One thing that struck me in Ben Taub’s reporting was the use of OSINT and internet data to track otherwise secretive figures like Halabi. CIJA investigators, for instance, found his Facebook accounts and tracked his location via pings on his Skype profile. My favorite detail was when Taub found his Whatsapp profile, with a photo of the man himself on a bridge somewhere in Hungary. I’m continually surprised by the information that be gleaned simply from carefully looking at public data with some amount of patience. In my news story, I cover a new report from a lab at Yale that tracks Ukrainian children who have been forcibly deported to and re-educated in Russia. The lab’s work often starts with social media posts, the lab’s director told me. Russian officers at a repurposed summer camp or military base might snap a photo with Ukrainian children and post it (publicly) to Telegram, Twitter, or Facebook, seemingly unaware that it has been geotagged. Investigators can also confirm activities relevant to Russification through posts or even satellite images.
Taub’s reporting clearly blends in-depth reporting alongside extensive documents, such as the hundreds of Syrian government records collected by CIJA that were seized by rebels during the civil war. But in some ways, the narrative feels a little too dry and clinical, nicely lifting from the transcript of an asylum interview without further color. Taub’s best moments were clear scenes, of him mocking on Oliver Lang’s old apartment door or of Lang’s personality-filled texts to his boss. Patrick Kingsley’s reporting, in contrast, manages to meld extensive, quoted interviews — although there are clearly parts that are more fuzzy around the edges — with important cues about demeanor and emotion that are sometimes more informative than the quotes themselves. I thought Mikhail’s technique of blocking out an entire story, as she does about midway through the assigned portion, was surprisingly effective. At the price of losing the specific context in which that story is being told to the writer, you earn a much more vivid and immersive depiction of her frame. This move also allows her to clearly bring out the voice of the original source — although storyteller is evidently a much better description. That’s of course not not possible with the parts of Taub’s reporting that relied heavily on documents. Sometimes, document-based stories are impactful enough on their own to deeply impact readers. More often, though, it seems that journalists should work to blend reports with human narrative, like we saw with Azmat Khan last week.
