Dataharvest 2024 | The European Investigative Journalism Conference Session: "Self Defense When Dealing With Disturbing Imagery"

June 1, 2024
1:45 - 3:00pm
Mechelen, Belgium
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Many journalists are exposed to violent material - and not just those on the scene of events themselves. If you are investigating war crimes or sexual violence, you can experience distress without ever leaving your desk. This session offers a highly practical dive into how to protect yourself against the unwanted impacts of vicarious trauma exposure. We’ll be talking about workflows: different ways of viewing distressing content, how to configure your machine and what it takes to manage these issues in teams. And we’ll be discussing the fundamentals of self-care that anyone investigating traumatic situations and immersing themselves in disturbing content needs to know.
 
Gavin Rees is Senior Advisor for Training and Innovation at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Since 2008 he has been working as a trauma awareness consultant and trainer for newsrooms, media-support organisations, and journalism schools across Europe as well as internationally. Recently his work has focused on developing new approaches to working safely with traumatic images, dealing with online harassment and working ethically and effectively with victims and survivors of profound human rights abuses, such as forced labour, torture and sexual violence. Previously, Gavin produced business and political news for US, British and Japanese news channels, and has worked on drama and documentary films for the BBC, Channel 4 and independent film companies. Gavin is a board member of the European Society of Traumatic Stress Studies and the UK Psychological Trauma Society.

 

Benjamin Strick is a digital investigator with a background in law, military and technology, specialising in open source intelligence (OSINT), investigations, influence operations, data and maps. Ben is the Director of Investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience and leads teams in the use of open source intelligence (OSINT) to support civil society, media, governments and accountability mechanisms, with a strong focus on Ukraine and Myanmar. He has applied these skills to document human rights abuses and war crimes across the world working with international media to create multi-award-winning investigative documentaries and assist civil society. He shares his passion for open source investigations through free YouTube tutorials to democratise these skills. Ben was previously an open source investigator with BBC Africa Eye, is a Bellingcat contributor and co-founder of Ocelli Project. In 2021 he was awarded Open Source Intelligence Champion of the Year for investment, commitment and contribution to the field. Ben is known for investigating Cameroonian executions, taking down influence operations targeting human rights, documenting a massacre in Sudan, tracking drones in Libya, documenting destroyed villages in Myanmar, investigating arms exports, identifying deceptive networks in India, investigating human rights abuses in Myanmar and finding John McAfee.

Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is a meeting point where networks are established and nurtured, data and documents shared, cross-border projects conceived and teams established. The conference days are all about learning, inspiration and getting some work done.

The conference is like a European editorial meeting: Participants develop story ideas, get together in new networks to work on a common story or sit down with coders and designers to analyze and present a new data set. Editors talk about how to best structure the work process or how to best protect freedom of expression in practice. This is how Dataharvest works. 

Participants range from senior investigative editors and journalists at established media and production companies to freelancers and journalists at non-profit outlets and junior journalists working on agenda setting projects.

What makes Dataharvest, The European Investigative Journalism Conference, unique:

  • It is a working conference, where international teams meet and coordinate. Numerous stories have begun at the Dataharvest conference.
  • It is a learning conference – with systematic training in CAR, digital safety collaborative methods and other relevant skills.
  • It is an innovation conference – with knowledge sharing about new business models and new journalism techniques in a time of dramatic changes in the media world
  • It is a networking conference – because stories don’t stop at the border. We actively stimulate the networking to build new teams for stories and collaborations
  • It is a knowledge sharing conference – where speakers from successful and important journalistic projects and newsrooms give presentations, head workshops and share their experiences.

The very first Dataharvest meetings were held in 2009 and 2010, when a small group of journalists and data developers of the Farmsubsidy.org network met to work with fresh data about the beneficiaries of the EU’s generous farm subsidies. They were organized under the auspices of Farmsubsidy.org, a network working for the transparency of EU farm subsidies.

By 2011, the meeting took its current form and was given the title Dataharvest, open to all interested journalists, 35 at the time. It opened up to groups outside the Farmsubsidy.org community, inviting journalists, transparency experts and coders – all in the field of European, cross-border, collaborative, investigative and data journalism. The working atmosphere from the early years was maintained as the number of participants kept growing.

Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is arranged by Arena for Journalism in Europe and in 2023 attracted around 550 journalists from 51 countries.