Investigative reporters are getting together via the Internet for hi-tech international probes. Foot-in-the-door reporters with notepads are becoming a thing of the past.
So says the Washington-based International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) in a report published on its IJNet network. “The image of the investigative journalist as a lone wolf, working in his cubicle in a corner of the world, isn’t so true anymore,” Marina Walker Guevara, of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is quoted as saying.
The ICIJ calls itself a collaboration of some of the world's top investigative reporters. Launched in 1997 as a project of the Centre for Public Integrity, ICIJ globally extends the Centre's style of watchdog journalism, working with 100 journalists in 50 countries to produce long-term, trans-national investigations and using “technologies and tools that are revolutionising reporting.”
A recent ICIJ investigation into the illicit global tobacco trade called on 22 reporters in 14 countries, spread across a dozen time zones. With such a far-reaching team, reporters followed the story “from counterfeiters in China and renegade factories in Russia to Indian reservations in New York and warlords in Pakistan and North Africa,” according to ICIJ’s website.
During the 13-month investigation, the team used “a secure, collaborative online workplace to chat, share documents, photos and videos, and edit each other’s work.” The final product, “Tobacco Underground”, exposed a multibillion-dollar illicit trafficking business contributing to crime, corruption, terrorism - and ill health - around the world. The findings are available in a multimedia package that draws on the public records, human sources and raw footage captured by ICIJ reporters.
Like “Tobacco Underground”, many of today’s investigative stories require months, even years, of research and large teams of reporters. Many are multinational. And reporters are tackling them better than ever before, according to ICIJ director and “Tobacco Underground” lead editor David Kaplan.
“Investigative reporting has gone global,” Kaplan says. “Its use is exploding to the far corners of the world, even in places you wouldn’t expect, where people can get killed for reporting the wrong thing.”
As newspapers cut costs, more than 50 non-profit investigative centres have sprung up worldwide. Global networks such as ICIJ – made up of 100 journalists in 50 countries, and currently looking to expand – are providing the platform for reporters to connect for cross-border investigations, while other centres operate on a more local or regional basis.
In some repressive media environments, journalists are finding ways to conduct investigative journalism by reporting on less controversial topics, such as financial and consumer issues, health issues and the environment. “In China, you can’t report on the communist party, but you can report on corruption on the local level," Kaplan says.
The Chinese magazine Caijing, for instance, has distinguished itself as a beacon of investigative reporting in the region, by angling their reporting through finance and financial investigations, Kaplan says. In Syria, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism has sponsored consumer reporting on food safety.
“The important thing is that you establish a methodology – you get a generation of reporters trained in how to do this kind of reporting,” Kaplan says. “The rest will come.”
Even in countries with independent media, investigative stories come with their own set of challenges. In ICIJ’s case, during “Tobacco Underground”, language, cultural and technological barriers proved challenging, as did working across time zones. Plus, reporters in different regions had different levels of training, and varied reporting styles and standards, Kaplan says.
“For example, undercover work is widely regarded to be a last resort in U.S. journalism,” he explains, “which is not true of a lot of our colleagues, working in countries where going undercover might be the only option.”
In China, Pakistan and Russia, the “Tobacco Underground” team went undercover, and captured footage that appears in the final multimedia product. In some instances, a button-sized camera was used. In China, ICIJ reporter Te-Ping Chen went undercover posing as a smuggler from Amsterdam. In the tri-border area of South America – where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina intersect – reporters shot from inside cars using polarized lenses.
Such footage adds visual and audio supplements to the print reporting in “Tobacco Underground”, which gives readers multiple ways to access information. In addition to 18 text stories, “Tobacco Underground” includes audio and photos of a paraplegic smuggler from El Paso and a former FBI agent who posed as a member of the Italian mafia. Video brings readers into an underground cigarette factory in Russia and behind-the-scenes of the trade in China. An interactive map allows viewers to visualise smuggling routes, contraband cigarette production and key shipping points. And an extensive resources page provides links to outside information.
Because of the nature of the story, with its characters and complexity, multimedia was conceived as a central component of the reporting from the beginning, Chen says. “It’s always the challenge with investigative journalism: taking masses of information – in this case a black market of $600 billion worth of smuggled cigarettes – and breaking it down and making it something that’s accessible to one person who is sitting at their desk or computer,” Chen says.
Still, readers will find 4,000-5,000 word stories and reports in the traditional investigative style on the “Tobacco Underground” site. Print newspapers across the world have translated and carried the story, and the report is available as an e-book.
“We think technology is great, and we certainly tried to use as much as was available, but what drove the story was the reporting, and the fact that these ICIJ reporters really know the terrain and the sources, and they can open all these doors,” Guevara says.
Kaplan, who has more than 30 years of investigative reporting experience around the world, says that today’s investigative reporters have to use technology as “the great equaliser” because so many resources are being cut.
ICIJ is currently putting major resources into expanding the UJIMA Project, a collection of databases, documents and other information for journalists, currently only in Africa. Once it goes global, journalists around the world will be able to access foreign agent registrations, weapon sales documents, development contracts, UN data and more with just an online search.
“Newsrooms are smaller, news holes are smaller, and we just don’t have the resources we once did,” Kaplan says. “One thing we do have is great tools and techniques that we didn’t have in the past.”
Last month, ICIJ was honoured at the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, in Washington, D.C., for “Tobacco Underground”. The story has also raised the profile of the issue of global tobacco smuggling, including among the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, and country delegations.
But even with new ways to report, investigative journalism as a craft remains rooted in the same principles it was founded upon, Kaplan says, and requires the same skills: how to think about stories systematically, how to think about multiple sourcing, how to look up public records, how to interview and how to follow trails – trails to people, trails of money, trails of accountability.
He compares investigative reporters to “good cops and honest prosecutors,” who are “driven by the hope to leave the world a little better than how they found it.”
“We dive deeply into complex subjects, and we look at whether people in a given society who have power are exercising that power in an accountable way,” he says. “That’s how you investigate.”
IJNet END
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
