Last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington received a huge data set consisting of 2.5 million documents on tax havens from unknown sources. The documents contain 130,000 names of people from 170 countries suspected of fraud, among them oligarchs, arms dealers and criminal financial investors. Apart from that, there were more than two million emails and lists of 122,000 covert companies and trusts from respective tax havens. The unprecedented research that followed brought together media outlets from 46 countries which set themselves to check the data. Here in Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a leading newspaper, was involved in the process of analyzing the data. In this post editor Bastian Brinkmann writes how data experts helped to analyze the enormous volumes of data.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as drones, have made their way out of military laboratories and into local electronics shops during the past ten years. Today, anybody can buy their own drone for as little as 300 euros. And the unmanned craft can even be used by journalists, for example, to cover protests or catastrophes.

Marcus Bösch talks about the pros and cons of drone journalism.

by Khamsy Tonpraserth, Daniel Hirschler and Michael Karhausen

What do you have to keep in mind when you want to tell a story only using pictures? If you want to put together a slide show for the web, for instance, a picture gallery or an audio slide show: what do you have to consider and plan as you are taking your photos?

These are some of the questions that were discussed at a recent photo-journalism workshop at the National University of Laos in Vientiane.

Khamsy Tonpraserth

Khamsy Tonpraserth was one of the participants. He lives in Vientiane and works as a Lao teacher at the university. He compiled some of the hints and suggestions the participants came up with during this workshop:

- Before taking your photos, write down your story line in one sentence. Tell the story in a way that is active, so that someone is doing something. A clear story line can guide you and help you identify which photos you have to take. Don’t take pictures that have nothing to do with your story line.

- A good photo should tell a story, freeze a moment in time or be an eye-catcher.

Henning Sussebach

Do feature articles have to be about catastrophes or celebrities to be good? According to the award-winning German print journalist, Henning Sußebach, not at all. Sußebach believes that intriguing topics can be found directly on your doorstep. In this blog post, he explains how ideas taken from everyday life can be made into stories that engage readers.

How do journalists find their stories? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if it isn’t the other way around – that it’s the stories which find the journalists. When this happens, it often makes for a better article because the journalist isn’t trying too hard to make an idea work; the story was already there just waiting to be told.

But happens when you run out of ideas? Does talking help? Or going for a walk? Is there a short cut to finding topics?

By Bettina Ruigies

Media outlets should have an idea who's watching them (Photo by 'espensorvik' / flickr)

Today’s fast moving media environment requires a lot of flexibility from media workers. Multimedia skills are a must. Journalists need to be able to produce stories for radio or television, print or online. At the same time, digitization, the Internet and affordable equipment enables anyone who wishes to open a TV station on YouTube or at least run a blog site.

All this technical innovation offers tempting perspectives for hard working and talented journalists. But frustration and failure might set in when it turns out that hardly anybody is watching or reading.