that we all can learn together!

Journalism is almost never delivered live. These days, always there seems to be a screen between the journalists and the audience. But before the online and digital world swallowed everything, journalism reached people through the pages of a newspaper or magazine, on a TV screen, or on a crackling radio (if you are too young to know what we're talking about, ask your parents).

It doesn't have to be like that -- even today when most people start feeling sick and anxious at the mere thought of being away from their smartphones for a few hours.

There are offline and in-person ways for us to present, deliver and disseminate our investigations and other reporting. And there seems to be a growing appetite among audiences and (some) media organisations to explore ways to get together and experience journalistic storytelling live.

In this session, three journalists who've been experimenting with different offline and in-person ways of journalistic storytelling will share their experiences, the lessons learnt, and how it feels to have your audience look you in the eye and talk to you in person as you present or deliver your story.

This session explores the powerful potential of visualising qualitative data – interviews, archives, testimonies, police reports, and more – within investigative journalism. We’ll delve into how these rich, often non-georeferenced sources can be transformed into compelling maps, diagrams, and visual narratives, offering unique insights into complex stories.

Moving beyond traditional hard data visualisation, this approach can reveal hidden patterns and connections within qualitative information and illuminate the human dimension of investigations, adding depth and clarity to narratives that might otherwise remain opaque. We’ll also examine how combining qualitative visualisation with hard data, such as satellite analysis, can strengthen the accuracy and impact of investigative reporting.

During this session, Federico Caruso (editorial coordinator, European Data Journalism Network) and Riccardo Pravettoni (journalist cartographer, Le Monde) will explain the mechanisms and choices involved in creating some of Le Monde’s most impactful visual stories, drawing from examples such as the Mazan trial, Saydnaya prison, and events in Lebanon and Gaza. We’ll examine how they analyse information, select sources, and craft the aesthetic look of these formats.

No prior knowledge or expertise is required to attend. You also won’t need to bring any specific materials.

You will leave this session with a better understanding on how to:
- Identify and extract valuable information from qualitative sources
- Apply various visualisation techniques to represent this data effectively
- Combine qualitative and quantitative data for stronger investigative narratives
- Appreciate the importance of scale and aesthetic choices in visual storytelling
- Gain a practical understanding of the processes involved in creating compelling visual journalism

Most investigative journalists have by now become used to getting data and building up datasets and databases as part of their research. And that's also most often the case in cross-border collaborative investigations, where data is normally the common language of the journalists and media participating (as well as English).

What is less common is then publishing or making those databases accessible, and using them as part of the storytelling when presenting and disseminating our investigations. And that's a shame, because the databases behind our research can provide us with an opportunity to reach and engage our audiences in interesting and novel ways.

In this session, two [OR three] investigative journalists, from two very different contexts, Serbia and Switzerland, will present how they went about building up or compiling complex databases as part of their investigations, and then making those databases publicly available and accessible to their audiences, and using the databases as part of their storytelling.

Come to this session to get inspired and learn how you can compile and use databases, not only as part of your research, but also making them part of the story to increase the reach and engagement of your investigations.

In the last decade or so, podcasts have gone from being niche to becoming a widespread media format and are now a well established and mature medium. Podcasts bring about their own kinds of opportunities and challenges, and, from the point of view of storytelling, seem to be particularly suited to long reportage and investigations.

In this session, we'll hear from two journalists with experience in producing independent investigative podcasts in two different parts of Europe: Portugal and Poland.

How do journalists and newsrooms think of topics for an investigative podcast? What are the key editorial and non-editorial issues to consider? And the main pros and cons for independent newsrooms that want to produce investigative podcasts? How to conduct interviews about complicated issues and get people to be candid on the record? How to narrate investigations that rely on documents and can include complex, abstract issues? What are the lessons learnt after trying things that didn't work out that well?