Atribuição: Dornicke (CC BY-SA 4.0)

O Museu Nacional de Belas Artes é uma ótima atração para o fim-de-semana no Rio de Janeiro pros que gostam arte. O espaço é grande, mas não o suficiente para cansar demais as pernas do visitante, o que é ideal; além disso, contém obras clássicas de pintores e escultores brasileiros consagrados, com um acervo mais voltado para o século XIX, ainda que também existam exposições menores com arte moderna brasileira.

Dito isto, o museu parecia um tanto subutilizado à época da minha visita, com certas áreas fechadas aos visitantes. A falta de ar condicionado na maior parte dos salões também não ajudou a atenuar o forte verão carioca, que acaba cansando o público ao longo da visita.

Sempre é possível melhorar, mas num quadro de crise como o que vivemos, o museu acaba se ressaltando pela qualidade do acervo e da curadoria, assim como pelo bom estado de conservação do edifício e das instalações, todos acima da média em comparação com outros museus cariocas.

CC-BY-SA 3.0

CC-BY-SA-2.5 CA

CC-BY-SA-2.5 CA

CC-BY 4.0

CC-BY 4.0

What is integrity? We expect governments to act in the public interest, to root out corruption, to uphold the rule of law. We expect businesses to follow the law, to pay their fair share of taxes, to not abuse their power. We expect nonprofits to act in accordance with their mission, to avoid wastefulness, to be transparent.

The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) is an investigative journalism nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that’s dedicated to documenting abuses of power in these and other institutions. It defines itself as nonpartisan and has indeed conducted many investigations across the political spectrum.

Although its name and location might suggest a “think tank” type organization, CPI is fully focused on producing journalism – often published in partnership with other news outlets.

Funding and Executive Compensation

Founded in 1989, CPI had revenue of about $9M in 2015. According to its Annual Report, almost all of its revenue comes from grants and donations. Most of its support comes from large gifts and grants (many from the typical foundations that fund journalistic work); in 2016, CPI received $210K in donations smaller than $250.

As of November 2016, CPI’s CEO is John Dunbar, an investigative journalist and CPI veteran. Because of the recency of his appointment, compensation information is not available yet; his predecessor received $301K from the Center in 2015, which is squarely in the middle between ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting in terms of executive compensation.

CPI states: “We maintain a strict firewall between funding and our editorial content.” It publishes its editorial standards which include a requirement for full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and a commitment to avoid such conflicts where possible.

Reporting

Compared with ProPublica and CIR, CPI has a stronger focus on institutions, both public and private. With regard to government, since 2001, no news organization other than the New York Times has filed more Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits than CPI, according to a report by the FOIA project. These types of lawsuits are necessary to challenge government over-classification of materials.

The recent CPI report regarding what amounts to a massive gift to the insurance industry by the taxpayer-funded Medicare program is an example of an investigation that was made possible through a FOIA lawsuit.

CPI investigates both Republicans and Democrats, and I was not able to detect a bias towards either group. The report on ambassador postings for donors to the Obama campaign is a good example of data-driven journalism targeting the Obama administration, while CPI also reported in detail on the perks and access offered to big donors to Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Businesses are far from immune from CPI’s investigations. In 2014, CPI received a Pulitzer prize for an investigation which revealed “how doctors and lawyers working at the behest of the coal industry helped defeat benefit claims of coal miners who were sick and dying of black lung disease.”

After the 2008 financial crisis, CPI published some of the most in-depth reporting on the links between banks that received bailout money and the subprime lenders that caused the crisis. Through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which it launched in 1997 and which it houses, CPI has helped bring about the most important investigations into tax havens and offshore banking in recent history, including the Panama Papers investigation.

CPI publishes a running log of all corrections.

Website, Licensing

CPI’s website is easy to read and offers section views for its primary ongoing investigative domains (e.g., politics, business, environment). The content is not sensationalized, and as with other investigative sites, you’re probably more likely to read an investigation of interest to you through a social media or RSS feed than by going directly to the site. Content is generally in text form, and the site looks reasonable on mobile devices.

Donation appeals are visible but not annoying. Stories use Facebook comments as a discussion system; commenting guidelines are buried in the terms of use, and I did not see evidence of moderation (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). Content is under conventional copyright and sometimes cross-published to other news media. In general, CPI is a cathedral-style journalistic organization with limited community engagement.

The Verdict

I would recommend CPI without reservations for your RSS or social media feed. The institutional focus distinguishes it from ProPublica and CIR, and this focus has led it to dig into some of the largest scale, most systemic abuses in areas such as the financial services industry. Its incubation of the International Committee for Investigative Journalists was a brilliant move in that regard, since many of the most complex tax avoidance schemes are international in nature. This makes CPI/ICIJ truly indispensable.

It’s not surprising that an organization with “Integrity” in the name does a good job with organizational transparency. Financial documents and annual reports are easy to find, and the donor information is comprehensive. In spite of all these editorial and operational strengths, CPI still has a relatively small online presence – 74K followers on Twitter, 83K on Facebook.

Doing more to engage (and involve!) readers through these channels without compromising on its strengths may help build a larger audience, which in turn may translate to more bottom-up funding. Given that CPI, ProPublica and CIR are all nonpartisan, we might also hope for more collaboration between them in future.

Because of its high impact business and government investigations, I give CPI 4.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up. It is now also in the Twitter list of quality nonprofit media.

Local bastante agradável, com temática surfista e cozinha 100% vegana. Há uma loja com artigos a venda e o local também aluga caiaques para quem quiser se divertir no Canal da Joatinga. É uma casa modesta, mas bem decorada e com um ar bastante descontraído e relaxante.

A comida em si é deliciosa, embora venha em relativamente pouca quantidade. O preço também é bem salgado: pedindo uma porção de petiscos (bolinhos de feijoada), o prato do dia e mais a bebida já é suficiente para atingir a marca dos R$45, então certamente não é um restaurante para se ir com frequência.

Apesar de tudo, vale muito a pena conhecer, degustar e prestigiar um dos poucos espaços veganos na cidade. Aproveite para ir em uma ocasião especial e ganhe alguns mimos do gerente ;)

Bozeman Science is one of those YouTube channels you probably have never heard of that’s managed to become very, very popular. As of this writing, it boasts more than 500,000 subscribers, and its most popular videos (e.g., “A Tour of the Cell”). have been viewed millions of times. It is run by Paul Andersen, a high school teacher and education consultant from Bozeman, Montana (a small US city known as the location of the first contact between humans and Vulcans, at least if you watch Star Trek).

Many of the videos are on subjects relevant to biology: photosynthesis, cellular respiration, gene regulation, gene editing with CRISPR, and so on. Andersen also explores topics in chemistry, physics, statistics, and – especially recently – education itself. For example, one video introduces the educational practice of modeling instruction, where students are asked to develop their own models to explain how a scientific phenomenon works, which they then reason about with other students and the teacher.

These videos do require focused attention and a willingness to research the occasional bit of jargon. Andersen moves relatively quickly through his content, so although a video might only be 5 minutes long, you might have to watch it 2-3 times and consult some additional materials to “get it”. That’s not really frustrating, since Andersen has the calm and confident voice of a good teacher and is easy to listen to.

The videos use plenty of illustrations, and Andersen takes pains to overlay textual corrections to note errors in the original recording. If you’re going to check out one of his videos, I would make it the introduction to CRISPR gene editing, since it remains a very relevant topic and is also a good example of his teaching style.

Andersen relies on donations to support his work, but he does not appear to have plans to turn it into a larger franchise like Khan Academy. As it is, if you’re into science (or prepping for exams), I recommend subscribing to the channel and checking in from time to time for topics that may interest you.

In 1977, long before the Internet gave new life to nonprofit media, Bay Area journalists David Weir, Dan Noyes, and Lowell Bergman founded the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in Oakland, CA. The nonprofit organization’s mission is to create investigative journalism that “sparks action, improve lives and protects our democracy”.

It did so initially by working primarily with other news outlets. A first major collaboration was a 1978 exposé by Kate Coleman and Paul Avery regarding the Black Panther Party and its involvement in organized crime, including murder. Since then, CIR has produced deep investigations about all sectors of society, for example:

• “Reasonable Doubt” (with CNN), a 2007 investigation into poor quality controls at forensic crime labs

• “Dirty Business”, a 2009 documentary about the myth of clean coal

• “The God Loophole”, a 2016 investigation of abuse at religious daycare facilities

CIR has received numerous journalism awards, including a Peabody, and the organization was a finalist for a Pulitzer prize in 2012 for its investigation of earthquake safety of California schools.

This focus on wrongdoing in any part of society makes it similar to the younger, NYC-based ProPublica, and indeed, in many ways, CIR is its West Coast counterpart. The two organizations had nearly the exact same amount of revenue in 2014 ($10,324,242 vs. $10,324,275) and draw funding from similar sources, primarily foundations and major gifts.

Unlike ProPublica, CIR does not provide a breakdown of its revenue by source, but it does provide a list of supporters, which includes Gates, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Open Society Foundations, Hewlett, MacArthur, Knight, and many of the other big names in philanthropy. An editorial independence policy is meant to make it clear that such support does not influence reporting.

One notable difference between the two is executive compensation. CIR pays its Executive Director a total of $232K, while ProPublica’s highest compensated “co-executive” makes $429K. CIR does not publish an Annual Report, but it does use an open source impact measuring tool to produce whitepapers documenting the real world effects of some of its most notable investigations.

As an older organization, CIR had to transform itself for the Internet. It now publishes its investigations on Reveal, which features in-depth reporting, podcast episodes, videos, and occasional data journalism. The grouping of investigations (e.g., “Hidden abuses under the watchtower” for its Jehovah’s Witnesses investigation) makes the current focus areas reasonably clear.

While it utilizes text, audio and video for its reporting, in many other respects, Reveal is very old school. There is no commenting system, content is under conventional copyright (as opposed to a Creative Commons License), and the heading “Get involved” only leads to an ask for donations.

The Verdict

As with ProPublica, the universal search for abuse (and the heavy reliance on conventional funding) can make it harder to address system-level issues such as inequality, climate change, electoral injustice, or mass incarceration. Efforts like CIR’s are therefore no substitute for values-driven journalism that provides consistent emphasis on systemic injustice.

On the other hand, the Center’s investigations into all sectors of society do help people to learn about (and act on) abuse and wrongdoing within their communities. On that basis, I recommend following Reveal, and the feed is now part of the Twitter list of quality nonprofit media. 4 out of 5 stars.