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After a successful hackathon and three intense, wildly inspiring conference days, the seventh edition of the European Investigative Journalism & Dataharvest conference closed on Sunday 21 May. We sifted through the tweets and storified the #EIJC17.

In our hyper-connected era, struggles for power increasingly take place in the digital realm. Hence, the digital lives of journalists who try to denounce injustice have increasingly become the target of cyber attacks, organised on behalf of powerful players under scrutiny. 

Most Americans these days get their main news from Google or Facebook, two tools that rely heavily on algorithms. A study in 2015 showed that the way a search engine like Google selects and prioritises search results on political candidates can have an influence on voters’ preferences. 

In "Hearing Voices", a cross-border and multidisciplinary team of journalists dug into the science of speech recognition and its use as forensic evidence. Based on more than 20 judicial cases where forensic phonetics evidence was used, the team, with amongst others Michele Catanzaro and Astrid Viciano, discovered that this evidence is all too often flawed, with far-reaching consequences. 

What is the potential impact of algorithms in journalism? What is the power of algorithms and why should it be at the top of a journalist’s to-do-list? Our second keynote speaker, Nicholas Diakopoulos, is a computational journalist with a background in computer science and human-computer interaction. He will give his keynote address at our annual European Investigave Journalism and Dataharvest Conference this May. The conference will take place from 18th until 21st May in Mechelen, Belgium.

BRUSSELS - Citizens are freeing themselves from political parties and party-newspapers, instead they go looking for news themselves and via new  media. At the same time media turn from playing a role in society to focus on profit. In such an environment journalists must free themselves from the media and become entrepreneurial. They must emancipate themselves, argues Ides Debruyne.