By Marina Savchenko
Why are Online Investigations and Data Security so important for investigative journalism?
5 tips for Structured Internet Research by Albrecht Ude:
- Online Research Means to Find, Save and Analyze Files from the Internet. Be critical when you view, read or analyze the files, look for metadata (or hidden data).
- Use different tools for your online research, such as browsers, addons and programs.
- Use more than one Universal Search Engines. Be informed, how search engines get their data, how they index them and how they rank results.
- Don’t forget about the verification – check, what you found! Always use Whois-Databases to check owner and date of a website.
- Use Wikipedia, but not like a source. Wikipedia may lead you to other sources, articles and links.
Albrecht Ude is one of the workshop trainers of the M100 Young European Journalists workshop and helps 25 young journalists from all over Europe to gain first-hand experience of an investigative journalism and online investigations.
About Albrecht Ude:
Albrecht Ude is working as a freelance journalists, researcher and research – trainer with a focus on structured online research, fact checking and communication security. He publishes in DIE ZEIT, ZEIT online, c’t, golem.de, Nitro, journalist, Message u.a. and teaches at universities, journalists schools, publishing houses and TV stations. Albrecht Ude is directing editor of the newsletter of Netzwerk Recherche. He focusses on internet censorship (e.g China), how to act against it and how to protect user and sources. His main aspects are research, IT & communication security, civil rights in times of the erosion of the rule of law, democracy and an open free society under the threat of increasing surveillance. Additionally he is blogging at recherche-info.de and calls out for more variety in the field of internet-research. Ude translates and commissions the german Text- E-Mail Newsletter Standard (TEN Standard). He also filed a suit against the first so-called data-preservation law and is one of eight agencies to expedited applications to the Federal Constitutional Court regarding the data-preservation law. He also is currently filing a suit against the second version of the bespoken law.
