Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Behind the polished facade of the multi-million euro football industry lies a darker reality. This presentation will take you inside two cross-border investigations into the opaque world of football sponsorships – tracking the unlicensed betting firms and crypto exchanges that now have a seat at the game’s top table.

The first exposed the influence and lucrative partnerships betting operators have with teams in more than 30 European leagues. The second uncovered the increasing foothold that crypto and investment companies have, revealing how unregulated sponsors infiltrated major sporting organisations.

We will explain how we obtained the underlying data and turned it into compelling stories connecting countries across the continent. The presentation will offer insights into the different tools and techniques we used – from trawling corporate accounts and financial registries, to exploiting Virtual Private Networks to assist with international research. We will discuss how these methods were used to build out investigative strands with international media partners and can be utilised for other cross-border projects.

The session will reflect on Swiss newsroom WAV Collective's year-long collaborative investigative projects – Invisible Walls and Big Business at the Borders – looking at automated border systems across Europe and asking who benefits from the push in AI in migration and border control.

Their reporting combined on-the-ground investigation in Greece with policy research in Brussels and institutional analysis in Switzerland and the U.K. They will give a step-by-step explanation on how they traced flows of money, data and accountability across borders and institutions.

What they'll cover in this talk:
- how to understand the systems, tools and implications of AI (even if you’re not a techie!).
- how to distinguish between proposed capabilities, funded projects, and implemented systems when it comes to reporting on tech.
- how to understand the functions of such systems, instead of relying on labels.
- And how to dissect the language that is often used to obfuscate real-world implications of tech.

Participants will learn how cross-border, collaborative teams can tackle investigations of complex, opaque systems that operate in regulatory grey areas and are often deliberately fragmented. Insights from this session will not only be valuable to colleagues working on similar topics, but useful to anyone investigating fragmented yet connected systems across different countries.

For more than eight years, we have been covering the housing crisis – locally and in a European-wide comparison. We investigated big corporate landlords, calculated rent affordability for key workers, explained how real estate speculation works, and investigated the complicated relationship between the climate crisis, energy costs, and housing unaffordability. We collected numerous datasets, interviewed scientists, politicians, and investors, and found ways to translate the data and abstract financial schemes into engaging and compelling stories for readers.

Now we want to share this knowledge with other journalists.

Come to our hands-on session where we will show you the most interesting datasets and modes of visualisations you can use for your own local reporting. We will explain different data-driven ways and methodologies for approaching the housing issue, which can be replicated in any European city, discuss different themes within the housing topic and what pitfalls to avoid, as well as what issues the current reporting is lacking and could be dug deeper.

Big pharma is responsible for inventing and manufacturing hundreds of life-saving innovative drugs, but often those medications come with a hefty price tag. The Cancer Calculus is a global cross-border investigation into how Keytruda, a life-saving cancer drug, is unaffordable for millions across the world and how pharma giant Merck protects their billions in revenue from it.

This session will examine the different tools pharma companies use to protect their revenues, from creating an impenetrable fortress of patents around their drug, to promoting higher doses that boost revenues and wild variation in prices worldwide.

The speakers will walk you through how they approached this complex investigation, the difficulties in unraveling the pricing knots, and what they learned along the way.

Journalists taking part in collaborations want equity and respect alongside impact, according to a 2025 poll by Lighthouse Reports. But what does that mean on the ground, and how can journalists advance equity in practical ways?

In this session moderated by journalist Hazel Sheffield, Lighthouse managing editor Hui Yee Tan will be joined by journalist and researcher Ruona Meyer. Together they will share the highlights of the survey and discuss its implications as well as practical needs of journalists in collaborations, and solutions to overcome inequitable relations in collaborative journalism projects.

Come with your own experiences and questions to share with experienced journalists in a safe, peer-to-peer environment, and openly discuss the things everyone else might be feeling are better left unsaid. 

Trusting your doctor is something you should be able to take for granted. Bad Practice, a collaboration co-led by OCCRP, The Times of London, and VG of Norway, exposed a European health scandal that has brought that into question.

The project identified at least 100 doctors who had been banned from practicing by medical regulators in one country but remained licensed to work in another. The stories have had a major impact, with governments across Europe and the European Commission pledging to crack down on the issue.

While a lot of cross-border projects rely on a central leak, this project required us to build a dataset from scratch by obtaining as many lists of doctors' licenses and doctors' medical disciplines as possible. This session will set out how we were able to make these findings, and the lessons we learned from building our database from fragmented records across jurisdictions, and then, once we identified likely matches, how we proved these doctors were still practicing. We would explain what went well, what didn't, and our ambitions for the future of the project as we add more countries from around the world to our database.

Attendees need no prior knowledge, just an interest in how to build cross-border investigations into regulated professions.

This panel will delve into the methods behind a months-long cross-border investigation that painstakingly revealed the industrialisation of the new “drop-off” method of cocaine trafficking in the Mediterranean.

What began with a single (but very dramatic) 2022 police operation involving two vessels near Sicily evolved into the reconstruction by the journalists of a transnational criminal system linking Latin American suppliers, Turkish traffickers, and European mafia. The journalists will explain how they moved from isolated events to identifying a coordinated fleet and uncovering the logistical role of key actors operating across jurisdictions.

The session will also focus on practical techniques: combining open-source maritime tracking data (AIS) with judicial records, seizure reports, and corporate registries to map connections between ships, companies, and individuals. Journalists will discuss how cross-referencing vessel movements with court documents and port data revealed patterns invisible to authorities at the time, as well as how interviews with prosecutors, law enforcement, and sources in multiple countries helped verify findings and fill gaps.

The panel will offer a step-by-step look at how to build a solid investigation that combines innovative data work with traditional reporting to expose complex criminal systems even before law enforcement fully connects the dots.

Non-consensual intimate content sharing is a growing problem, disproportionately affecting women and marginalized people, and increasingly amplified by deepfakes and automated tools. What looks like chaotic “leaks” online is often a structured, organized, and profitable ecosystem.

In this session, we’ll show how we uncovered networks that steal, share, and monetize image-based sexual abuse. You’ll see the technical approaches we use: tracking digital traces, mapping channels, analyzing hosting setups, entering abusive groups safely, and spotting patterns in offshore companies. We’ll also explain how to map networks of abusers by understanding their ecosystem of filehosters, cloud services, and CDN layers.

Finally, we’ll share practical tips to safeguard your well-being when investigating abusive material. By the end, participants will be able to turn overwhelming, chaotic content into actionable insights, exposing the organized systems that enable and profit from abuse.

Across Europe, university staff and students have been challenging their institutions' complicity in oppression and occupation in the Palestinian West Bank and genocide in Gaza. This has led to numerous research efforts from ad-hoc coalitions at universities across Europe uncovering their own university's ties to institutions engaging in and enabling this violence, as well as an uptick in interest in existing research, mostly done by actors not in establishment academia.

Academic Complicity (academiccomplicity.eu) is a mapping project collating the most recent research on this and displaying it in a form usable by journalists, activists and the public. The first database was set up for the Netherlands in Summer 2024 and has since spread to Belgium, Germany, France, and Norway. It is currently expanding to Denmark and, in late May, we will have published a new database on Horizon Europe collaborations across Europe.

In this session, we will talk about how we ensured safety and anonymity of our sources and how this affected our decisions; how we maintain the volunteer-run database; how we verify the data. We will discuss our design decision and rationale based on these factors and what lessons we learned from maintaining a database like this. This session is useful to journalists working in the theme of activist repression as well as those who want to build up databases via crowdsourcing. 

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans were tricked after receiving text messages on their phone claiming they had missed a payment at a toll road or that they needed to pay a fee for a parcel they ordered. Who is behind it?

In this session, we will share the methods that led us to unmasking the person calling himself “Darcula” - the lead developer of one of the major Chinese phishing-as-a-service platforms. The software Darcula created, called Magic Cat, is used by hundreds of scammers worldwide.

The presentation will also go into analysing a large throve of victim data shared by security researchers, re-constructing the phishing software, and infiltrating Telegram groups. The OSINT section will go into detail about using technical data sources and leveraging visual cues in photos shared by the criminals.

This investigation was led by NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) in collaboration with Germany's public broadcaster ARD and Le Monde.

Come to this session to learn more about Chinese cybercrime and how to investigate it, as well as hear more about the data trove the NRK journalists still have that might be relevant to your country.

The stories (in English) can be read here:
https://www.nrk.no/spesial/inside-the-scam-network-1.17399135
https://www.nrk.no/spesial/the-hunt-for-darcula-1.17399157