The NEXT-IJ Project to Empower Investigative Journalism
As corruption, organised crime, and financial misconduct grow more sophisticated, investigative journalism needs cutting-edge resources to expose wrongdoing. The Next-Level Data and Tools for Investigative Journalism (Next-IJ) initiative, funded by the EU, aims at providing journalists, newsrooms and media outlets with AI-powered tools, advanced data analysis capabilities, and enhanced cross-border collaboration networks needed to investigate in today’s interconnected digital landscape.
Transcrime and the School of Journalism of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, will partner with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) to achieve this goal. As leaders of Work Package 3 (WP3), we will develop and integrate data sources, tools and a risk-based approach, applying proprietary risk indicators and intelligence analysis. We will also carry out an analysis of potential legal and ethical issues to ensure that activities, tools and datasets comply with both applicable laws and regulations, and ethical considerations, to also develop guidelines for journalists (WP4).
As part of this initiative, Next-IJ is organising three online investigative journalism workshops on the following days:
- Thursday, 26 June 2025
- Friday, 18 July 2025
- Saturday, 20 September 2025
Stay connected:
Visit the project website: https://next-ij.eu/
Subscribe to the mailing list: https://groups.io/g/next-ij
Follow on LinkedIn and Bluesky
Latest news
View all news
Inside the Corruption Maze: Data-led Strategies to Investigate Corruption
Training session under the EU co-funded project SECURE 18 June 2026 | h. 10:00 – 14:00 CEST Online, via Webex Public authorities, law enforcement agencies and journalists face a paradox: while data is more abundant than ever, information fragmentation and saturation are capitalized upon by…
Integrity & Due Diligence – 3rd DATACROS III Training
“Identifying criminal red flags in AML Due Diligence for high-risk customers and supply chains” 24 June 2026 | 9:45 – 13:00 CEST Online, via Webex Criminal organisations are becoming highly adaptive economic actors, capable of embedding themselves into legitimate markets, supply chains, financial flows and service…
Assessing the Risk of Labour Exploitation in Legal Business Supply Chains
A new report presents the main outputs of the INVERT project (Identifying compaNies and Victims in the Exploitation phase to disRupt the financial business model of adult and child labour Trafficking), funded by the European Union and coordinated by Transcrime. The initiative addressed the need for new approaches and…
Transcrime awarded project SignAIL to counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference
Project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe programme The growing scale of online information ecosystems, combined with advances in AI and synthetic media, has increased the reach and sophistication of coordinated influence operations commonly referred to as FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference). Malicious efforts conducted by…
A new phase for the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
By Professor Ernesto U. Savona In times of fragmented politics and converging criminal threats, the idea of “Europe” must be reimagined not only in political and legal terms but also in cultural ones. Criminology, as the discipline devoted to understanding crime, justice, and security, cannot remain confined within national…
Why do some countries become drug trafficking hubs – and others don’t?
Phillip Screen, a researcher at Transcrime, completed his International Ph.D. in Criminology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in February 2026. In this blog post, he presents the main findings of his doctoral thesis: “Why some and not others? Challenging traditional narratives in understanding…
