Behind the Scenes of Using Web Scraping and AI in Investigative Journalism

While the work of investigative journalists sometimes involves engagement with anonymous resources for hidden information or even undergoing, threads for good stories often lie on open sources that can be accessible to everyone. For this reason, the web scrape has been necessary for journalists in the last few decades. Recently, developments in AI have provided another way to upgrade the reporter's toolkit.

Why is web scraping important to journalists?

Web scraping is the automatic data collection from the Internet using specialized software tools known as web scrapers. As a solid way of collecting data, it can be used for both good and bad. The general public often hears more about the latter, expressing the belief that web scraping is something shady that is perhaps banned in full. However, when the case that the outcome threatened to produce web scraping illegally appeared before the United States Supreme Court, it was journalists who stood against it. An Investigative NonProfit Newsroom, Markup, has filed a short Amicus Possession That web scraping is essential to democracy.

This is not an overstatement. In some cases, web data extraction tools allow journalists to keep government agencies responsible. By scraping public information, investigators can check if the data supports the official position, report to otherwise ignore anomalies, or uncover negligent data management skills of state institutions.

In addition to Tracking disinformation Spreading throughout the web will not be possible without automatic solutions. Artificial intelligence can boost this spread by easily developing fake visual and audio content. In the bright side, AI-powered scraping tools can also be monitored, recognized, and removed such fakes.

Web scraping also allows journalists to uncover stories from criminal underground. Here, the work of the journalistic and forensic investigator resembles each other. Both types of investigators can use data scraping to detect human trafficking activities and illegal markets.

How to use the latest tech for high quality journalism?

Journalism of the investigation now is closely related to Data Journalismthat uses data as the main resource for investigation and reporting stories. However, not all journalists are data scientists, analytics, or coder. And even for tech-savvy journalists, ways to use web scraping and AI tools for journalism are not always straightforward. Some things can help journalists start.

Use tools without-code

Tools and tutorials are available for those who do not possess coding skills that believe in data power to release relevant stories. Some journalism scraping advocates share online content with the use of tools without code and provide tips for abducting web scraping in investigations and storytelling. For example, a person may seek guidance from fellow journalists in the Investigative Journalism Network to Use Free browser extensions such as Data Miner to retrieve data from the web.

Think about scale

Sometimes, the work of journalists is more difficult by the abundance of information rather than shortage. This is clear on the Internet, where reality can be publicly accessible but drowning in greater disinformation than even an army of people can quickly tight.

Thus, one way to approach a scraping-based investigation is by thinking about threads of stories that are impossible to follow manually. For example, if you have noticed some weakness reporting, you may want to review all the articles written by the same reporter. However, searching for them manually can be difficult and hourly. With the web scrape, you can quickly discover that the amount of articles themselves prove your suspicions.

This happened when the data scraping tools helped Show that 38,000 articles published in the same year in the war on Ukraine characteristics author to the same “journalist.” Thus, real journalists can open fake journalism of non-existent people with the help of proper scraping tools.

Let AI read and connect the dots

While web scraping will help journalists get large data sets, AI tools are appropriate to help with this data. These tools have been used for many years to study the imagination of the satellite, which will take immense personnel, time, and resources to make manu -man. Recently, the New York Times used ai Only in this way can it boost its findings in the Gaza bombing.

However, journalistic investigations often involve reading documents and placing pieces scattered with a lot of textual information. This needs to be done when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) holds 11.5 million documents consisting of “Panama Papers.” A few years later, ICIJ cooperated with the Stanford AI Lab to learn how to enroll the emerging machine studies (ML) The value is learned of such a different -benefit cooperation.

To a more Recent casesA Filipino journalist used Openai's feature, which allows you to create agents at the top of Chatgpt to come up with one that can help Journalism of the guardian. The custom agent can read and summarize many pages of auditing reports and other official documents to identify potential new angles. Without the solutions, journalists will have to spend a lot of time in a report while governments can publish thousands of them each year.

Ethical gathering data and using AI

Strict guidelines of ethical journalists follow when conducting investigations also apply to the use of data and AI scraping solutions. Journalists are advised to identify their scrapers on the website if possible. In some cases, however, it will ruin the investigation. For example, journalists can only achieve their goals using proxies IPs when monitoring illegal activities in dark web forums and markets. They can only prevent the hackers by hiding or targeting their true identity online.

In addition, journalists should take care of the data they have gathered and stored to avoid breaking the laws or leaking sensitive information. In this area, specially trained AI can help manage data collection activities so that important public data is targeted. However, AI itself should not be trusted with the final decisions when reporting a story. Ultimately, human administration, journalistic integrity, and domain expertise remain the most important investigation tool that AI does not threaten.

Conclusion

Data journalism is an integral part of investigative journalism. Both web scraping and emerging AI technologies strengthen journalists' work and help track the elusive threads of amazing stories behind the mountain data. In the future, AI tools will likely be used more for the development of story ideas, catching anomalies, and commemorating the findings, among many other activities. Meanwhile, the power of the web scraping to extract the value from public data and reveal what was hidden in simple vision could make it a specific tool of Investigative Journalism in the 21st century.