2025-01-30 16:00:35
There were approximately 100 definitions of community the last time I looked, and the only thing they had in common was that they referred to human beings. “Ah,” commented a colleague. “So we leave chimpanzees out?” For our purposes today, yes. Chimpanzees are beautiful animals, but they do not form communities that support independent media. Humans do. I will propose to you that this is the core of our current work — not simply or merely building audiences, but instead building communities around and with us.
The Stakeholder Media Project (SMP), which I co-founded at INSEAD with Luk Van Wassenhove and Maria Besiou, argued that so far as media are concerned, a community may be formed through practice or interest. It’s a place, physical or emotional, where people care about the same things, or are doing the same things. Their media — because everyone owns some kind of media today — serve those values and interests. They exist to promote the community, to protect its values and interests, and to prevail over adversaries.
We can call media that embrace this model “community-powered journalism,” as Kevin J. Davis and I wrote, or “stakeholder-driven media” (SDM, as opposed to MSM, “mainstream media”). In business scholarship, where the nature of stakeholders came to salience through Ed Freeman, a stakeholder is someone who can affect or is affected by an organization. We are affected by corporations, oligarchs, political leaders, as well as by our neighbors, who collectively make up a place. We can also affect them, as journalists and actors of a community. Like all journalism, this emerging game is about power. Also like mainstream journalism, a lone voice is more easily lost. Whether or not we wish to take sides, we will need someone on our side.
If you wonder what SDM look like, think of Reddit, where a multitude of communities of interest co-exist. Or for that matter, the reports of financial analysts, some of whom have loyal investor followings. Or the thriving little industry of “horror stories” websites and Reddit groups about AirBnB, sponsored in some cases by the company’s competitors. Or the OCCRP, a community of journalists, and civil society organizations like Transparency International that oppose oligarchy and impunity.
Greenpeace is in a class of their own. They declared in 1995 that Greenpeace would henceforth be a media organization as well as an activist force. Thirty years later, Greenpeace is a significant online and print publisher of environmental news and investigations (disclosure: I collaborated with them on a project in 2017). Their worldwide community includes three million donating members, and 70 million social media followers. The project I did with them was spurned by French MSM, for whom Greenpeace is a quasi-enemy of the state, but that didn’t matter, because 150,000 French people downloaded it, and networks of online environmental outlets promoted it. That was a so-called natural experiment — could you generate impact through SDM, even if MSM ignore you? Yes.
Can you generate impact without SDM? Despite the legend of Watergate, the short answer is no. That question was first and best studied by David L. Protess et al. in their landmark book, “The Journalism of Outrage.” They found that results follow from coalitions between journalists and civil society actors. Anton Harber, whose journalism contributed mightily to the fall of Apartheid, said that the movement’s success depended on a coalition of journalists, civil society, and lawyers. We are still learning about collaboration — it’s been little more than a decade since trans-border projects became a force — and working with people besides journalists is much of what we have to learn.
Since I’ve opened the can of misinformation, let’s eat the contents. We are on the front lines of a war, in which personal or political gain is captured through lying. I thank my brother Richard Hunter, who’s writing a book on the subject, for this insight: We are fighting as individuals, and the other side, led by states and oligarchs, has gathered armies — of bots, the online equivalent of drones; and of poorly-paid, obedient liars. Misinformation is a low-risk, low-cost, high profit industry, enabled and concealed by online platforms whose view of privacy favors theirs over yours.
And we have to give up another illusion: A neutral approach to issues and personalities will not succeed with many communities of interest. The objectivity, or reality, of facts continues to matter to many (not all) communities, and those are the ones we want to join. With rare exceptions, however, the idea of “objectivity” as the last neutral force in the room is no longer sufficient to sustain a credible offer. What the communities we seek want — whether it is the community of pharmaceutical investors or the front porches down the road — is not merely an objective chronicle of their troubles, and certainly not fantasies or lies that grow those troubles. (If that’s their inclination, they’ll find communities that resemble themselves.) The communities we serve want to feel protected, served, recognized, and informed in a way that advances their interests.
Their members already know what matters, and they’ve come to us to help figure out what to do about it. The community wants actionable information that helps make things better, for them and those they care about. They do not expect us to be neutral about what we believe and desire. They expect us to be transparent — “this is what we want, this is how we will get it.”
A media that serves these interests can be profitable for its owners and employees, and valuable to its community. Its scale will be determined by the size of that community. At the top end of the scale, Bloomberg began as a data service for financial professionals; the news was icing on the cake, but it did add value and enable expansion to other customers.
Bloomberg joined an existing community, and Greenpeace built one. These are the only two workable strategies we saw at the Stakeholder Media Project, and I haven’t seen more since before the pandemic. Certainly, you can’t change an existing community, and it’s very hard to capture one (as Murdoch learned long ago with MySpace, and as Elon Musk is now learning with “the social network formerly known as Twitter”). Even Reddit faltered when its editors went on strike, because they were key actors in the user communities they served.
Stakeholder-driven journalism is not the same vocation as the press that we learned about in journalism school, and which has been in secular decline for decades, as an employer, a trusted voice, and an economic proposition. For a still-growing sector of the heritage or mainstream media, the current business model is to sell to an oligarch and do as he (nearly all are men) directs.
That entails other losses. The fundamental return on investment in oligarch media is to present one’s views, more or less subtly, in order to direct public opinion and channel debates, or to profit from the power. (In Georgia and Moldova, it is to take and hold the power on behalf of Russia.) If the community — one part of a larger audience, in this case — moves away, all that return is threatened.
You can’t betray your core community and expect to stay in business, unless Sugar Daddy has deep pockets. On the other hand, if you stand with the community in a crisis, they will not let you disappear. If you do something to make their lives better, they will want you to be there to do it again. This isn’t a pious wish. I’ve seen it happen at a number of media — the Kyiv Independent and The Fix are great recent examples — that have invested in serving readers and communities concerned by Ukraine, for the former, and independent media professionals for the latter.
Numerous independent media are developing a community-based model, though not always consciously. Some, like ClimateIntegrity.org, are very conscious of it. They exist to provide high-level data and analysis to prosecutors and lawyers who are considering whether and how to sue Big Oil. Their monthly audience is under 30,000, but their audience happens to be the people who have a direct and urgent need for Climate Integrity’s product.
The answer to the first question – repeat – is not “everyone,” despite the fact that we create public records. It’s “whoever has a personal or professional interest in what we’re doing.” That’s the core. If we don’t reach them, we will not survive.
The answer to the second question — what do they need to know? — is not, “what we think they should know.” That’s been the answer for decades, either from arrogance, or in the name of “giving a voice to the voiceless” (in current parlance, “the vulnerable” – a word I dislike, because it implies helplessness, and our job is to awaken strength). There’s a better answer: We can listen more closely to the voices people already possess. (Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson of the Solutions Journalism Network calls this “elder” and “local” knowledge.)
Meanwhile, communities need watchdogs, and if we can’t bark, we’re useless. That’s part of protecting the community.
We can also help build the futures they want; if they don’t want the same future that we do, and we can’t persuade them to rethink, it’s time to find another community. If we’re doing our work of protection, promotion and prevailing well, someone else will need us. These are skills we can carry forward, luckily, because we are obliged to learn them.
One example of what we’ll learn: What is it like to investigate your own community? I’ve done it more than once, and I can’t say it was fun. My friend Hugh Wheelan, who co-founded Responsible Investor — yes, investors have communities too — found himself in an unpleasant conflict with a prominent member of the community who posed a danger to it. It wasn’t fun for Hugh either, and he and his media survived by reporting the story fully. He made an enemy, and he made a lot more friends.
You may not care for investors, responsible or not, but that’s irrelevant here. What matters is that an independent media must erase the notion that our work as journalists has nothing to do with the business side of their enterprise. Why do so many journalists still imagine that they are not in business? Ah, yes: Because all sorts of compromises against nature and ethics occur regularly, or might, on the other side of the Chinese wall. (I spent two years selling ads at the start of my career). It’s nonetheless absurd, for a start, not to invite our business staff to co-develop projects that add demonstrable value for the community and show us how to capture some of that value for our media.
In Korea, Yongjin Kim, the founder of Newstapa, which made a president fall and is now under state pressure, built his enterprise on a community of 40,000. In 2023, I heard his plans for a complete industry infrastructure, based on launching communities, schools, and media aimed at providing reliable truth. There are similar ideas in what the Kyiv Independent is doing. Beyond the details, there is transparent ambition, one I’d call noble — to renew journalism from the ground up, through a community of believers and actors. I haven’t heard a better idea yet.
This is what is emerging around us, this is the fight we are going to win.
Editor’s note: This column by Mark Lee Hunter is an abridged version of a keynote speech delivered at Lithuania’s Investigative Journalism Festival organized by Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT and the Lithuanian Journalism Centre. This excerpted column was published in the opinion section of The Fix (where it can be read in full), and is republished by GIJN with permission.
Mark Lee Hunter is an author, scholar, and investigative journalist. He is a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and an advisor to the Investigative Media Lab at the University of Georgia.
2025-01-29 21:21:30
The fossil fuel industry plays a central role in the climate crisis, accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. Despite international pledges to achieve net-zero emissions, the consumption of oil, gas, and coal continues to rise, driven by a concentrated network of influential corporations and state-owned entities. Investigating this complex and opaque industry is a critical task for journalists seeking to uncover hidden agendas, greenwashing campaigns, and the true impact of fossil fuel production on vulnerable communities.
In this GIJN webinar, journalists will learn key strategies for probing the fossil fuel industry, guided by insights from GIJN’s forthcoming Guide to Investigating Fossil Fuels, which was supported by JournalismFund Europe. A panel of expert journalists — all of them chapter authors of the guide — will share their experiences and tools for exposing the industry’s role in the climate crisis, investigating private and state-owned enterprises, analyzing regulatory policies, and evaluating the credibility of proposed climate solutions. Whether you’re new to the topic or looking to deepen your expertise, this session will provide practical advice for impactful reporting on one of the world’s most pressing issues.
Megan Darby is a writer and strategist on the IISD Energy program. Before joining the organization, she was the editor of Climate Home News, an award-winning independent media outlet specializing in the international politics and diplomacy of the climate crisis.
Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate change reporter from Alberta, Canada, home of the largest oil sand deposits in the world. He is a regular contributor to DeSmog. His work has been instrumental in unveiling the industry’s influence on climate policies and highlighting the consequences of unchecked corporate practices.
Fermín Koop is a reporter from Argentina specialized in the environment and climate change. Based in Buenos Aires, he is the Latin America managing editor at Dialogue Earth. He is the co-founder of Claves21, a network of environmental reporters in Latin America, and a university professor of journalism.
The moderator is Amy Westervelt, an award-winning investigative journalist and the founder of Drilled, a podcast and media outlet that uncovers the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate misinformation and greenwashing. She brings a sharp focus on holding corporations and governments accountable for their environmental impact.
Watch our Twitter feed @gijn and newsletter for details on future events.
Date: Thursday 20 February 2025
Time: 09:00 AM EDT – What time is it in my city?
2025-01-29 16:00:14
Multimedia journalist Tina Xu was taken aback the first time she came across an unmarked grave of a migrant in Lesbos — a Greek island and a main arrival point for people crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
“It left a very deep impression on me… some [graves] have stones that just say ‘unidentified’, some have stones with no markings at all. Some have no gravestone, it’s just a rock… and then some have no rock at all, it’s just a stick,” she tells GIJN.
“So when I saw that, I began thinking ‘people’s last memories are here. If relatives come searching for them, how would they even know?’”
The question led Xu to team up with multimedia and investigative journalist Gabriela Ramírez. Soon, a transnational team of journalists formed, spanning some of Europe’s most deadly borders, and the team began applying for grants to investigate the issue.
These were the main questions the team sought to answer: How many of these graves are there across Europe? What happens to someone who goes missing at Europe’s borders? What about their families?
Together, the team identified 1,015 unmarked graves in 65 cemeteries across the past 10 years, located in Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta, Poland, Lithuania, France, and Croatia. Each unmarked grave represents a person who lost their life en route to Europe.
Their thorough and visually striking investigative reporting on unmarked migrant graves, Europe’s systemic neglect, and the human cost of the situation, was published in 10 countries across 20 outlets. Journalismfund Europe and IJ4EU provided funding, while the Limelight Foundation supported Unbias the News to publish the investigations. The investigation and its stories were recognized, honored, and awarded multiple times throughout 2024: by the European Press Prize, the IJ4EU Impact Award, and the Lorenzo Natali Prize.
The Border Graves investigation team at the European Press Prize ceremony: (Left to right) Gabriela Ramírez, Gabriele Cruciata, Tina Xu, Eoghan Gilmartin, Barbara Matejčić, Kristiana Ludwig, Daphne Tolis, Leah Pattem. Image: Courtesy of European Press Prize
GIJN spoke to Xu and Ramírez about what the eight-month, cross-border investigation entailed, what it revealed, and what they learned in the process.
The Border Graves Investigation team consisted of Barbara Matejčić, Daphne Tolis, Danai Maragoudaki, Eoghan Gilmartin, Gabriela Ramírez, Gabriele Cruciata, Leah Pattem, and was coordinated by Tina Xu. The team also collaborated with the journalists Kristiana Ludwig and Benjamin Heubl at Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Felicity Lawrence, Ashifa Kassam, Lorenzo Tondo, Manisha Ganguly, and Pamela Duncan at the Guardian.
Initially, the team expected the project to involve a lot of satellite imagery analysis. However, this was not possible, partly because many graves were vertical or covered by forests and so could not be identified from the birds-eye angle offered by satellites. This realization caused the team to have to change course shortly after the investigation began.
They soon became aware of another glaring obstacle: official data about unidentified graves across the countries was non-existent.
“No one is counting the number of unmarked graves… no government institution, no large NGO,” Xu explains. The inability to obtain any official data or rely on satellite imagery analysis left the team with no choice but to resort to “on-the-ground and traditional journalism.”
To move forward, the journalists began compiling a list of NGOs, contact persons, cemetery locations, and any other important information they could come across through desk research. They sought the help of grassroots organizations and citizens, then turned to fieldwork and in situ research.
The team soon realized that citizens and small organizations had stepped in to fill the void left by government and institutions, finding and recording identities of deceased migrants and connecting to their families. By working closely with these civic-minded individuals and small groups, the team was able to conduct their investigation.
In Spain, Caminando Fronteras, an organization that works to help people search for their missing loved ones, linked the team to families. Comitato 3 Ottobre in Italy took the journalists around to grave sites across Sicily and invited the reporters to the annual gathering of family members of victims of the October 3 shipwreck in Lampedusa.
In the Balkans, a man named Nihad Suljić, who runs a Facebook page Dead and Missing in the Balkans, took the reporters to grave sites along the border. They did a similar collaboration with POPH in Poland, Sienos Group in Lithuania, and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Croatia.
Journalist Tina Xu operating a drone at a Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki, Poland, on the Poland-Belarus border. Image: Courtesy of Gabriela Ramírez.
The journalists visited well over five dozen cemeteries in total, and the methods to obtain information differed from country to country, cemetery to cemetery. For example, in Croatia, municipalities were very responsive to the team. But there was a total lack of recordkeeping at other cemeteries and radio silence from many local governments in Italy.
“We tried to find data at all of these different levels. At European levels there is none. At national levels there is none, at city levels there is none… so our last resort is to turn to small village governments, funeral parlors, or the grave keepers themselves, or the coroners.”
In fact, the journalists on the team deem their data findings as one of the investigations’s most important achievements, in that it created a documentary record where none previously existed.
Having to resort to this type of reporting to find answers also made the investigation much more costly and time-consuming; the funding deadline needed to be moved and the team surpassed their allocated budget. However, the journalists were determined to report on the situation in their region in the best way possible. In order to go deeper, additional work had to be undertaken at the reporters’ own personal expense, a reality that freelance journalists often confront.
For Ramírez, who had relatives migrating from Venezuela to the United States, working on this story felt personal. Putting herself in the shoes of the families of these migrants, she deemed it vital to discover more about the situation from this perspective.
“It was also (about) understanding the issues,” she says. “What makes it so difficult for families to find their relatives? What are the steps they usually follow to find news about a missing person?”
With the help of the local organizations, and through social media searches, the team members managed to track down and speak to families of people who were unidentified, missing and deceased. They spoke to people whose loved ones left for Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Algeria, and Sri Lanka. They spoke to the families about the serious structural hurdles faced by the families when searching for and, if found, burying a body.
Each journalist delved into their own region’s situation, but the team’s combined reporting painted a larger picture of neglect not only on a local level, but also, collectively, on a European level.
Journalists in Greece found that funeral homes are asked to conduct rushed burials without proper paperwork, and in Italy, graves were being exhumed and moved from the cemetery illegally. Reporting in Poland found the case of someone who was buried in an unidentified grave despite having a passport.
The lack of coordination among EU countries and the failure to handle migrants’ remains properly exposed systemic neglect, despite a 2021 European Commission resolution calling for a coordinated approach to respectfully caring for and identifying unknown migrant remains.
There was no formal response from the EU following the investigation. However, one impactful moment occurred when Ramírez’s reporting in Lithuania prompted a successful crowdfunding campaign by a local NGO, which decided to take the case of one of her story subjects to the European Court of Human Rights.
With online cross-border investigations still relatively new, journalists continue to navigate the do’s and don’ts of working within this context. Ramírez tells GIJN that this investigation taught the team the importance of communication and clarifying details, such as crediting on publications, beforehand.
Ramírez and Xu also agree that having a team made up of local journalists or journalists who are familiar with their regions was a key factor in the success of their transnational project. Their collaboration was also important when taking into consideration the sensitive subject matter of the investigation. Their weekly calls became vital points of processing and sharing what they were experiencing throughout the work as they dealt with the gravity of the story.
Joanna Demarco is GIJN’s visuals and newsletter editor and has been working in journalism in Malta for the past decade, both as a local reporter and a freelance photojournalist. She has published her work in publications including Politico Europe, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Der Spiegel.
2025-01-28 16:00:37
South Warnborough is a sleepy village in the south of England. With a population of just 600, it has a pub, a church, and a village shop with a Post Office counter for sending and receiving mail, paying bills, and banking. In 2001, Jo Hamilton and her husband David — on the recommendation of other villagers — took over the shop. They operated a tearoom and delicatessen, sold groceries, and Jo became what is known as a sub-postmaster, running the Post Office counter.
Like thousands of other sub-postmasters across the country, Hamilton was using a new automated accounting software to track transactions, adopted in 1999. The UK government — the Post Office’s only shareholder — implemented the system, known as Horizon, to replace traditional paper-based accounting practices. Developed by Fujitsu, Horizon was, at the time, the biggest non-military IT project in Europe.
What Hamilton didn’t know is that she was about to become part of what would later be described as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. The Horizon system was faulty, and quickly started to cause unexplained shortfalls in sub-postmasters’ accounts. “Rather than investigate the problems and fix them,” tech publication Computer Weekly wrote, “the Post Office blamed the branch operators.”
On a number of occasions, Hamilton was faced with accusations that she had caused the shortfalls. “I was always told I was the only one having problems and that my contract said I had to make the shortfall good,” she tells GIJN. Eventually, the deficit grew to £36,000 (US$44,000). “The audit team arrived and demanded to know where the money had gone,” she recalls. “I was charged with theft and it took two years to drag me through court.”
After taking a last-minute plea bargain to avoid jail, Hamilton was ordered to pay the shortfall and had to remortgage her home to do so. “The judge spared me prison because 74 people from the village were in court to support me,” she explains. “I was, however, a convicted criminal, and would remain so for the next 14 years. A criminal record has far-reaching consequences. It restricted my work and my ability to help out with things at my granddaughter’s school. The list is endless.”
Hundreds of other sub-postmasters were also criminalized. Fiona McGowan was accused of stealing £30,000 (US$36,500) while running a Post Office in Edinburgh, Scotland. It ruined her reputation within the community, and her mental health began to plummet. “She went from running successful businesses to dying alone and penniless in a homeless shelter,” ITV News wrote. “She was just 47.”
Sub-postmaster Martin Griffiths had to pay the Post Office £102,000 (US$124,000) following similar accusations of shortfalls. In 2013, he “deliberately walked in front of an oncoming bus,” his wife told a 2020 government inquiry into the scandal. He never regained consciousness and died three weeks later. The UK Post Office scandal represents the biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history. There were 900 prosecutions for theft, fraud, and false accounting.
In 2009, the first story about the Post Office’s IT problems hit the press. It wasn’t a headline on TV news channels or on the front pages of the newspapers. In fact, it was in Computer Weekly, a now-digital (but formerly print) specialist magazine for tech and IT professionals. Journalist Rebecca Thomson wrote about Lee Castleton — a sub-postmaster who was sued and bankrupted by the Post Office after his accounts showed discrepancies — alongside six others, including Jo Hamilton. The piece was the result of a year-long investigation.
Tony Collins, who was Computer Weekly’s executive editor at the time, had broken a number of stories on IT errors. He first became aware of the Horizon issue after receiving a letter from sub-postmaster Alan Bates in 2004.
“Collins wrote a lot about public sector IT disasters and IT outsourcing,” Karl Flinders, chief reporter at Computer Weekly, tells GIJN. “When someone contacts you, you know, it’s hard to handle the story of one person. But he kept [Alan’s letter] in his mind, and put it aside. And then in 2008, he was contacted by Lee Castleton, who is another well-known sub-postmaster, telling a similar story.”
Collins worked with Thomson to write the first article. “Obviously, it was a bit of a risk,” Flinders says. “We weren’t as worried about being sued by the Post Office, because it’s a government organization, so less likely. But Fujitsu, they could have sued us in damages if we got things wrong.”
Computer Weekly picked up the story early, but it would take a long time for the national papers to show any interest. Their first story, from 2009, detailed the cases of seven sub-postmasters who had experienced problems with the IT system. Image: Courtesy of Computer Weekly
Thomson left Computer Weekly in 2010, and Flinders continued reporting. The investigation wasn’t picked up by national outlets initially, but Computer Weekly kept at it. “We love doing off-diary investigations,” Flinders says. “It was slowly, gradually, picking up more steam. And obviously, Alan Bates was behind the scenes with a group of sub-postmasters doing all of their work [to clear their names]. We were working with them; writing about them.”
In 2018, a landmark court case saw 555 sub-postmasters take on the Post Office. They were successful in proving that Horizon was defective, which Flinders says was a turning point in the investigation. “Since then, a lot’s been in the open,” he says. “Still, they didn’t really pick it up that madly, the newspapers.”
Everything changed in 2024 when the broadcaster ITV produced a hit dramatization of the scandal: Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which focused on the sub-postmasters’ campaign for justice. It became the channel’s most-watched show of the year, with more than nine million viewers. The public outrage was palpable and the government was forced into action, later announcing that they would introduce legislation in order to exonerate the hundreds of convicted sub-postmasters collectively.
“Mr. Bates vs The Post Office” became ITV’s most-watched show in 2024. Image: Courtesy of ITV Studios
Another outlet that chipped away at the Post Office scandal before it became wider public knowledge was satirical and current affairs magazine Private Eye. Investigative journalist Richard Brooks had been writing about the software errors since 2011, after the publication received a call from journalist Nick Wallis. Wallis had done a local news program about the issue, and interviewed a number of sub-postmasters.
“He thought that this was an important story, and wanted it to get some wider coverage,” Brooks says. “I thought it was very interesting because over the years, we’d covered a lot of government IT cock-ups.”
Screenshot of Private Eye’s special report into the Post Office Horizon scandal. Image: Courtesy of Private Eye
Private Eye had previously reported on the Horizon project, but as a public spending matter, Brooks explains. “This seemed like the consequences of what we’d been writing about all these years,” he tells GIJN. “And I thought, these stories really impacted people’s lives, and it was important for us to take it up. I mean, to be honest, I was slightly disappointed that we hadn’t picked up on it earlier, given the interest that we’d had in these issues.”
A unique element of the investigation for both outlets was that the sub-postmasters were simultaneously working as a campaigning group, the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA). The JFSA operated as “the workhorse” behind the campaign to expose the failures of the Post Office and the cover-up that came with it. Founded by Alan Bates, the group were submitting Freedom of Information requests, preparing for legal action, and pushing for a national inquiry.
“It was different to a normal investigation that I would do in that I wasn’t bombarding the Post Office with lots of questions,” Brooks explains. “[The JFSA] were getting access to far more information than I ever could. I thought the best job we could do was to keep the profile of that campaign, that effort, up, so that it became a political matter.”
Brooks reflected on why it took the story so long to break through to national outlets. “It wasn’t a sexy story. I mean, it was computer systems,” he says. “It was people whose plight didn’t really bother big newspapers all that much. Certainly not as much as it should have done. I think if there had been a bit more bling in the story, the papers would have been all over it. But these were very ordinary people. Unglamorous. And, you know, that didn’t appeal as much as it should.”
Flinders’ advice for investigative journalists is to build up a network of contacts, and continue speaking to those closest to the story. When interviewing IT experts for other stories, he would always keep the Horizon scandal in the back of his mind, he says, asking them if they had any knowledge of the software and its issues.
“Speak to as many people as you can, never think a story might be too outrageous to be true, and never ever give away your sources, or even hint at what they could be,” he adds. “Be really thorough, go through everything, double check, triple check, and stick with it, you know. Because this story – for a couple of years, there wasn’t much happening. It was really frustrating, but just always keep it there in the background when you’re doing other things.”
He acknowledges that small or niche news outlets can face different circumstances. “Being a small team, we can’t really risk going to court, because it would destroy us,” Flinders explains. But he also says that it brings advantages. “I think they underestimated us… They didn’t really see that we could do them any harm. They think if Computer Weekly write it, it’s a small outfit, who cares?”
In the case of Private Eye, Brooks emphasizes the value of perseverance. “We did stick with it for over a decade; we regularly kept it in the public eye,” he says. “Lots of other angles like who was involved, the hypocrisy, why they might be doing it – looking beyond just the facts of individual cases to broaden the perspective. To say, well hang on a minute, what were the commercial imperatives of the Post Office? Why were they doing this?”
Cultivating a range of contacts was also a core part of Private Eye’s coverage. “If people are getting the details beyond what you could get just by asking for it yourself, then clearly you want to get in with them,” Brooks says. “There is a bit of a balance between developing good relationships with people and your journalistic objectivity. You’ve got to manage those two things.”
Investigative journalist Karl Flinders. Image: Courtesy of Flinders
Something that both Flinders and Brooks highlight is that journalists working on similar stories should set reasonable expectations. “There’s no guarantee that scandals will get exposed and dealt with,” Brooks notes. “As a journalist, you’ve just got to do your job. There’s some satisfaction when things get noticed, but that’s not always going to happen. You’ve got to get your job satisfaction from just doing it.”
Last year, the Post Office said that it was “sincerely sorry for the devastating impact” that unreliable Horizon data had caused hundreds of sub-postmasters. As of January 2025, the UK government has paid approximately £594 million (US$733 million) in financial redress to over 3,800 victims, and more than 2,000 new compensation claims have been made in the last month by others. Fujitsu has also issued an apology, and admitted that they have a “moral obligation” to contribute to compensation efforts.
In 2024, Computer Weekly won an Orwell Prize “for breaking the Post Office Horizon scandal and sustained investigation and reportage of the story over many years.”
While the award was welcome recognition of 15 years of dogged reporting, for the journalists behind the story, the real win has been in making sure that the voices of victims have finally been heard.
“That’s why most people become journalists. I can’t believe that I’ve been able to work on a story like this,” Flinders says. “99.9% of leads that I work on off-diary don’t come off, but if you get one like this, it’s worth it. Even if you think it’s not going anywhere, never just give it up completely. If you trust your sources and you believe it’s true, just keep plugging away.”
Emily O’Sullivan is an editorial assistant at GIJN. She has worked as an investigative researcher for BBC Panorama, and an assistant producer for BBC Newsnight. She has an M.A. in investigative journalism from City, University of London.
2025-01-28 10:12:59
Satellite imagery has become a game-changer for investigative journalism, offering powerful tools to uncover hidden stories, monitor environmental changes, and expose human rights abuses. But access to satellite images can be costly and complex. Thankfully, a range of free resources and strategies now makes this invaluable information more accessible than ever.
This GIJN webinar explores how journalists can tap into free satellite imagery to enhance their reporting and uncover the stories the world needs to see.
The webinar brings together leading experts to share practical advice and tips on navigating this often-overwhelming field.
Carl Churchill is a journalist at The Wall Street Journal, where he covers data-driven investigations. He has used satellite imagery to reveal critical insights on environmental crises, supply chain disruptions, and global conflict zones.
Yao Hua Law is an award-winning journalist from Malaysia who has extensively reported on environmental and agricultural issues. His work often incorporates satellite imagery to track deforestation, illegal land use, and the impact of human activity on fragile ecosystems.
Laura Kurtzberg is a data visualization specialist, cartographer, and news applications developer with a particular interest in environmental stories.
The moderator was Manuela Andreoni, chief correspondent at Reuters based in Brazil.
