Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Leaks remain a  powerful source of investigations, but they are becoming harder to handle, authenticate, and secure in an era of mass leaks, AI-generated forgeries, surveillance, and legal pressure on newsrooms.

This hands-on session offers a practical, step-by-step methodology for journalists working with data leaks today, from first contact with a source to post-publication decisions. Based on real investigative cases and newsroom practices, the session focuses on decision-making, security, verification, and workflow, rather than theory.

The session walks participants through the full lifecycle of a data leak, using concrete examples and tools:

- How to evaluate a leak: source motivations, credibility, red flags, and public-interest tests
- How to decide whether to investigate (or walk away) without wasting newsroom resources
- How to verify authenticity in an era of AI-generated documents and manipulated leaks
- How to protect sources, data, and journalists throughout the investigation
- How to make smart editorial, ethical, and legal decisions under pressure
- What to do with data after publication (retain, restrict, destroy, or share)

If you have been through the Digital Hygiene session at Dataharvest, or are otherwise already aware of the baseline of digital security, you are now ready to advance to the next level.

In this session, we will dive deep into threat modelling as well as the tools and tactics to know about if your investigations involve a high degree of risk to your sources, your collaborators, or yourself.

The goal of the session is that you are able to make informed choices by assessing digital risks specific to an investigation and selecting the appropriate systems and strategies to manage them consistently.

Do you want to learn how to translate your ideas into budgets, explore different financial scenarios, draft budgets for grant applications, and improve your financial reporting? Join the budgeting cafe to ask anything you’ve always wanted to know about journalism finance.

Please note: you need to book a time slot in advance. You can do it HERE.

Court decisions are treasure troves of verified facts—but they're often locked in dense legal documents that the public never sees. This session will present a specific methodology for extracting, contextualizing, and translating judicial findings into compelling multimedia narratives that serve human rights advocacy, accountability, and education.

We want to present the methodology we developed in the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina - BIRN BiH - on how to connect court findings into coherent narratives, translating court-verified facts into accessible, informative, and educational content.

We will use three BIRN BiH developed databases to demonstrate our methodology. Additionally, we want to present how we used court facts to develop educational tools. Many journalists and human rights documentalists treat court records as supporting evidence for stories. This session will show how court decisions themselves can be the primary story—and how systematic extraction creates accountability infrastructure that outlasts individual articles or projects.

Are you working on cross-border investigations that lead you to physically cross a border? Are you crossing borders with devices that hold information on your sources? Do you know what data is stored on your phone and how it could be accessed at a border? If this is you and you want to find out how best to protect yourself, then this session is for you!

Your devices hold a significant amount of information on you and your sources. At a border, this data could be accessed, copied and stored, putting you and others at risk. Join us for this 75-minute session, organised by ACOS Alliance, where you will be given clear, practical guidance to help you navigate the uncertainty around securing your data at the border. 

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.