Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

A leak of several million emails from the Israeli Ministry of Justice revealed a long-running lawfare operation aimed at shielding Israeli policies toward Palestinians from legal scrutiny in international and European courts, while also seeking to criminalize protest and advocacy against Israeli human rights violations. Spanning nearly 15 years and involving more than a dozen European countries, the emails are written mainly in Hebrew and show how several European countries collaborated with Israel to ensure impunity for its illegal occupation, paving the way to future war crimes. Media in Israel-Palestine are barred from reporting on the leak due to a gag order, making international collaboration essential. The leaked collection of MoJ documents have been indexed and made searchable for the public in the Library of Leaks by the nonprofit whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS).

This session presents how an independent journalist, working with European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and multiple European newsrooms, analysed and reported on the leak using straightforward, accessible methods. The investigation relied primarily on close reading, systematic memo-writing, manual timeline construction, and country-by-country mapping of key actors and legal strategies, complemented by cross-referencing the emails with publicly available records.

The talk will share practical lessons on making sense of large email leaks in multilingual contexts, combining leaked material with open-source and public-domain data, coordinating cross-border reporting under legal constraints, and maintaining accuracy through repeated verification and collaborative review.

More and more OSINT and data-driven investigations are being turned into documentaries for television and platforms. From the success of programs such as Cash Investigation in France, to Sweden’s flagship investigative show Uppdrag granskning, and internationally acclaimed documentaries such as the Oscar-winning Navalny (based on Bellingcat’s data-driven investigation) and the Emmy-winning Pegasus, data- , OSINT, and leak-based reporting is increasingly finding its way onto the screen.

But many journalists (specifically those who are not familiar with video production) are unsure whether their story is suitable for a documentary, or how to approach pitching, filming, security, or narration. This panel offers a practical methodology for turning an investigation into a documentary for journalists coming from print or online media. Drawing on concrete European case studies, we will explore how to pitch a documentary project to producers and broadcasters, when to start filming, how to protect sensitive data, and how to transform abstract data into compelling visual and narrative-driven storytelling.

After this session, participants will be able to:

-Assess whether a data/OSINT/leak-driven story is suitable for documentary storytelling
-Decide when and how to start filming during a data investigation
-Integrate audiovisual constraints (security, budget, narration) into their investigative workflow
 -Understand how to pitch a documentary based on a data investigation

AI-generated scam advertisements have flooded European social media platforms, using deepfake videos, cloned voices, and fabricated news stories to lure thousands of victims into fraudulent investment schemes. While the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) was designed to curb illegal and harmful content, these scams continue to spread at scale, exposing major gaps in platform enforcement and regulatory oversight.

This session will show how to investigate AI-driven scam ads and platform failure using publicly available tools, leaked material, and EU tech legislation. We will walk through how to find and identify and analyse AI-generated scam ads and deepfake content, use Meta's Ad Library to map scam campaigns, detect duplication and evasion tactics, and estimate scale. The session will also address how to collaborate effectively with civil society organisations and trusted flaggers to monitor platforms and access specialised expertise.

As part of the presentation, we'll also talk about how to investigate the Digital Services Act in practice, including transparency obligations, systemic-risk provisions and reporting mechanisms; how to document and report on failures of enforcement by platforms and public authorities, and how to connect platform-level analysis to human stories, including victims' experiences. That also includes how to responsibly handle leaked messages, call scripts, and fake trading platforms, balancing verification, security and ethical considerations.

The session will include concrete examples and live walkthroughs, showing how journalists can combine platform data, legal frameworks and human sources to hold tech companies and regulators accountable. 

Do you have questions or considerations about digital security? Do you need help setting up your hard disk encryption, or do you need advice on how to use a password manager? Would you like security advice on your personal software, hardware, or on precautions when traveling?

Bring your questions for a one-to-one session with our trainers. The individual consultations are suitable for small teams or individuals who have specific questions or face security concerns.

We will connect you with the digital security trainers, who may contact you before the conference to learn more about your concerns.

Topics:

• Hardening your devices
• Securing your accounts
• Spyware concerns
• Checking your digital footprint
• Whatever else you'd like to discuss!

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

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many European countries have increased their defence spending and awarded large new contracts to arms companies. Beneficiaries include US corporations such as Lockheed, as well as European firms such as BAE Systems, Airbus, Rheinmetall, or Leonardo. At the same time, these companies are making money by exporting weapons to authoritarian regimes, and their weapons could end up on the battlefields of Libya or Yemen. Some of these companies have continued to support Israel in its destruction of Gaza by selling weapons to the country.
How can such companies be investigated? Whistleblowers can occasionally help journalists to expose dubious deals and hidden manoeuvres. But arms deals can also be investigated without the help of an insider. Videos showing military vehicles can be geolocated. Satellite pictures reveal the locations of naval vessels. Tracking websites allow you to follow the routes of warships and aeroplanes. Company employees reveal the military projects they are working on on LinkedIn.

This presentation will demonstrate how open-source methods can be used to investigate the arms industry. Drawing on specific examples from recent investigations, it will show how these methods can be employed to shed light on the activities of companies such as a European missile-maker that supplied Israel with bombs used in Gaza, German engine manufacturers whose products are being used in Russian and Chinese warships, Turkey's breaches of the arms embargo in Libya, and the role of Airbus, as well as French-made warships in the war zone around Yemen. The presentation will also highlight the activities of a German arms giant Rheinmetall,, which sent personnel through an embargoed port in Eritrea to assist with the repair of Emirati naval guns in the Red Sea.

Everyone knows that you can track planes online. But how exactly do you use plane tracking tools, and how can they help you with investigative research in particular? That's what this workshop is all about. It's aimed at journalists who have only ever tracked their vacation flights, but it also offers tips and tricks for more experienced colleagues. (It can get a little nerdy at times, but hopefully never boring.)

This session will tackle questions such as:
-How do you use flight tracking sites for research?
-Can you really track all planes? And what do you do if they don't want a flight to be found?
-What are the advantages and disadvantages of different platforms?
-How does flight data help to verify other information from your research?
-What are the biggest stumbling blocks, and what do you need to watch out for?
-How do you access older data?
-And why are plane spotters your best friends...

The tools of the trade are explained with practical examples from real research cases. These include Russian sabotage and hijackings, kings on their travels, and smuggled wild animals.

Do you have questions or considerations about digital security? Do you need help setting up your hard disk encryption, or do you need advice on how to use a password manager? Would you like security advice on your personal software, hardware, or on precautions when traveling?

Bring your questions for a one-to-one session with our trainers. The individual consultations are suitable for small teams or individuals who have specific questions or face security concerns.

We will connect you with the digital security trainers, who may contact you before the conference to learn more about your concerns.

Topics:

• Hardening your devices
• Securing your accounts
• Spyware concerns
• Checking your digital footprint
• Whatever else you'd like to discuss!

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

Every slide in this presentation is hand-drawn. So is the thinking behind Cheatsheet, The New York Times' AI tool built from scratch for investigative reporters. We'll show what we built, in which cases we ditched off-the-shelf AI, and how we tested it with non-technical journalists.

The presentation will offer a practical roadmap for use cases (needle-in-a-haystack document search, mass translation, statistical analysis) plus an honest Dos and Don'ts list for AI in journalism and a first look at our open-source plans.

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.

Investigating data-driven stories on environmental health, long-term pollution, or biodiversity loss often means facing a structural problem: the data don’t exist, or have never been systematically collected, not even by public institutions. In these cases, the only option is to produce them from scratch.

This session presents a journalism-led methodology that integrates citizen science and social research as core tools of investigative data journalism. Developed through collaboration with scientists while preserving editorial independence, the approach is grounded in concrete case studies and practical experience.

Drawing on projects conducted with communities exposed to chronic industrial pollution, environmental degradation, and conflict, the session shares practical tools, workflows, and lessons learned for designing, collecting, validating, and using original data when datasets are missing.

Participants will learn how to:
-design and run a citizen science project for investigative reporting, from framing research questions and defining indicators, to engaging and training citizen scientists, data collection, quality control, and journalistic use of the data- establish effective collaboration with scientists during research design, data collection, and verification through shared protocols and a memorandum of understanding
- design a rigorous social research process to investigate community needs and priorities using surveys, interviews, and qualitative methods, including collecting and analysing texts to identify trends, patterns, recurring themes, and undercovered issues
- integrate community-generated data, social research findings, and scientific measurements into original investigations and engaging stories.

The session also demonstrates how this approach can generate multiple, high-impact outputs: original investigative reporting based on co-produced data, policy briefs grounded in empirical evidence, and social research outputs in scientific journals.

Investigating migration is becoming a difficult beat. Sources are vulnerable, data is scarce, and governments and agencies routinely block access to information. 

In this session, two journalists with extensive experience on migration reporting will share how they navigate these barriers to still produce rigorous, impactful reporting. 

Nidžara Ahmetašević from Bosnia and Lydia Emmanouilidou from Greece will bring complementary perspectives shaped by their respective contexts, from the Balkan route to the Aegean. Together, they will walk you through their recent investigations (both nominated for the European Press Prize) that exposed systemic failures despite limited access. You will leave this session with strategies for investigating migration using alternative sources, document trails, and innovative reporting when official channels remain closed.

Stories that will be referenced in this session: 
Mines, memory, and migration on Bosnia’s perilous border, by Nidžara Ahmetašević
Unaccompanied children sleep on the floor in shifts in Greece’s ‘Model Camps’. The EU is aware. by Lydia Emmanouilidou, et al.

This session will explore a new method: scraping on-screen text, using immense volumes of videos—from police dashcam videos to 24-hour news TV channels to fuel your investigation.

Antoine Schirer, a designer turned journalist, will share the methods and scripts he used for a 2025 Reporters Without Borders investigation to dissect months of programs of the controversial French news channel CNews.

Using Python, OCR, and fuzzy string matching, more than a million news banners were analysed to expose how the channel gets around broadcasting legislation.

We will look at other examples and invite you to discuss how to be creative with unusual - even non-existent datasets.