NEW YORK (AP) – One of the brightest journalistic publications from the war in Ukraine included intercepted radio broadcasts by Russian soldiers showing an invasion of disorder, their conversations were even interrupted by a hacker who was literally whistling “Dixie”.
This is the work of an investigative department in The New York Times, which specializes in open source reporting, using publicly available materials such as satellite imagery, cell phone or security camera recordings, geolocation and other online storytelling tools.
The sphere is in its infancy, but it is developing rapidly. The Washington Post announced last month that it was adding six people to its video forensics team, doubling its size. The University of California, Berkeley, became the first college to offer an investigative reporting class last fall that focused specifically on these techniques.
Two open source video reports – a reenactment of The Times’ Rage Day at the Capitol Revolt on January 6, 2021 and the Post’s view of clearing out a racial protest in Lafayette Square in Washington in 2020 – won duPont -Columbia Awards for Excellence in Digital and Television Journalism.
Radio broadcasts in Ukraine, where soldiers complained about a lack of supplies and defective equipment, were checked and brought to life with video and eyewitness reports from the city in which they operated.
At one point, something that looks like a Ukrainian intruder invades.
“Go home,” he advised in Russian. “Better a poor horse than no horse at all.”
The Times’ Visual Investigations Division, which began in 2017 and now has 17 employees, is “absolutely one of the most exciting areas of growth we have,” said Joe Kahn, future executive editor.
The work is thorough. “Rage Day” consists mostly of videos taken by the protesters themselves in the enchanting days before they realized that publishing them online could cause them problems, along with materials from law enforcement and journalists. It outlines how the attack began, who the leaders were and how people were killed.
The video investigation also contradicts the Pentagon’s original story of a US drone strike that killed civilians in Afghanistan last year. “Seeking our protection, they instead became one of the last victims in America’s longest war,” the report said.
“There’s just so much evidence in the open network that if you know how to turn the rocks and reveal that information, you can connect the dots between all these facts to get to the undisputed truth about an event,” said Malachi Brown, who heads the Times team.
Rage Day has been viewed nearly 7.3 million times on YouTube. A study of the Post on the death of Travis Scott’s concert in Houston in 2021 has been seen more than 2 million times, and his story about the last moments of George Floyd garnered nearly 6.5 million views.
The Post team is the result of efforts launched in 2019 to verify the authenticity of a potentially news-worthy video. There are many ways to smoke fakes, including examining shadows to determine if the visible time of day in the video corresponds to when the footage actually took place.
“The Post saw the impact this kind of storytelling could have,” said Nadine Ayaka, head of the visual forensics team. “This is another tool in our reporting mechanisms. It’s really nice because it’s transparent. It allows readers to understand what we know and what we don’t know by showing it clearly. ”
Still new, open source storytelling is not tied to rules that govern the length or shape of the story. A video can last a few minutes or, in the case of Rage Day, 40 minutes. The work can stand alone or be embedded in text stories. They can be investigations or experiences; The Times used security videos and a cell phone, along with interviews, to tell the story of a house in Ukraine when the Russians invaded.
Leaders in the field cite the work of the website Storyful, which calls itself a social media intelligence agency, and Bellingcat as pioneers. Investigative news website Bellingcat and its leader Elliott Higgins are best known for their coverage of the Syrian civil war and the investigation into alleged Russian involvement in the downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014.
The Arab Spring in early 2010 was another key moment. Many of the protests were coordinated in the digital space, and journalists who could navigate this had access to a world of information, said Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of California, Berkeley Law School.
The commercial availability of satellite images was also remarkable. The Times uses satellite imagery to quickly refute Russian claims that the atrocities committed in Ukraine were staged.
Other technologies, including artificial intelligence, help journalists look for information on how something happened when they could not be there. In 2018, the Times worked with a London company to renovate a building in Syria, which helped counter official denials about the use of chemical weapons.
Similarly, the Associated Press built a 3D model of a Russian-bombed theater in Mariupol, and combined it with video and interviews with survivors, produced an investigation report that killed more people than previously thought.
The AP is also working with Koenig’s team to investigate terrorism tactics from the Myanmar military administration and is using modeling to study the victims of the war in a Gaza neighborhood. It is working with PBS’s Frontline to gather evidence of war crimes in Ukraine and seeks to expand its digital efforts. Experts cite the BBC’s Africa Eye as another notable effort in this area.
As the effort expanded, Koenig said journalists needed to make sure their stories guided the tools used, rather than the other way around. She is now heard regularly by news organizations that want to build their own investigative units and need her advice – or students. Berkeley graduate Hailey Willis is on Brown’s team at The Times.
It feels, Koenig said, as if a big change has taken place in the last year.
Brown said the purpose of his unit’s report is to create impact stories that touch on broader truths. The investigation into a Palestinian medic shot by an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip was as much about the conflict as it was about her death, for example.
“We have such mandates,” said Adjaka of the Post, “which should help make some of the most urgent news of the day.”
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