Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Processing natural language is seen as the task that artificial intelligence is most adept at. However, as journalists and researchers, we need our technologies to be explainable, understandable, and deterministic. Because of this, not all artificial intelligence algorithms are well-suited for our work. And, when every company promises that their AI software is extraordinary, it's difficult to distinguish the empty promises from what the technology can actually do. Working on OpenAleph, an open-source tool for investigative journalism, has taught us a lot about processing natural language. We extract names of people and companies from raw text. We try to infer the language a text is written in. The names of places, cities, and countries are crucial to us, in order to situate data geographically. All of this is heavily reliant on algorithms. But not all algorithms are as good as getting us what we want!

In this session, we'll show you what works and what doesn't. Everything we demonstrate can be used independently of OpenAleph, and integrated into your own workflows. Some machine learning algorithms are excellent at getting us more insights from our data. In addition to this, data that we already have, or public data, can be harnessed to help us identify names of people and places, just based on similarity - no AI required!

Finally, we'll discuss how these approaches compare to using large language models and generative AI. This session is half teaching and discussing common solutions, half workshop. For the workshop part, bring a laptop running Python if possible.

If you’re new to digital security, this hands-on session serves as a starting point to level up your security game. We aim at introducing the basics of digital security in an easy-to-understand and interactive way.
The session will start with a fun check of your current security habits and will be tailored to the participants’ needs based on their answers. We will give an overview of the most common online threats and share practical and easy-to-implement tips to improve both your personal and your team’s level of security. We will focus on how to harden your devices (both phones and computers) and secure your accounts, as well as how to encrypt confidential data.
After this session, you will have a better understanding of how to communicate and carry out investigations securely. You will leave with the knowledge and tools to protect your data, devices, and accounts.

Many journalists, disillusioned with traditional journalism outlets and shrinking media freedoms in their countries, decide to branch out on their own. In Europe, the number of public interest media outlets has been rising, but the sector consists mostly of small to medium-sized newsrooms. The Journalism Value Project found that half of the public interest media it surveyed (174) reported annual budgets of less than 200,000 euros and 70% of all surveyed centres were purveyors of investigative journalism. They found that the sector faced an uncertain future and other existential threats, such as legal, governmental, and similar.

In this panel, speakers will give guidance, tips, and a heads up to people thinking of branching out on their own, those who recently established their own media, and those who have been doing it for a long time. The panel will discuss the intricacies of establishing and running a non-profit media, and things you might have been thinking about.

How does a centre survive the first 2-3 years before funding begins to stabilise? How does the founder survive? What strategies can you adopt? We will also discuss the topics nobody told us about when we were starting out. For instance, if you’re a journalist, you will probably not do much journalism for the foreseeable future. You will need to find a way to manage journalists while being a journalist first yourself. You will compete for funding with your friends and colleagues. You may lose yourself and your personal priorities while trying to make ends meet for yourself and your team. How to navigate it all?

Join this panel to learn how not to make the same mistakes or miss the same opportunities as we did.

Independent newsrooms across Europe are facing a tough reality: grant funding is becoming more competitive, short-term, and unpredictable. This panel will explore the challenges small newsrooms encounter when forced to downsize, and how they can restructure teams, workflows, and output to continue producing quality journalism under financial pressure. We’ll also examine how one can try to secure new revenue streams - and how to pursue them without compromising editorial independence-and about the strain that sudden influxes of one-off projects and grants can place on already overstretched teams. Join us to discuss these challenges, share experiences, and learn practical, transferable strategies.

This presentation will examine various methodologies and share practical tips — as well as common challenges — when working with freedom of information (FOI) requests in “difficult” contexts. These include investigations into closed institutions such as the police or prison system, requests made under time constraints, or cases complicated by non-transparent governmental bodies.

Drawing on examples from the presenters’ work in Portugal and Turkey, we will discuss how to craft precise and effective FOI requests under pressure, handle incomplete or evasive responses from authorities, and leverage the human connection to follow up informally and obtain information.

We will also discuss how strategic litigation, formal complaints to state regulatory bodies, and public pressure campaigns can be used to compel institutions to release information. We invite FOI practitioners and FOI-curious participants to attend the session and share their own examples of successes (and failures) during the discussion.

Receiving a noteworthy tip is an achievement in itself, but it's almost never the end of the story. Where does your Signal application live? How can you safely share and store leaked documents? Oh, and what if they are -- gasp --malware? This is where the concept of OPSEC (Operational Security) comes into play.

However, discussing OPSEC practices can sometimes feel too detached from the reality of a working journalist. In this session, we will strive to make things more grounded. We'll conduct a live simulation of a leak throughout its lifecycle. We'll discuss OPSEC in practice and demonstrate how to use:- a hardened phone and PC OS (GrapheneOS / QubesOS), and- some lesser-known security and privacy tools (e.g., Dangerzone, Orbot, BlinkComparison)
Finally, we'll go beyond mere tool usage and share tips and lessons learned from past OPSEC failures and wins.

This is an intermediate session on the subject of security hygiene. We don't assume any background in engineering or security, and it should be approachable to anyone familiar with some basic concepts (encryption, anonymity, threat modeling) and tools (Signal, Tor), which we will use as the foundation for the rest of the demonstration.