Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The session will highlight methods to uncover the activities of consulting, PR and advertising firms, taking attendees through the steps that DeSmog and ARIA took to build an evidence base for their investigations into these sectors, how they landed this work in mainstream media, and the impact of that work so far.

The panel will also walk the audience through the methods, tools, and partners they used, and show them how they might replicate that work in other jurisdictions. They will also briefly touch on the different ways that DeSmog and ARIA operate in the media ecosystem.

The PR, advertising, and consulting sectors have long been fundamental enablers of corporate activity, often overlooked because their work is carried out behind closed doors, and protected by NDAs. It is therefore important that journalists have the necessary tools to investigate their activity and hold these firms accountable for their actions.

Attendees need no previous knowledge or expertise, except for a curiosity in the workings of the PR and consulting sectors.

When attendees leave this session, attendees they should have a better understanding of the tools available to them to identify the activities and clients of the PR and consulting sectors in their own countries, putting them on a strong foundation for future investigations into this space.

In a world where history may sometimes seem busy repeating itself, the ability to find your way around traditional paper archives is increasingly useful. Whether it’s war, genocide, the Cold War or the environment: historical stories are becoming more and more – well – current.

In this session we’ll show you how to transfer data and OSINT skills to working with paper and historical records. We will explain how to find stories in the material and how to find both historical and current sources. We’ll show you some – hopefully – inspiring examples, and we’ll discuss why it’s not smart to accidentally download 500,000 records from the National Archives.

No previous knowledge and no additional materials (e.g. laptop) are required for this session.

Customs records and open-source databases are a goldmine, but they can also be overwhelming. With so much data, where do you begin looking for stories? How can you be sure that what you're seeing is what you think it is? And how should you organise your findings once you have a good lead?

At a time when international sanctions affect everything from oil to aircraft parts, this presentation offers insights into investigating sanctioned goods, sharing information on the databases and tools and techniques useful for finding original supply chain stories. We will be drawing on our experience of tracking shipments of aircraft parts from western facilities to Russia via India (see: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/boeing-airbus-russia-sanctions-aircraft-parts-india-intermediaries). We will explain how we trawled through thousands of transactions to find what we were looking for – and how we turned rows of data into actual stories.

AI has moved from niche tech coverage to leading headlines worldwide. Opaque algorithms make life-changing decisions about millions across the continent in health, banking and social security systems. Meanwhile, Big Tech increasingly uses Europe as a base for the resource-guzzling data centres that power modern generative AI development. So where do you start? This hands-on session will walk through a framework for different story archetypes and an understanding of how to generate and pursue story leads. Then, we'll home in on a specific story and how to build an AI accountability investigation from scratch — including following the money behind digital infrastructure, using freedom-of-information laws and collaborating with data scientists to uncover algorithmic bias. Participants will leave the session with an understanding of how to investigate automated systems even when access to code is difficult. Participants who want to go deeper can attend the Level 2 session.

How can you benefit from the knowledge and methodologies of experts to help you in your investigation? Are there any ‘recipes’ for creating a safe space of knowledge with scientists? Are there dos and don'ts? How do you navigate the different relationships to time? Come and listen as journalists from the Forever Pollution Project share their experience of brainstorming with 5 to 18 experts, including environmental chemists, toxicologists, social scientists and lawyers (and survived).

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.

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.

In this session, De Smog's journalists will share their experience and tips from a recent investigation that
traced the supply chain of feed used in farmed fish sold in UK supermarkets.

Attendees will gain an understanding of where to obtain data for a supply chain investigation: such as trade data (including via FOI), shipping route data, and information hidden on supermarket packaging. The session will also showcase examples of how to interpret and analyse these data.

The Church is one of the most important players in the European property market, yet it remains an opaque institution, hard to investigate. Our collaborative project Sacred Grounds is the first to bring a comprehensive picture of valuable assets the Church owns across European cities and of its investment strategies shaping our cities.

For six months, we cooperated across European media outlets to find out whether Churches manage their land holdings in the spirit of Christianity, in the service of the common good, and in accordance with their own ethical codes. And what is the impact of church property dealings on the affordability of housing and public services? The coordinators of the Urban Journalism Network investigation will showcase major international and local findings, explain how to get data and how to investigate the non-transparent institution that the Church is.

If you have not yet tried investigating in this part of the world, we will be looking at why it’s worth investigating property owners in Dubai, and how to do it. We will share tools and tricks we used in the Dubai Unlocked collaboration, and also discuss ways of identifying leads and developing a solid story about how the Emirates are used as a safe haven for criminals.