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.

Human rights violations in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and correctional facilities are particularly difficult for journalists to uncover: those affected are isolated, authorities are opaque, and data is often fragmented or non-existent.

How can we investigate places that hardly anyone has access to? What methods can we use to get a glimpse behind the walls or fences of those facilities? How do we obtain data? What evidence can support our investigation?

In this presentation we will explore ways to obtain information, access those closed institutions, strengthen the investigation, and develop strategic approaches.

The session will cover:
- Strategies for gaining physical access as a journalist to prisons and detention facilities
- Using Freedom of Information requests to obtain documents and datasets
- Working with fragmentary or missing data and still finding a story in there
- Building, protecting, and maintaining sources in highly sensitive environments

The presentation is aimed at investigative reporters, data- and document-driven journalists, and FOI enthusiasts who want to strengthen their ability to report on closed institutions and other hard-to-reach environments. Participants will leave with concrete tools, workflows, and ideas they can apply to their own investigations.

Reporting online today, journalists have to battle astroturf campaigns, fake news sites and sketchy shell companies to find out who is behind the story. It frequently leads to a frustratingly common question: who is behind this website?

Popular tools and approaches to investigating websites have been less reliable lately. There's more opaqueness in areas where there should be more transparency; crypto payments add a layer of confusion, and generative AI makes it easy for adversarial actors to operate hundreds of websites.

Using a range of OSINT tools and real-world investigations, we will walk you through investigating the provenance and ownership of websites: identifying the scope and scale of the network it belongs to — if any? Who’s behind the site, now and in the past? Who are the main actors promoting this website? Is it AI slop? Are foreign actors likely behind the domain?

While it is not always possible to fully unmask the owner of a site, using a thorough checklist of tools and techniques that we have used in real-world investigations we can help you make sure to reveal as much as possible about a website, and potentially uncover important clues. We will also walk you through how to conduct these investigations safely depending on your threat model, and how to document your findings reliably.

 This session is suitable for beginners and doesn't assume existing technical knowledge.

Police work is notoriously difficult to investigate. While police actions directly affect fundamental rights and guide politics and law-making, official data on their influence is scarce.

In this session, we will share some tools and methodologies on how to investigate the police sources. We will draw on more than ten years of investigations into different aspects of police violence and state abuse of power in Germany. We will also show how the data-driven journalism tools can help to make the underlying structures more visible, and present our recent investigation into police unions in Germany: who they are, want they stand for and how they influence the public debate and politics. We pieced together data from different sources and combined it with investigative journalism to draw the full picture.

We want to show how it is possible to do a data-driven investigative story despite missing data. We will focus on the following questions:

- How to build your own datasets when no official statistics exist? Which public data sources about the police are available? Which data can we get from ministry inquiries? What about social media?
- How to clean up, classify and analyze the data? Which tools are helpful in combining manual and automated workflows?
- How to tell a complex data-driven story without this one headline? What are judicial and editorial hurdles when publishing a sensitive topic?
- What can investigative and data journalists gain from close collaboration? What worked well? What would we do differently?

In this session, we’ll show you how we approached a sensitive topic: mapping the potential exposure of all schools to the use of pesticides from surrounding agricultural activities. We will explain  how - working with scientists - we came up with a robust methodology,  found the data we needed and then crunched it to tell us where to go to make truly data-driven reporting on the ground.  

This investigation, published in Le Monde in December 2025, has sparked a lot of national and local interest thanks to its interactive map. Attendees will leave the session with a clear step-by-step guide to get started and adapt the ambition of the investigation to their own capacity. Feel free to bring with you any datasets that would help to map similar issues in your country.

You can read the main story in English here
Free access to the map in French here