Gunfire and Ground Truth: Investigative Journalism Using Creative Commons
Channel: Jennryn Wetzler
Date: 16/02/2022

Gunfire and Ground Truth: Investigative Journalism Using Creative Commons

February 15, 2:00 pm UTC/ 9:00 am EST
Speaker: Cecília Oliviera, Investigative Journalist and founder of Fogo Cruzado
Cecília Oliviera will discuss developing and using crowd-sourcing on an open platform as an investigative tool in journalism focused on drug and arms trafficking. In 2016, frustrated with the lack of publicly available data, she began mapping every shooting in Rio de Janeiro. This effort turned into Fogo Cruzado, an open data platform on armed violence that is spreading to every major city in Brazil.

Background: Journalism provides a crucial public service. Access to verifiable information and stories that question the underlying terrain of power is critical to democratic societies. Yet, journalism as we know it faces existential new challenges. Increasingly, journalists face work-halting financial and ethical challenges, as well as threats to their physical and digital safety, when sharing information online. Misinformation and disinformation campaigns in the media challenge collective notions of ground truth. They challenge the bedrock and meaning of open internet. 

Journalism also faces newfound opportunities, as the tectonic plates of power shift in our shared digital landscape. We witness the rising role of nonprofit media sources, filling gaps where traditional media organizations have shuttered; the rising power of crowdsourcing information and fact checking, and a powerful new role an open internet can play in knowledge sharing. 

Join us as we explore what public, open options our news needs, and how to take advantage of these options. Through particular cases in Brazil, Croatia, India, the US, as well as global examples, the webinar series explores topics of: 

-Online narrative power as social power
-Access to information and paywalls in the time of COVID
-How to address mis & disinformation campaigns shifting the focus of traditional news audiences
-The rising role of nonprofit media and the gap they fill
-Open licensed media