International Center for Journalists

Posted on November 16, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Nigerian journalists drive positive change following oil contamination investigation

Earlier this year, two journalists from Nigeria, Kelechukwu Iruoma and Ruth Olurounbi, teamed up to explore and document the impact of oil contamination on communities in the Niger Delta where millions of barrels of oil had spilled decades ago.

Their investigation revealed that oil spills in the region of Ogoniland, home to more than 850,000 people, continued to have negative and dangerous health effects on the Ogoni people, some of the oldest settlers in the area who rely on farming and fishing for their livelihoods.

Today, their work has led to a commitment by government to provide safe drinking water to the townships affected by oil contamination – which studies have previously linked to cancer, childhood malnutrition and low fertility – resulting in the poisoning of their water.

The journalists visited four communities where wells were contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen at levels over 900 times above the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline. They engaged local leaders to enlist 50 non-smoking, non-alcohol-drinking residents to give blood samples, which the reporters brought to a lab in Lagos for evaluation. Lab testing conducted by health professionals working with Iruoma and Olurounbi reported that more than half of the residents who gave blood samples had dangerously high levels of an enzyme that is a marker for liver damage.

While the land and water vital to the support systems of those who live there are contaminated by the oil spills, moving elsewhere is not an option for many. “In our culture, land is very important to us. And, if you are left a piece of land […] you are left something very dear. You are left a legacy and you don’t move away from that,” says Olurounbi. “But every year harvesting there is less and less to harvest because the land will not reproduce.”

This is why restoration of the area is crucial to the lives of those who call Ogoniland home. However, government’s promise to hire contractors to provide potable water has come nearly a decade after a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report called on the Nigerian government and oil companies to share the cost of extensive restoration of the area.

“The speed of the clean-up has been so slow that the desired results will not be achieved,” an environmental scientist and Ogoniland resident told Iruoma and Olurounbi. “This is what the people have been living with all through their lives. This is suicide.”

Restoration is vital to supporting the betterment of public health in the region which has been devastated by multiple oil spills.

In their investigation, the two journalists leveraged technologies such as drones to show the extent of environmental wreckage in the area, and interviewed residents, leaders and local scientists. Olurounbi and Iruoma received an ICFJ Alumni Reporting Grant which included $7,500 plus hands-on training in using drones, capturing still and video photography of the contaminated areas, and creating infographics. The funds from the grant were used to pay for the blood tests and travel to the region.

“We have pictures and videos that show the contaminated soil and rivers. Rivers where people fish or where they go to take water, even now,” Iruoma says. “We used the drone photos and video to show clearly how the oil spill affected the livelihood of the people.”

Backed by Microsoft’s News Labs, the grants were created to support data journalism and immersive storytelling in ways that promote transparency and understanding.

Applications were open to alumni of previous ICFJ programs. Iruoma participated in ICFJ’s Reporting Fellowship on Migration and Climate for Nigerian Journalists in 2017. Olurounbi is a member of the Nigerian chapter of WanaData, a network of female journalists developed by ICFJ and Code for Africa that is driving digital storytelling across the continent.

This story has been shortlisted in the Excellence in Environmental Journalism category of the Fetisov Journalism awards, the most lucrative journalism awards in history. The winning list will be selected by December 1, 2020.

Posted on March 16, 2020 by — Leave a comment

News reporting grantee winner quantifies how climate change is affecting everyday life

Josh Landis lived and worked in Antarctica from 1999 to 2001 as an editor at The Antarctic Sun, the only newspaper on the continent at that time. And while he was hardly the only person on the continent, it could often feel like that in a peaceful sort of way.

“Being able to sit on the ice, with penguins walking by and seeing killer whales spyhopping in the water, rising and falling right in front of me, stuck with me forever,” he says. “It gave me a personal appreciation for the vulnerability of these places which at first seems so impervious” to climate change.

After leaving Antarctica, Landis returned to his hometown of New York City where he worked in high-profile jobs for several years, writing for ABC News anchors and eventually becoming a CBS News national correspondent. Though he had reached a pinnacle professionally, his thoughts always drifted back to the Earth’s southernmost continent. Four years ago, he helped found Nexus Media News, a nonprofit science, tech and environmental news service with a focus on climate change and supported by foundations.

Landis’ passion about climate change was among the reasons he was chosen by Microsoft News and the International Center for Journalists for an ICFJ Alumni Reporting Grant with a focus on data journalism, which included receiving data visualization training using Microsoft Power BI.

Landis and his team, in collaboration with the CityLab news organization, chose to investigate how climate change is influencing the U.S. real estate market. They drew upon research from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group, which calculated real estate losses due to persistent flooding from Texas to Maine.

While other news reports covered the data by focusing on where the highest dollar amounts were lost, Landis, his team and First Street incorporated census data for a unique analysis. Using Power BI, they determined which areas lost the most real estate value relative to the average home price in the affected area. After crunching the numbers across thousands of ZIP codes, one of the highest “loss ratio” places was Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

Posted on March 2, 2020 by — Leave a comment

News reporting grantee winner shines a light on the power of data to improve children’s health

Verah Okeyo’s father earned about $30 a month as a supervisor at a flower farm near Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Her mother was a midwife whose work included educating expectant and new mothers about health and sanitation. The family were provided their own house. The flower farm’s owners made sure Verah and her three siblings were provided with education and healthcare.

Okeyo lost her parents when she was 16 years old – her mother from an illness, her father not long after, from the heartbreak of his wife’s passing. Despite that, looking back, 15 years later, Okeyo realizes she had a relatively privileged life growing up compared to many children in Kenya who have much less – especially when it comes to healthcare.

So when Okeyo became one of the data journalism grantees winners in the Microsoft News grant program in collaboration with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), she used the opportunity to learn more about child mortality rates in Kenya. It is a topic she often covers as a health care reporter for The Nation, the largest daily independent newspaper in Kenya, and part of the Nation Media Group, which operates in East and Central Africa. She wanted to know why, over time, mortality rates have declined in some of Kenya’s 47 counties but increased in others.

“In Kenya, if you belong to the have-nots, which is more than 70% of the population, your rights, particularly for health, are going to be trampled on a lot,” she says. “I grew up without much, but I was never denied health care, and health care with dignity.”

She learned that early on when, as a student journalist in college, she went to report a story at a maternity ward in a public hospital.

“I remember seeing three women in a bed, so I told the nurse, ‘Those three women must be very good friends for them to stay in one bed like that.’ The nurse looked at me and she rolled her eyes, and she said those three women were in that bed because there were no other beds. And that they had just had surgery. And I found that so appalling. Everybody was looking at me, as if ‘Why are you surprised? This is how public health in Kenya works.’”

It was her “aha” moment.

“People sleep on the floor sometimes in public hospitals, they share beds sometimes, there’s no running water in some hospitals,” she says.

Part of Okeyo’s project involved digging through demographic data going back to 1965, two years after Kenya won its independence from Britain. She learned that pneumonia is a primary cause of death for children in remote areas of the country, and diseases such as rabies, kala azar (transmitted by the bite of a female sand fly) and African sleeping sickness are often the leading causes of mortality in children ages 5 and younger.

Those diseases are part of a health classification known as “neglected tropical diseases” because they are exactly that – ignored in terms of education and attention around the world, yet they can also be fatal if they go untreated.

“Neglected tropical diseases are not only neglected by funding organizations, but by health care workers who do not even know about some of them,” Okeyo says. “You find these diseases among the poorest of the poor, because many of the diseases are brought about by not having proper food, access to clean water and to sanitation. These diseases kill people.”

Her work in public health follows in the footsteps of her mother. “She used to go to very, very difficult-to-reach areas, and tell them things like if they wash their hands, they will not get diarrhea. For me, this is continuing the work my mother had started.”

To tell the story, Okeyo used Power BI to visualize the data, county by county. During the process, the data led her to poor and remote areas of the country, something Okeyo felt was important for the investigative team to do to interview people beyond “the usual counties” near Nairobi.

Posted on June 12, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Microsoft announces ICFJ immersive storytelling grantee winners

In January 2019, we launched our journalism grant partnership with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Our first recipients are already midway through their data journalism training and now I’m thrilled to introduce the recipients of the second phase of our program.

Kelechukwu Iruoma and Ruth Olorounbi comprise a team investigating the toxic effects of oil spillage in Ogoniland, Nigeria, which has led to poisoned farmlands and compromised reproductive health. An estimated 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled since 1958: This makes an annual average 240,000 barrels of crude in the Niger delta, destroying the local livelihood and the very population’s survival. An award-winning investigative freelance journalist, Iruoma covers environment, education, agriculture and health in Nigeria. He is a reporting fellow of ICFJ and International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), and has been trained by the organizations as Premium Times Center for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and Global Rights Nigeria.

His reporting partner Olurounbi is the business editor at Per Second News, a U.S.-based organization. The Wole Soyinka Female Leadership and ICIR fellow has covered development and human right issues, business, and agriculture for more than 10 years. When she’s not writing, the award-winning journalist mentors young girls in her local community.

The second project is one man’s cultural retrospective on a country’s re-emergence to a superpower and tourist destination. Philip Cunningham’s story will take him across the globe, about 7,000 miles from his New York base to Beijing. A seasoned broadcast reporter, producer and documentary filmmaker who started as a Chinese history researcher and tour guide in China, he has worked with outlets like PBS, ABC, NBC, BBC, NHK and CCTV and has witnessed key events like the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the 1999 anti-U.S. demonstrations, and the 2008 Olympics. His goal is to create an immersive travel odyssey of Beijing across time and space that’s at once personal and political, cultural and historical. In addition to plumbing his photo and video archive, a past Nieman Fellow and Fulbright scholar, Cunningham plans to revisit key locations — some of which have changed beyond recognition. Since his first visit in 1983, not only has China changed radically, but so has journalism and the toolkits for a documentarian. A student’s retelling of one of his own stories inspired Cunningham to explore how the latest technologies might enrich the age-old art of storytelling.

Two very different stories, both told and amplified through immersive storytelling.

Supporting these three journalists has been part of our larger effort to help newsrooms and journalists deliver impactful stories and empower them through technology to find, create, and share information in unprecedented ways. We operate on the industry and individual level: be it hosting workshops at NICAR in southern California and the upcoming GEN Summit in Athens, working directly with newsrooms like the AP or Recode or assisting individuals like our ICFJ grant recipients, our goal is help journalism in what is our shared values: the pursuit of truth so that people and communities can make the best decisions in their daily lives to guide their future sustainability.

We look forward to sharing stories on what the ICFJ grantees are learning and how they are affecting change in these communities. Please visit ICFJ to see and support all the tremendous projects it is undertaking–and while you’re at it, wish the center a happy 35th anniversary.