tomvaillant/investigative-journalism-training

Investigative Journalism Training

Instruction-tuning dataset for investigative-journalism and OSINT assistant workflows: tool selection, investigation methodology, verification, financial investigation, digital security/OPSEC, sourcing and evidence, media law, editing, and ethics.

This dataset was used to fine-tune the Buried Signals "journalist" model family (Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5/3.6 LoRA adapters and merges). See the model cards under tomvaillant for trained checkpoints.

• Creator: Tom Vaillant / Buried Signals
• Examples: 687 multi-turn chat records
• License: Apache 2.0 (consistent with the base models)

Dataset Structure

Each line of training_data.jsonl is a JSON object in chat format:

{
  "messages": [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are an investigative journalism AI ..."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "..."},
    {"role": "assistant", "content": "..."}
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "category": "osint",
    "id": "osint-001",
    "source": "navigator-llm_generated"
  }
}

• messages — the conversation (system / user / assistant turns). The system prompt embeds investigative-journalism ethics: the SIFT framework, evidence grounding, proportionality, and source protection.
• metadata.category — one of the 10 categories below.
• metadata.id — stable per-example identifier.
• metadata.source — provenance tag where applicable (e.g. navigator-llm_generated, navigator-community_curated, navigator-llm_regenerated for the 66 OSINT Navigator Q&A records); absent for the synthetic-from-source examples.

Category Distribution

Category	Tag	Count	Primary Sources
OSINT Tool Selection	osint	141	Navigator tool DB, Navigator cached Q&A, Indicator briefings
Investigative Methodology	methodology	96	Investigation skill, GIJN, Bellingcat
Follow the Money	follow-the-money	80	FTM skill, GIJN, EBU
Fact-Checking & Verification	fact-checking	80	Fact-checker agent, Verification Handbook 3
Ethics & Proportionality	ethics	60	SPJ Code of Ethics, Spotlight agents
Digital Security / OPSEC	digital-security	60	OPSEC basics reference
Sourcing & Evidence	sourcing	50	Evidence-grounding reference
Media Law	media-law	50	GIJN legal, RCFP
Editing & Story Structure	editing	40	Al Jazeera handbook, EJF manual
Social Media Intelligence	social-media	30	Social-media-intelligence skill
Total		687

Sources and Attribution

Training examples were synthesized and curated from the following sources.

OSINT tool data (Buried Signals / Indicator Media)

• tomvaillant/osint-tool-database — 7,524 OSINT tools, weekly crawl of 9 open-source toolkits. Creator: Tom Vaillant / Buried Signals.
• OSINT Navigator Cached Q&A — 238 production query/answer pairs with Wilson-score ranking (LLM-generated and community-curated). Creator: Tom Vaillant / Buried Signals.
• Indicator Media Briefing Tools Database — 101 tool entries extracted from 37 briefings. Creator: Indicator Media. Used with permission.

Buried Signals skills (buriedsignals/osint, buriedsignals/spotlight)

• OSINT Investigation Methodology, Follow the Money, OPSEC Basics, Spotlight Investigator, Spotlight Fact-Checker, Evidence Grounding. Creator: Tom Vaillant / Buried Signals.
• Social Media Intelligence skill — adapted from jamditis/claude-skills-journalism by Jay Amditis (MIT License).

Follow the Money primary sources

• Jim Shultz, Follow the Money: A Guide to Monitoring Budgets and Oil and Gas Revenues, Revenue Watch / Open Society Institute, 2005 (ISBN 1-891385-40-2).
• Miranda Patrucic & Jelena Cosic, Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Following the Money, GIJN, 2024 (CC BY-ND 4.0).
• Derek Bowler, Tracing Beneficial Ownership with OSINT for Financial Crime, EBU Eurovision News Spotlight, 2025.

Investigative manuals (PDFs)

• GIJN, Citizen Investigations: A Practical Guide (2019).
• UNESCO / Mark Lee Hunter, Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists.
• UNESCO, Global Investigative Journalism Casebook.
• Al Jazeera Media Institute, Investigative Journalism Handbook.
• EJF / TEMPO Institute, Investigative Journalism Training Manual.
• CiFAR, Investigate — The Manual (illicit financial flows, 2021).
• CIPE, Investigative Reporting: A Toolkit for Reporters (2009).

Web references

• European Journalism Centre, Verification Handbook 3.
• Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics.
• Bellingcat resources and how-tos (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 where applicable).
• GIJN Resource Center.
• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP).

Synthetic generation

• Instruction/response pairs generated by Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic) from the materials above. The system prompt embeds investigative ethics (SIFT, evidence grounding, proportionality, source protection).

Partners

• Indicator Media (indicator.media) — OSINT briefing tools data, Navigator partnership.
• GIJN (gijn.org) — investigative-journalism methodology and resources.
• Bellingcat (bellingcat.com) — OSINT techniques and verification guides.

Intended Use

Fine-tuning journalist-facing assistant models: investigation planning, OSINT tool selection, verification checklists, public-source research methods, evidence-grounded drafting, and ethics. Models trained on this data should have their outputs verified before use in reporting.

Citation

@misc{vaillant2026investigativejournalism,
  title  = {Investigative Journalism Training},
  author = {Vaillant, Tom},
  year   = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/tomvaillant/investigative-journalism-training}}
}