Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Italian non-profit newsroom IRPI published a year-long investigation into the supply chain behind the famous red shrimp of Mazara del Vallo, which is a premium 'Made in Italy' seafood product concealing a trail of illicit practices that threaten both marine ecosystems and market transparency.

Red shrimp is harvested through deep-sea bottom trawling in the Central Mediterranean, where a huge regulatory gap between EU fleets and largely unsupervised North African vessels has created a hotspot for overfishing and illegal transshipments. The investigation documents how Italian operators source shrimp caught by non-EU vessels through informal and often illegal channels, using vessel tracking data, ownership structures, and Global Fishing Watch's open AIS database to identify suspicious transhipment operations and anomalous fishing patterns.

The session will walk journalists through the methods, datasets, and investigative approaches behind the story -from detecting AIS signal shutdowns to mapping opaque supply chains- offering replicable tools for reporting on illegal fishing and environmental crimes in the Mediterranean and beyond.

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.

Stuck on something technical? Come talk it through.

Maybe you've got a folder of 800 PDFs and no good way in. Maybe a source sent you a database and you don't know where to start. Maybe your scraper broke the night before deadline, or you're staring at an Excel file with merged cells and dreams. Maybe you just want to know if the thing you're trying to do is actually possible, before you sink three more days into it.

Bring it to a one-to-one session with a data engineer. No prep required, just show up with the problem.

Things people often bring:

• Messy data that won't behave
• Scraping and extraction that's stuck
• An investigation idea where you don't know if the data exists
• A manual task you suspect could be automated
• When to use LLMs, and when not to
• Whatever else you'd like to discuss!

We may get in touch before the conference to learn more, so we can hit the ground running.
Please note: you need to book a time slot in advance. You can do it HERE.

Many journalists have published investigations, data stories, and visualizations across different outlets, but no single place to display all their work. In this hands-on session, participants will build a simple, professional portfolio website using GitHub Pages, creating a central hub where their work can live together, even without previous web development experience. By writing and modifying small pieces of HTML and CSS together, participants will see how a simple page can gradually become a polished portfolio.

To attend this session, no prior coding knowledge is required. Familiarity with GitHub or basic HTML is helpful but not necessary. After attending this session, participants will have a live portfolio website that they can continue improving and use immediately for job applications, pitching stories, or showcasing investigative work.

Participants should create a free GitHub account before the session: https://github.com/join. It is also useful to install Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

Data journalism projects often rely on manually executed scripts, spreadsheet updates, or code running on private computers. As investigations become more complex, span longer timeframes, or require regular updates, these methods become inefficient and unsustainable. Automated data pipelines offer a solution to these challenges.

This workshop provides an introduction to Apache Airflow, an open-source platform for automating and managing workflows. The session demonstrates how Airflow can be utilized to efficiently automate data journalism processes—from scraping to creating and updating visualizations. Participants should have basic programming skills.

After attending this session, the participants will know why and when to use automated pipelines and understand the basics of Airflow.

Stuck on something technical? Come talk it through.

Maybe you've got a folder of 800 PDFs and no good way in. Maybe a source sent you a database and you don't know where to start. Maybe your scraper broke the night before deadline, or you're staring at an Excel file with merged cells and dreams. Maybe you just want to know if the thing you're trying to do is actually possible, before you sink three more days into it.

Bring it to a one-to-one session with a data engineer. No prep required, just show up with the problem.

Things people often bring:

• Messy data that won't behave
• Scraping and extraction that's stuck
• An investigation idea where you don't know if the data exists
• A manual task you suspect could be automated
• When to use LLMs, and when not to
• Whatever else you'd like to discuss!

We may get in touch before the conference to learn more, so we can hit the ground running.
Please note: you need to book a time slot in advance. You can do it HERE.

As environmental and climate crises grow more complex, journalists are evolving to meet the challenge. Across Europe, reporters are increasingly working alongside scientists - not just as sources but as collaborators- to strengthen their investigations, boost their methodologies, and create more impact. This shift is the core of “expert-reviewed journalism” and this panel will explore how it actually works in practice. 

Drawing from investigative projects they were part of, three seasoned journalists will share how journalism-scientist partnerships are built, how trust is established, and how the roles are defined so the day-to-day work is fruitful and dream projects are done. The speakers will discuss practical realities, nerdy secrets and their lessons learned: how they managed data and workflows, navigated tensions between disciplines, and developed shared work practices where both sides work to reach the finish line while respecting each other’s professional lanes. 

Some of the projects that will be mentioned in this talk: 

The Forever Lobbying Project: https://foreverpollution.eu/lobbying/ 
The Green to Grey Project: https://greentogrey.eu/ 
Swampower: https://facta.eu/focus-on/swampower/