2025-12-10 16:00:00
Journalists regularly take on governments, big corporations, powerful elites, shadowy networks, crooks and scammers in the pursuit of the truth. However, when it comes to taking on their friends and colleagues, they are not always quite so fearless, according to Simon Allison, the co-founder of pan-African newspaper The Continent.
There are reasons why many journalists quietly dread reporting and investigating places and people too close to them, Allison explained. “Such stories are difficult and complex, naughty, messy, very personal, and require a different kind of bravery.”
Allison was speaking at the 21st African Investigative Journalism Conference (AIJC) in November at a session titled, “‘The Call is Coming from Inside the House’: Reporting Too Close to Home,” alongside his colleague Christine Mungai, The Continent’s news editor.
The session was designed to help journalists who have felt too close to a story to pursue it — or those who have doubts about whether they are the right individuals to execute a story because of their personal connections.
Mungai and Allison explored the emotional, ethical, and professional challenges of reporting on topics too close to home, drawing on examples of investigations they had edited, supported, reported on, as well as those that they had dropped.
In July 2025, Mungai published a two-part investigative series with Africa Uncensored centering on one of her former teachers.
In The Teacher and the System, Mungai explains that the teacher was once a spiritual authority in her life and a person she had placed on a pedestal. He preached the Bible and led Christian Union meetings at her school, the Alliance Girls High School, one of Kenya’s top girls’ secondary schools.
Christine Mungai, news editor at The Continent. Image: Screenshot, LinkedIn
Mungai had left the school but was still in contact with her former teacher when, at age 19, she experienced “a physical, sexual encounter” with the then-31-year-old school staffer at his house. She was shocked, but as she wrote in her story, “didn’t have the language then to understand what had happened.”
For 12 years, she kept what happened to herself, until in 2018 she learned she was not the only one. “That changed everything,” she wrote in the piece. “The moment I heard their story, mine became real.” That moment of reckoning led her to start investigating her former teacher.
It is often assumed that when a journalist is close to a story, their personal connection to the individual or institution can introduce bias and distort objectivity. However, Mungai’s perspective differed. She assigned herself the story even though, typically, journalists are assigned stories by their editors. While her experience was central to the story, Mungai explained that she approached it as a journalist determined to undo silence.
Her proximity to the story also gave her access that outsiders couldn’t have.
For years, whispers of sexual misconduct swelled in corridors of their alumni meet-ups and on social media. Yet, accountability kept failing, Mungai explained.
“All I wanted was to set the record straight,” she told the AIJC audience. “I wanted to take that story out of the realm of rumors and innuendo and put it down for history.”
Allison asked Mungai how it felt psychologically working on a story that was a part of her own past. “It was a form of spiritual anguish. It felt like torture,” she replied.
For four years, Mungai reached out to friends, colleagues, and former students in her effort to record testimonies and reconstruct evidence for her investigation.
Her connection to the school did add a layer of emotional difficulty, she said: “I was and I still am part of that community. This is a school that I was proud to attend. I was one of those proud alumni.” She attended reunions without fail, participated in WhatsApp groups, and lived every inch of the school spirit. And then she found herself coming to a different realization. “I think many of us needed to become adults and to kind of acquire the language and the framing to actually put words into some of the things that we had witnessed,” she said.
One of the biggest challenges Mungai faced was corroborating the stories of other students from the school who said they had experienced inappropriate behavior. Initially, she lacked documentary, physical, or digital evidence, and all she had was memories of a number of ex-students who were prepared to talk about what had happened to them.
Two former students told her about non-consensual physical contact with the same man while they were still in school, another of a non-consensual kiss initiated by the teacher weeks after graduating. Two others described relationships with their former professor that later turned physical or sexual.
Mungai credits one of her mentors for advising her to corroborate each and every account with someone else’s testimony. For part two of the story, Mungai stated she met a source who kept meticulous records.
Legal threats and censorship are risks both Allison and Mungai have encountered while conducting their investigative stories. Before she could publish this piece, Mungai was hit with a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), lawsuits that are sometimes used to silence journalists. “I thought, I’ll lose my mind,” Mungai recalled, about how she felt after she was served with the lawsuit.
Mungai received the SLAPP after she sent a right-of-reply request to the teacher. Instead of responding to her reporting, he rushed to court and blocked the story from being published. However, months later, the injunction was lifted. In the court ruling, the magistrate found the story credible and supported its publication in the public interest. The story — which accused the teacher of sexual misconduct, grooming, and harassment stretching back more than two decades — was ready to publish.
Mungai expected a backlash after publishing, she said, but instead was overwhelmed by the widespread support she received from her alumni circle and the general public. She attributed this to her long and comprehensive investigation. Part one was 17,000 words while the follow-up was 8,000 words.
For his part, the teacher denied ever interacting with students in a way that was intimate, suggestive, or emotionally entangling, or from ever initiating physical or sexual relationships with former students. Still, the school board expressed shock and outrage at the allegations in the piece, and promised “strong, decisive, and immediate” action. Following public pressure after publication, the teacher resigned, citing cyberbullying linked to the “false” accusations.
Sometimes, the person we need to investigate is one of our own. Allison detailed a different, complex case of a reporter who had falsely presented as a cancer patient, shaving their head and soliciting sympathy from their employer and the public for more than a year. The journalist was slated to speak at the AIJC. The topic? Ethics in investigative journalism.
“I did not want to do this story. It felt very personal. It involved journalists that I knew and respected who were sort of in the orbit of the story,” Allison told the AIJC audience.
But his then-editor Beauregard Tromp, who is now the convenor of AIJC, sat him down. “He said: ‘You have to learn how to do these kinds of stories because sometimes holding power to account means holding the power that you can see in your own life to account.”
On this occasion, Allison said, the story needed to be told.
Allison reported having received intimidating calls from the journalist’s father — a prominent journalist in his own right — but the unconditional support from his editor and newsroom made a difference. Eventually, the reporter admitted they had faked the illness, and the AIJC removed the journalist from their speaking role.
Simon Allison, co-founder of The Continent, speaking at AIJC25. Image: Courtesy of AIJC
Both panelists agreed that no one carries such a story alone. Support, they underscored, is a form of survival. Allison emphasized the need for colleagues and editors who can hold emotional weight with journalists.
For members of the audience who raised concerns that they felt abandoned by their newsrooms, writer and political activist Nanjala Nyabola added a practical warning, noting that “solidarity among journalists is safety.” In stories that are this personal, emotional safety is not a luxury. It becomes part of the reporting structure.
Alisson then grounded the room in journalism’s most valuable currency. “Trust is required to do journalism,” Allison plainly told the room. “If people don’t trust you, you can’t do this job.”
Sometimes that means reporting in places you’d rather leave alone.
Naipanoi Lepapa is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. A specialist in open source intelligence and collaborative transboundary investigations, she mainly focuses her storytelling on human rights, gender, health, technology, the environment, and climate change. In 2022, she was named Kenya’s Investigative Journalist of the Year by the Media Council of Kenya at their Annual Journalism Excellence Awards (AJEA). She was also a 2023 Pulitzer Center AI accountability fellow.
2025-12-09 16:00:48
Just how far reaching is the impact of online gambling? And who profits from lax regulation, jurisdictions that turn a blind eye to money laundered through gambling operations, and those that make a business out of those with addiction issues?
These were some of the issues discussed during the “Investigative Online Gambling” session at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25), which took place in Kuala Lumpur last month.
Giulio Rubino, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI), said that the stakes are huge, especially in relation to global sporting events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Online betting is booming — and is expected to make up a significant percentage of the US$150 billion experts think will be wagered on the event.
Gambling has always preyed on the vulnerable — particularly those struggling with mental health or addiction issues — but it has also in some cases been linked to transnational criminal networks that corrode government integrity and scaffold their gambling empire on illegal activities.
Rubino, together with Kira Zalan, investigative editor at OCCRP, Lydia Namubiru, editor-in-chief at The Continent, and Saska Cvetkovska, from Macedonia’s Investigative Reporting Lab (IRL), shared with the GIJC25 attendees how they investigated the connections between organized crime and online gambling, in a session moderated by Kristina Amerhauser, senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).
Organized crime groups use online gambling both as a way of making, and hiding, money. First, they obtain gaming licenses. Some countries, such as Malta and especially Macedonia, provide them quite easily. Since all online gambling activities are transnational operations, once a group has a license from a country, they no longer need to operate there. They can launder and move money from one country to another, skewing the banking system.
Because of Macedonia’s weakened regulations on online gambling, it effectively provides “anonymity and regulatory evasion for anybody in the world that wants to launder money from drug trafficking, human trafficking, and so on,” Cvetkovska added.
Saska Cvetkovska, from Macedonia’s Investigative Reporting Lab (IRL), discusses how her home country plays a key role in fostering online gambling rings across Europe. Image: Suzanne Lee, Alt Studio for GIJN
Once the framework is laid out on paper, the second stage is getting people to use the gambling platform. The more the better, since larger cash flows cover the money laundering operations and generate additional income for the organization. Online gambling operations seem more legitimate and obfuscate more money transfers when many users are betting.
One common tactic in places like Macedonia is pressuring brick-and-mortar gambling parlors to run their own businesses using the criminal organization’s electronic gambling platforms. It’s as if the mafia was forcing corner shops to sell the cigarettes they smuggle. Sometimes, once a service becomes widely known, criminals might simply pay people to place bets, just to create a cash flow that seems real. Once an online gambling platform is up and running as intended it can be extremely lucrative, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
The expert panel in Kuala Lumpur described multilayered criminal infrastructures behind online gambling, and offered practical tactics to help reporters expose those networks.
Setting up the system requires completing several stages and having teams focused on certain tasks.
If the operation is conducted from outside of Europe, but the criminals are at least partially based there, a third step might be necessary: finding appropriate online wallet services that can handle, for example, cryptocurrencies, and that avoid the banking system.
Once that’s in place, they basically have a private bank. There are no controls. “When gambling goes online it becomes a system of money laundering,” Rubino explained. “All the players have an account filled with money that works like cash in an account, and it becomes like an online banking system.”
After that, organized crime dedicates groups of people to run the system. “The tech teams purchase software designed for the gaming industry and adapt it as necessary,” said Zalan. “They have sales teams, with call centers in several countries giving people incentives to gamble, and they have finance teams, with people that support the payments that need to come in from the players to the criminal network.”
Giulio Rubino (right), co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of IrpiMedia, discussing the widespread impact of online gambling on global sports events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Image: Suzanne Lee, Alt Studio for GIJN
There are a number of tactics used by investigative reporters to reveal some of the different stages or teams involved in online gambling, and the criminal organizations behind them. They include:
Also, note that there is a murky line between online gambling and online scams. As a result, online gambling often targets the same WhatsApp and Facebook groups used to spread crypto scams and pyramid schemes, preying on the same types of victims.
The panellists said that even where online gambling activities are legal in your jurisdiction, it’s fair for investigative coverage to examine if the laws and regulations governing all this wagering are at the service of society.
“We sell hope,” the owner of a gambling business in Uganda said to Namubiru. But the people who need this hope are usually desperate for money. “It’s people who have such little exposure to money that they tend to have a bit of magical thinking about it,” he said.
2025-12-08 20:53:23
Defrontera is a digital-first, nonprofit media organisation reporting on global health, medicine, and life sciences with depth, data, and narrative power. Our audience is policymakers in Kenya and Africa, practitioners in global health, and the public through impactful, open-access journalism.
We are seeking a sharp, creative, and metrics-driven audience engagement editor to lead how Defrontera appears across our digital platforms. Our stories span short features, long-form investigations, data-rich explainers, podcasts, and policy commentary.
2025-12-08 20:48:14
The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting, preserving, and defending media freedom and professional journalism across Europe. Based in Leipzig, Germany, ECPMF operates as a European co-operative.
The Digital Communications and Outreach Assistant will support the Communications Officer and the wider ECPMF team in most of the external communication activities. This role focuses on social media management, digital content creation, and community engagement to strengthen ECPMF’s visibility and impact.
This is an ideal opportunity for someone with strong digital communication skills, creativity, and a passion for press freedom to gain hands-on experience in an international NGO environment.
2025-12-08 20:45:32
At Arena for Journalism in Europe, we are looking for someone to coordinate the Collaborative Desk and lead security awareness trainings to support collaborative, cross-border journalism. The role combines expertise in IT and secure tech environments, as well as project coordination and user support.
The Collaborative Desk provides the technical infrastructure needed for journalistic cross-border collaborations, translating the needs of the journalists into a technical setup, hosted on its own open-source environment.
Cross-border teams have unique challenges: team members work in different countries, from well-established newsrooms to working on a freelance basis. The aim of Arena’s Collaborative Desk is to facilitate a crucial aspect of this collaboration: A digital workspace that is secure and easily accessible, as well as guidance in using it.
2025-12-08 20:25:42
IREX is a global development and education organization. We strive for a more just, prosperous, and inclusive world – where individuals reach their full potential, governments serve their people, and communities thrive. We focus on four essential areas to progress: cultivating leaders, empowering youth, strengthening institutions, and increasing access to quality education and information.
The Program Coordinator provides day-to-day support to ensure the smooth and timely implementation of the Learn to Discern (L2D) program in Ukraine. The Program Coordinator role involves coordination of educational and communication activities, logistical and administrative support, partner engagement, and oversight of subgrants and programmatic reporting. The Program Coordinator ensures that program activities are implemented in accordance with IREX standards and donor requirements, contributing to L2D’s goal of promoting critical thinking and resilience to adversarial propaganda across Ukraine.
