Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

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.