NR26

Reporters’ approaches to crucial insiders are often ghosted – the potential sources don’t even bother to respond.  It’s an unfortunate point of failure in many investigations:  Not getting enough help particularly from knowledgeable former employees of the wrongdoing businesses and government agencies.  
  
Stefanie Dodt and Jim Mintz show how emails to formers often fail because they are boring, pushy or vague.  Successfully approaching people has little to do with being nice, or begging for help. The key that unlocks the cooperation of former employees is understanding the six ways you may be interesting to them, and to benefit from the six ways they may be interesting to you. 
  
Line by line, they demonstrate un-boring email examples that cannot be ghosted.  The result is information and help from inside perspectives that deepens your reporting. 

For 16 years, Viktor Orbán rebuild Hungary's journalism, silenced critical voices and built propaganda channels. But a few journalists resisted, published hard-hitting investigations and even build their own, independent media outlets from scratch, despite all the attacks and at great personal cost. How does investigative journalism work in an autocracy? Experienced journalists will talk about their impactful work – and we will try to come up with lessons for German newsrooms as well.

Journalism in exile thrives on investigative work. It is a daily balancing act between courage and risk. How do journalists living thousands of miles away from their home countries investigate sensitive stories? How do they reach sources who put themselves in danger by speaking to media outlets in exile?
The panel demonstrates how investigative journalism can succeed from a distance and identifies the methods that are particularly effective. At the same time, it highlights the hurdles and dangers that exiled journalists face on a daily basis.

Three successful media professionals from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Russia offer insights into their work and describe how investigative journalism remains possible despite repression, persecution, and criminalization:

Qais Alamdar uses OSINT techniques such as satellite imagery to expose the hidden structures of the Taliban’s security apparatus.
In her ARTE video series “Masha on Russia”, Masha Borzunova exposes the Kremlin’s propaganda machine and manages to speak with Russian deserters.
Fatima Karimova runs her media outlet “Mikroskop Media” from exile and exposes corruption and election fraud in Azerbaijan, among other issues, through investigative reporting.

This panel will be held in English.

Last December, the international investigative project “Damascus Dossier” was published. The investigation is based, among other materials, on several tens of thousands of photographs showing people who were tortured to death or died of starvation. The work posed numerous challenges for NDR and ICIJ, the organizations behind the project.

Among the questions the team faced were: How can an international investigation involving tens of thousands of images be organized when the content is so disturbing that it may traumatize staff? What is the best way for reporters to approach surviving relatives who may have been searching for their loved ones for many years and may not yet have been informed of their death? How can reporting on such a sensitive topic be conducted in a way that balances the interests of the public with those of the bereaved?

Amir Musawy, Jelena Cosic, and Lena Kampf played key roles in the Damascus Dossier project. The panel offers insights into their working methods and explains the techniques they used to handle this sensitive investigation.

Schrottreife Tanker. Schiffe als Operationsbasen für Dronen. Schiffe, die Infrastruktur angreifen. Es ist derzeit viel los auf der Ostsee und den Weltmeeren. Die russische Schattenflotte und andere sketchy boats machen Schlagzeilen. Aber was müssen Journalistinnen und Journalisten über Schiffe, Flaggen oder Sanktionen wissen? Welche Daten gibt es bei Schiffstrackern wie MarineTraffic? Der dänische OSINT-Experte Christian Panton zeigt ganz praktisch, was man tun kann.

Tankers ready for the scrapyard. Ships as operational bases for drones. Ships attacking infrastructure. There's a lot going on right now in the Baltic Sea and the world's oceans. The Russian shadow fleet and other sketchy boats are making headlines. But what do journalists need to know about ships, flags, or sanctions? What data is available on ship trackers like MarineTraffic? Danish OSINT expert Christian Panton gives a practical demonstration of what can be done.