Welcome to the Knight Center’s new low-cost advanced course, “Investigative Reporting Now– OSINT and other cutting edge tools and techniques.”
Throughout four-weeks, students will learn about the latest techniques for gathering information and disseminating it, including Open Source Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, satellite imagery and various forms of data journalism.
We’ll discuss how each innovation relies on rock solid investigative reporting, a clear hypothesis, detailed reporting and editing plans, open communication (especially in collaborations) and comprehensive fact checking, editing and presentation plans.
This is a course designed for investigative reporters and editors looking to ramp up their skills and experiment with new reporting tools and storytelling techniques. But younger ambitious journalists already dabbling with these techniques are welcome too.
“Investigative Reporting Now” is an asynchronous course, allowing you to log in and complete activities at your own pace throughout the week.
Every Thursday, Lise Olsen will host optional live sessions on Zoom from noon to 1 p.m. (Central time) to discuss the week’s topics. These sessions will be recorded for those who can’t attend.
The course materials are organized into four weekly modules:
Module 1: Planning Complex Investigations
Module 2: Using Data Journalism and OSINT Techniques
Module 3: Cutting-Edge Tools in Investigative Reporting
Module 4: Polishing and Presenting Investigative Stories
Lise Olsen is an investigative reporter, editor and author who has uncovered many twisted tales, including crooked judges, an unjust execution, massive environmental disasters, myriad cases of corruption, and unsolved serial killings.
She’s investigations editor for the Texas Observer magazine and her work has also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, NBC News, Inside Climate News, Texas Monthly and other outlets.
Over the years, her investigative reports have contributed to the prosecutions of a former congressman and a federal judge, inspired laws and reforms, helped solve cold cases, restored names to unidentified murder victims, and freed dozens of wrongfully-held prisoners.
Her first book, Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the Secret System that Protects Them and the Women who Blew the Whistle, won the 2022 Investigative Reporters & Editors book award and the Texas Institute of Letters’ nonfiction book award. Her new book, The Scientist and the Serial Killer, will be published by Random House in April 2025.
Her reporting has been featured in several documentaries: Paramount+ The Pillowcase Murders (2024); Netflix’s The Texas Killing Fields (2022), about a series of grisly murders spanning several decades; CNN’s The Wrong Man (2015) on the innocence claims of executed offender Ruben Cantu, and the six-part A&E series The Eleven, (2017) about Olsen’s work to reinvestigate a prisoner’s confession to a string of unsolved serial murders in the 1970s.
She has prevously taught MOOCs for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and presented at conferences and workshops in a dozen countries. She is a former board member of Investigative Reporters & Editors and currently serves on the board of jurors for the Latin American Congress on Investigative Journalism (COLPIN).
Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas
300 West Dean Keeton
Room 3.212
Austin, TX, 78712
Telefone: 512-471-1391
Email: journalismcourses@austin.utexas.edu
