Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School

LONDON - The cij summer school is now in its eighth year. It is the UK's only annual investigative journalism forum that offers hands-on training to journalists, researchers, charity workers and journalism students.

The centre for investigative journalism (cij) advances education for, and public understanding of, investigative journalism, critical inquiry, and in-depth reporting and research. The cij summer school is now in its eighth year. It is the UK's only annual investigative journalism forum that offers hands-on training to journalists, researchers, charity workers and journalism students. In response to concerns expressed by colleagues and senior journalists about false reports and conflicting studies in scientific, health and environmental journalism, this year's focus will be on science and investigating scientific claims.

This year the strand on science journalism will look at what lies behind the headlines, getting beyond the spin and evaluating the evidence. It aims to contribute to our understanding of health, climate and nuclear issues and the way they are currently being reported, to provide tools for sourcing arguments and counter-arguments, as well as evaluating both sides of debates.

Ben Goldacre – Bad Science
Fri 9 July 13:35, Great Hall, College Building, City University London
Ben will talk about how to spot examples of dubious or simply wrong scientific research and pseudo science peppering it with some terrifyingly good examples of how we can get it all wrong. His work focuses on unpicking the evidence behind misleading claims from journalists, the pharmaceutical industry, alternative therapists and government reports.

P Sainath – When farmers die – inequality, agrarian distress and the media.
Sat 10 July 14.00, Great Hall, College Building, City University London
Spending most of each year collecting detailed reports from the households of landless labourers and marginal farmers, Sainath’s work has set the agenda for investigative rural reporting. India’s leading investigative reporter will talk about the agrarian crisis in the Subcontinent and around the world. His work on the agrarian crisis has produced the largest journalistic body of work ever on the problems of farmer communities in the Indian countryside and has also had a powerful impact on public policy.

David Leigh and Paul Farrelly MP – The Inside Story of Trafigura – old and new methods
Sun 11 July 14.00, Great Hall, College Building, City University London
David Leigh, The Guardian’s Investigative Editor and Paul Farrelly MP – responsible for bringing the Trafigura ‘super injunction’ story to the limelight, will talk about how journalists and politicians used parliamentary privilege (old-fashioned methods), cross-border co-operation (innovative) and the internet (new-fangled) to defeat cover-ups by lobbyists and lawyers, and expose the scientific facts.

Fore more details visit the CIJ website.