Bridging journalism and justice: what we learned in Perugia
Lessons from our events at the International Journalism Festival
Mid April, Starling Lab joined Airwars, IrpiMedia, Paper Trail Media, and Videre to co-host a closed-door side event at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The event – Bridging Journalism and Justice – brought together journalists, investigators, and legal practitioners for a technical conversation about one specific problem: how journalistic documentation of atrocity crimes can be preserved, verified, and managed in ways that support future accountability efforts.
What we discussed
The conversation was organised around four themes: (1) OSINT and verification workflows; (2) secure archiving and evidence management; (3) controlled capture and metadata capture tools; and (4) standardised documentation templates.
Deliberately avoiding providing a “List Of Tools That Will Solve Your Problems”, I tried to instead situate the growing necessity of considering data integrity to make images count in court . The key to a legal claim about digital material rests on three things: authenticity (is this the genuine article, tied to a source we can interrogate?), integrity (has it been altered?), and chain of custody (is there a documented record at every handoff?). In practice, the strongest evidence is evidence that can explain its own history.
This is not only about admissibility in a strict legal sense. Several things can undermine otherwise useful material: unclear provenance, missing timestamps, no record of who handled a file, and unlogged edits or compression. Courts may treat these as reliability problems, and unreliable evidence gets discounted or excluded.
What tools help; and what’s underused
The tool landscape for capture and preservation has matured considerably. Capture apps like Proofmode, eyeWitness to Atrocities, and Numbers Capture Cam help journalists and human rights defenders embed useful and immutable metadata at the point of documentation; online archiving through the Internet Archive and tools like Webrecorder and evidx.de enable content longevity without risks of top-down censorship and removal; and an emerging set of technologies that bind provenance and custody metadata to files across their entire information lifecycle
But the category most participants agreed was underused was simpler: investigation plans, policies and procedures, and asset management – the unglamorous work of being able to find your own material, track its handling, and quote from it confidently months or years later.
The needs we identified
A few threads ran through the whole conversation:
The journalists and investigators in the room were not looking for new applications. They were looking for ways to make good practice fit into what they already do. The friction of adopting parallel workflows is a genuine barrier – we need solutions tailored for what already works
The gap between “we documented this” and “this is usable” is often a habits gap more than a tooling one. Consistent use of any system, even a simple one, beats intermittent use of a sophisticated one.
Raising the bar for “verified content” risks systematically disadvantaging those who cannot meet technical thresholds: communities in conflict zones, witnesses without institutional backing, sources who shared material in difficult conditions. Any serious framework needs to grapple with this.
Preservation is a starting point, but managing consent (who agreed to what, under what conditions), including over time, is an ongoing obligation that most current workflows handle poorly.
What we’re working on
The group is reconvening to attempt to address several of these gaps directly, and we’ll be sharing more on this work in the coming months. As for Starling Lab, the approach remains focusing on integrating evidence-quality workflows directly into the tools journalists and investigators already use–rather than asking them to adopt a separate system. The lab has some fantastic collaborations coming soon in this space. Stay tuned!
Also, If you’re interested in our support for a project like this collaboration with Airwars, funded by IJ4EU, be in touch!