18 data sources for investigative journalists
Government websites can be a starting point for many journalists investigating issues in the public interest, such as local planning and development, or spending.
There are also many other data sources available that are often the result of other investigations and projects journalists and news organisations have worked on, or that have been compiled by civic groups and non-profits, which other reporters can use.
Below we have compiled a list of 18 databases and data sets that contain information about a variety of topics and industries. Most of them are available for free, while some, such as the ones maintained by the Investigative Reporters and Editors, require you to have a membership to the organisation to access them.
This list is not exhaustive. Are there any additional resources you have come across in your reporting, or has your organisation made any datasets available following an investigation? Tweet us at @journalismnewsand we will update this collection.
TheInvestigative Dashboardfrom the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project allows you to search documents from the organisation’s previous investigations, as well as official sources and scraped websites. In total, you can explore 93,374,268 leads for your investigations, the website states, including information on people and companies and their assets.
More than a year has passed since Panama Papers broke, yet journalists are still finding stories in the 11.5 million documents leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) created a public database of 320,000 offshore companies, based on information from Panama Papers and the 2013 Offshore Leaks Investigation. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to find stories in this database.
The ‘Next to die’ project from non-profit US outlet The Marshall Project is not a traditional database, but it can definitely be a starting point if you are investigating executions in the United States.
It tracks upcoming scheduled executions, and provides information on the name of the person, the state, the date and a summary of each individual’s case. Each case also comes with background on the history of the death penalty in a given state, and past executions to have taken place in that location.
Similarly to ‘The next to die’, ‘The Counted’ project from the Guardian tracks people killed by police in the United States.
The database contains information for 2015 and 2016, which can be filtered by an individual’s name, state, race, age and whether or not they were armed at the time the incident took place.
Another US non-profit, ProPublica, makes some of the data and APIs from its investigations available online through its Data Store. Some datasets, such as the Trump administration’s financial disclosures, or information about the types of ads shown on Facebook, are available for free, while others are paid for.
The National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) in the US maintains a list of databases on topics such as boat accidents and federal campaign contributions.
A data sample can be downloaded for free, but the full information is available at a cost (or for free if you are a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors). An annual membership for non-US journalists costs $70 (£54), and also provides access to tipsheets and reporting guides.
