4th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer, Norway
LILLEHAMMER - Sonali Samarasinghe’s story - Gangsterism and the faulty legal system - won the Global Shining Light Award. With almost 500 participants from 86 countries the Global Investigative Journalism Conference took place in Norway from the 11-14th of September. At more than a 100 seminars, plenary and panel sessions, the world’s best investigative journalists talked about old and new journalistic work methods. They found plans and solutions for facilitating and legislating investigative journalism all around the world. Brigitte Alfter, Editor-in-chief of Wobbing Europe presented How to use Freedom of Information internationally. Director of the Pascal Decroos Fund, Ides Debruyne, gave a keynote speach on How to fund your project - networks and funding.
Gangsters awarded
At the conference the best investigative stories of 2008 were judged and awarded by a three-headed jury. They judged the articles concentrating on the difficulty of doing the story, the resources available to the reporter, the danger to the reporter, and the most important, the impact of the story. The winning article - Gangsterism and the faulty legal system - was written by Sonali Samarasinghe from Sri Lanka. In her story she writes about „how a government minister in Sri Lanka used his power and connections to the Prime Minister, to run roughshod over the media and the justice system. The article shows how important it is to cultivate sources, convince people to talk and gather the documentation to back it all up.“ The second prize winner article – The minister and the mining sector – written by Edik Baghdasaryan, from Armenia is investigating, why the country’s environment ministry was not interested in using the appearing ecological challenges to build up a strong and profitable mining sector. Three other stories were commanded as top category, Abuja Environmental Task Force by Solomon Adelbayo, The Government 60 bn Rands Arms Deal by the Investigation team at the Mail and Guardian and last but not least Child Alert by Anas Aremeyaw.
A global village
The participants and speakers represented countries from all around the world, Eastern Europe, The Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America so it was a really a global event. There were six main tracks with the topics of War on terror, Corruption and organized crime, Safety for journalists in war zones, Climate and environment, Computer-assisted reporting, and Facilitating investigative journalism. Beside the speeches, plenary and panel sessions, the participants had the chance to improve their computer skills to be able to analyze and investigate complex situations, with the help of advanced internet searching, using spreadsheets and databases, also to produce stories that can be easily overlooked by other media.
