Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Processing natural language is seen as the task that artificial intelligence is most adept at. However, as journalists and researchers, we need our technologies to be explainable, understandable, and deterministic. Because of this, not all artificial intelligence algorithms are well-suited for our work. And, when every company promises that their AI software is extraordinary, it's difficult to distinguish the empty promises from what the technology can actually do. Working on OpenAleph, an open-source tool for investigative journalism, has taught us a lot about processing natural language. We extract names of people and companies from raw text. We try to infer the language a text is written in. The names of places, cities, and countries are crucial to us, in order to situate data geographically. All of this is heavily reliant on algorithms. But not all algorithms are as good as getting us what we want!

In this session, we'll show you what works and what doesn't. Everything we demonstrate can be used independently of OpenAleph, and integrated into your own workflows. Some machine learning algorithms are excellent at getting us more insights from our data. In addition to this, data that we already have, or public data, can be harnessed to help us identify names of people and places, just based on similarity - no AI required!

Finally, we'll discuss how these approaches compare to using large language models and generative AI. This session is half teaching and discussing common solutions, half workshop. For the workshop part, bring a laptop running Python if possible.

If you’re new to digital security, this hands-on session serves as a starting point to level up your security game. We aim at introducing the basics of digital security in an easy-to-understand and interactive way.
The session will start with a fun check of your current security habits and will be tailored to the participants’ needs based on their answers. We will give an overview of the most common online threats and share practical and easy-to-implement tips to improve both your personal and your team’s level of security. We will focus on how to harden your devices (both phones and computers) and secure your accounts, as well as how to encrypt confidential data.
After this session, you will have a better understanding of how to communicate and carry out investigations securely. You will leave with the knowledge and tools to protect your data, devices, and accounts.

Many journalists, disillusioned with traditional journalism outlets and shrinking media freedoms in their countries, decide to branch out on their own. In Europe, the number of public interest media outlets has been rising, but the sector consists mostly of small to medium-sized newsrooms. The Journalism Value Project found that half of the public interest media it surveyed (174) reported annual budgets of less than 200,000 euros and 70% of all surveyed centres were purveyors of investigative journalism. They found that the sector faced an uncertain future and other existential threats, such as legal, governmental, and similar.

In this panel, speakers will give guidance, tips, and a heads up to people thinking of branching out on their own, those who recently established their own media, and those who have been doing it for a long time. The panel will discuss the intricacies of establishing and running a non-profit media, and things you might have been thinking about.

How does a centre survive the first 2-3 years before funding begins to stabilise? How does the founder survive? What strategies can you adopt? We will also discuss the topics nobody told us about when we were starting out. For instance, if you’re a journalist, you will probably not do much journalism for the foreseeable future. You will need to find a way to manage journalists while being a journalist first yourself. You will compete for funding with your friends and colleagues. You may lose yourself and your personal priorities while trying to make ends meet for yourself and your team. How to navigate it all?

Join this panel to learn how not to make the same mistakes or miss the same opportunities as we did.