Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Comparing the size of glacier 100 years ago to today is a strong message on the impact of climate change without many words. This idea – to visualize gradual changes by contrasting the world some decades ago with today – can be a powerful way to engage new audiences for climate stories. Sources for this kind of structural analysis are often available but untapped: Old guide books, maps and other materials existing only in print.

Through an example on the industrialization of ski resorts, we will show how old guide books and other analog materials can be a treasure trove for climate journalists and how they can use it efficiently, even if the amount of paper seems intimidating.

In the session we will discuss potential story leads and which guide books (or similar) to look out for. In the second part, we will discuss strategies and tools to extract information and organize data, and tools that might be useful for extraction. We will also demonstrate how AI tools might help, where manual work is needed and which non-AI tools might speed up the work, even if you don’t consider yourself a data journalist.

Did you know: since July 2024, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have disclosed over 55,000 meetings with lobbyists and collectively declared more than 1,800 side jobs, including roles linked to registered EU lobby organisations? Or that of the over 23,000 lobby meetings disclosed by the European Commission, only less than one in five was held with civil society organisations? This expanding body of public data enables systematic analysis of lobbying exposure, conflicts of interest, and undue influence risks in EU decision-making, and has become a key resource for investigative reporting to break stories across the EU.

During this session, we will examine the practical investigative applications of Integrity Watch EU (IW EU), a near real-time transparency and data aggregation platform on the interactions between the private sector and over 2000 EU officials. IW EU collates all available data on MEP and European Commission lobby meetings, MEP side activities, and lobbyists registered on the EU’s Transparency Register. It is part of the wider IW eco-system of platforms, deployed in 23 European countries, enabling cross-border linkages with national integrity data such as political donations, lobby registers, or public procurement procedures.

Participants will receive a technical introduction to the new real-time monitoring features of IW EU, including its underlying data sources, legal disclosure frameworks, and analytical functionalities. We will go hands-on to learn how data sets can be queried, cross-referenced, and contextualised for investigative purposes. This session is suitable for beginners, and no data journalism knowledge is required.

Data journalists have traditionally thought of maps and spatial calculations as a job for special mapping software, like QGIS. But it's often more efficient to do GIS work within the same script that you perform the rest of your analysis.

In this session, you will see how easy it is to work with GIS within your code and share interactive maps with colleagues. To follow along, participants should have some experience in data journalism and a curiosity about the relationship between data and maps.

This session will introduce participants to a new world of possibilities for doing spatial analysis in code. While participants will benefit from simply observing, those who want to run the code should have R Studio installed https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/

Do you want to untangle complex corporate webs, uncover money laundering schemes, or gain transparency into international business structures? Book a personal time slot to explore how to use North Data for your specific investigations.

As a versatile tool for OSINT and data analysis that journalists can use free-of-charge, you gain access to 23 countries, more than 86 million companies, and 152 sources. Discover how to:

* Dig Deeper: Navigate commercial registry files, financial statements, and patents._
* Spot Red Flags: Use CEO changes and network centrality as early warning signals._
* Avoid Pitfalls: Understand country-specific data quirks and registry landscapes._

Sign up for a slot HERE and bring your specific research questions.

Every human inhales 14 kg of air per day, and air pollution caused by human (e.g., road traffic, industrial process, agriculture) and natural (e.g., wildfires, dust storms) processes affects everybody on the planet, contributing to a growing list of health impacts. The composition of the atmosphere also plays a critical role in the climate system. A wide range of observational and model data are available for analysing the distribution and timing of air pollution episodes and their possible impacts. Yet navigating these datasets and understanding what they can reliably show is not always straightforward.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) provides a wide range of open datasets on emission sources, atmospheric composition, and air pollution covering past, present, and future conditions, that can support your air quality reporting.

In this session, you will be guided through the CAMS data landscape: where to find key datasets, how they are built, what they can (and cannot) tell you, and common pitfalls to avoid.

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.

Behind headlines about record-breaking temperatures, extreme events affecting millions, and long-term climate trends reshaping ecosystems and our environment lies a wealth of datasets used to track how our planet is changing and better make sense of these events. Yet navigating these datasets and understanding what they can reliably show is not always straightforward.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) provides a wide range of open climate datasets covering past, present, and future conditions that can support your climate reporting.

In this session, you will be guided through the C3S data landscape: where to find key datasets, how they are built, what they can (and cannot) tell you, and common pitfalls to avoid.

As wildfires become more frequent and intense across Europe, attracting growing public and media attention, journalists need solid methods to analyze fire data over time. But building a dataset is only the beginning. This session goes beyond the story to explore how to sustain and adapt a data project over more than a decade, using Civio’s Spain in Flames as a case study.

In this session, we'll share best practices for long-term data journalism: designing datasets that can evolve, working with fragmented official sources, handling changes in definitions, revising past data responsibly, and deciding what comparisons remain valid over time. The talk covers both data processing workflows and visualization strategies that hold up as your project grows.

In the context of increasingly severe wildfire seasons, this session offers replicable methods and tips for building climate data projects that last and that can inform responsible reporting for years to come.