Student Work | Columbia Journalism School

Student Work

WIRED: Americans Identified by Twitter as Russian Bots

As part of Susan McGregor's Investigative Techniques course, students in the M.S. Data Journalism and Dual M.S. concentrations wrote about Americans banned from Twitter after their accounts were flagged as bots tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. Their story was published in the July 2018 edition of WIRED.

Data and investigative students from the ’17 M.S. class worked with Univision on an investigation of the Trump Organization’s international business. Their findings: 15 of 27 international Trump-branded real-estate projects include developers or investors who have faced criminal allegations, including corruption, fraud, and drug trafficking.

Students in Professor Mark Hansen's computational journalism class contributed to "The Follower Factory," a New York Times report on fake accounts in social media networks. It found that some 48 million Twitter accounts may be automated and designed to simulate real people.

Columbia fellows and Toronto Star reporters reviewed thousands of pages of bankruptcy and other documents in three countries and interviewed dozens of people in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Israel to uncover "How every investor lost money on Trump Tower Toronto (but Donald Trump made millions anyway)."

Four postgraduate fellows from the Class of 2017, contributed to the reporting by Propublica, WNYC and The New Yorker that revealed how Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. were nearly charged with felony fraud for misleading prospective buyers of units in Trump Soho, the family's 46-story condominium in Manhattan.

While enrolled in the data concentration, Kevin Sun, '17 M.S., examined how Australia is making covert propaganda videos to discourage asylum seekers from reaching its shores. What started as a Medium blog for one of his classes ended up running as a story for Quartz.

Data and investigative students Manuela Andreoni and Inti Pacheco, '17 M.S., worked alongside Adam Davidson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, on his investigation into alleged corruption involving Trump's deals in places like Georgia and Azerbaijan.

A six-month investigation by students in Prof. Giannina Segnini's cross-border investigations with data class resulted in a collaboration with Univision that showed how the cruise industry is one of the least regulated in the U.S., and how it shielded itself under the laws of tax havens from which it operates.

Students in the data concentration worked with the team investigating the Panama Papers, a trove of 11.5 million leaked documents. They researched the shipping industry's offshore links, providing data analysis and story leads to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Lydia Namubiru, '16 M.S. Data Concentration, is back in her native Uganda, working on a technology platform that will use text messages to connect professional journalists with sources in small towns and to aggregate the news from these communities. She is also teaching data journalism in Kampala. Read more about Lydia.