Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Italian non-profit newsroom IRPI published a year-long investigation into the supply chain behind the famous red shrimp of Mazara del Vallo, which is a premium 'Made in Italy' seafood product concealing a trail of illicit practices that threaten both marine ecosystems and market transparency.

Red shrimp is harvested through deep-sea bottom trawling in the Central Mediterranean, where a huge regulatory gap between EU fleets and largely unsupervised North African vessels has created a hotspot for overfishing and illegal transshipments. The investigation documents how Italian operators source shrimp caught by non-EU vessels through informal and often illegal channels, using vessel tracking data, ownership structures, and Global Fishing Watch's open AIS database to identify suspicious transhipment operations and anomalous fishing patterns.

The session will walk journalists through the methods, datasets, and investigative approaches behind the story -from detecting AIS signal shutdowns to mapping opaque supply chains- offering replicable tools for reporting on illegal fishing and environmental crimes in the Mediterranean and beyond.

When covering a long-running conflict, finding new ways to tell the story and keeping audiences engaged is a big challenge, especially when the stakes are too high for events to pass unnoticed. As Russian journalists in exile, we have been reporting on Russia's aggression against Ukraine for more than four years. For the third anniversary of mobilisation, which sent hundreds of thousands of Russian men to war, we developed a new approach to illustrating the consequences of that aggression for Russian society itself. By narrowing our focus to one of Russia's 85 regions and drawing on a range of sources, we were able to establish the most precise casualty figures ever reported at that level, combining that data with carefully crafted storytelling. The result proved effective: the piece reached not only Russian audiences, but widely read globally as well.

Attendees will leave this session with both the inspiration to keep reporting on long-running events even when audiences show signs of fatigue, and concrete techniques for doing so. These include thinking outside the box, revisiting older sources that may hold new value, and combining different reporting methods -data analysis, interviews, and OSINT- to keep coverage of a long conflict fresh, rigorous, and compelling.

Stuck on something technical? Come talk it through.

Maybe you've got a folder of 800 PDFs and no good way in. Maybe a source sent you a database and you don't know where to start. Maybe your scraper broke the night before deadline, or you're staring at an Excel file with merged cells and dreams. Maybe you just want to know if the thing you're trying to do is actually possible, before you sink three more days into it.

Bring it to a one-to-one session with a data engineer. No prep required, just show up with the problem.

Things people often bring:

• Messy data that won't behave
• Scraping and extraction that's stuck
• An investigation idea where you don't know if the data exists
• A manual task you suspect could be automated
• When to use LLMs, and when not to
• Whatever else you'd like to discuss!

We may get in touch before the conference to learn more, so we can hit the ground running.
Please note: you need to book a time slot in advance. You can do it HERE.