2026-01-23 16:00:16
A land registry entry in Austria, a company filing in Liechtenstein, and a shareholder record in the British Virgin Islands were enough to link a luxury property to a political figure — without relying on leaks or whistleblowers.
Examples like this shaped the discussion in the “Navigating the Offshore Maze of Cross-Border Corporate Data” session at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, where panelists demonstrated how publicly available records can be used to trace assets across borders.
Speakers dismantled the myth that offshore finance is inaccessible or unknowable and argued that the real barrier is not secrecy alone, but confidence, skill, and persistence. “Offshore is not a specific physical or geographic phenomenon,” said Nick Mathiason, co-director of Finance Uncovered. “Offshore refers to the practice of recording a transaction in a different country to where an asset is located.”
That conceptual shift, he said, can unlock entire investigations.
Mathiason said there is a familiar anxiety in newsrooms: fear of financial statements. A former business journalist, he said it took years before he felt confident analyzing company accounts — and he believes that hesitation cost him stories.
“I kind of didn’t really understand the fundamentals of how to analyze financial statements for a long time,” he said. “I self-taught, and I think I missed quite a few stories because I didn’t have the real structured skill-set.”
But financial secrecy, he argued, is often overstated. Many common methods of profit extraction like dividends, interest on related-party loans, management fees, and intellectual property charges are visible in company accounts, particularly in notes sections and cash-flow statements.
Trade mis-invoicing and transfer pricing may be harder to spot, Mathiason acknowledged, but the first principle of navigating offshore structures is knowing which documents can offer clues and which cannot.
The second principle is geographical realism. Offshore finance is not limited to microstates. “Any country can be offshore to another country,” he said, pointing to Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, and Luxembourg — all jurisdictions with open corporate registries.
Those registries, Mathiason said, allow journalists to track money leaving resource-rich countries and reappearing elsewhere. Once reporters know how to read the documents, “the world is your oyster.”
Delegates at the GIJC25 in Malaysia. Image: AltStudio for GIJN
Mathiason illustrated that point with a case involving the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, which manufactured OxyContin. After the family pledged to sell international assets to compensate victims of the US opioid epidemic in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Finance Uncovered journalists examined corporate registries across multiple countries.
The work was led by a reporter who had no financial background when she started.
“She was not a financial expert,” Mathiason said. “But two years later, she and our colleague put together a forensic analysis.”
By aggregating revenue figures from subsidiaries, the team calculated that Sackler-controlled companies were still earning hundreds of millions of dollars annually despite promises to divest. “It was all out there,” Mathiason said. “But the thing is that she understood what to look for.”
Similar logic applied to other cases. Mathiason described how a British investment company structured ownership of a Ugandan electricity distributor through Mauritius — a country without capital gains tax. When shares were sold, Uganda received nothing.
“Did Uganda miss $38 million from this sale?” he asked. “The answer is probably, yes.”
Understanding corporate structures, he said, allows journalists to ask those questions and answer them with documents.
While companies dominate most investigations, Karrie Kehoe, deputy head of data and research at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, turned attention to a quieter tool: trusts.
“Another thing that they do is that they use trusts,” Kehoe said. “And it’s a fantastic way for bad guys to hide money.”
Trusts, she explained, are legal arrangements commonly used for estate and succession planning, but they are also used for tax evasion, sanctions evasion, money laundering, and political donations. Unlike companies, trusts often leave little public trace.
“There isn’t something like a corporate registry for trusts,” she said. “That’s why they’re very tricky.”
Kehoe first encountered their scale during the Pandora Papers investigation, where US states such as South Dakota, Florida, Delaware, and Wyoming emerged as major trust hubs. States competed to offer low taxes, strong privacy protections, and favorable courts.
One Wyoming trust services website, she noted, openly advertised “very strong privacy laws” and a judiciary that “upholds the letter of the law.”
Where can journalists find trust information? Kehoe urged reporters to think laterally. Court records are one avenue. Anti-money laundering directives in the European Union have also begun forcing limited trust registration. The UK Trust Registration Service, launched recently, marks an initial — though not public — step.
For journalists, she highlighted one resource above all: ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks Database, which consolidates data from the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and other major leaks.
“There are thousands of stories in here that no one has looked at yet,” Kehoe said.
While Mathiason and Kehoe focused on structures, Karina Shedrofsky, co-founder and director of research at the Data and Research Center (DARC), emphasized method.
Asset tracing, she said, usually begins in one of two ways: tracking what a known individual owns, or identifying who owns a suspicious asset. In both cases, the process depends on patience and familiarity with records.
“These are people who go to great lengths to keep their ownership hidden,” Shedrofsky said, noting the frequent use of relatives and proxies.
She urged journalists to expand their geographic thinking. “If something’s available somewhere, the chances are that it’s probably available somewhere else,” she said. “You just have to know where to look or know who to ask.”
Her demonstration followed the trail of an Austrian castle linked to a prominent Russian official named Igor Shuvalov, who was placed on the official UK sanctions list after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Starting with a land registry, Shedrofsky traced ownership through an Austrian company, a Liechtenstein entity and finally a British Virgin Islands firm — where beneficial ownership is opaque.
Rather than stopping, she kept digging. By examining overlooked documents, she identified a shareholder: Shuvalov’s son.
“You really have to look at every single document,” she said. “Turn every page.”
Paid databases like Orbis helped fill gaps by revealing subsidiaries not disclosed in official filings. That led to previously unknown assets in Italy, confirmed through land registries and flight-tracking data.
The lesson, Shedrofsky said, is not about tools alone, but organization. “Some of these company networks get massive,” she said, stressing the importance of clean spreadsheets and pattern recognition.
“Sometimes the most important leads are hidden in the patterns,” she said.
You can watch the video of the session on GIJN’s YouTube channel:
Hanan Zaffar is a media practitioner, multimedia storyteller, and documentary filmmaker based in India. His work primarily focuses on South Asian politics, minorities, human rights, and the environment. His reporting has appeared in TIME Magazine, the Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, Business Insider, and other places. He has also had reporting stints in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, and is the UN Foundation’s 2025 Polio Press Fellow.
2026-01-22 16:00:48
The stories selected for our editors’ pick this year span cocoa trafficking in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the sale of personal mobile data in Europe by secretive but powerful data brokers, and investigations into opaque sporting institutions in Tunisia. Then, there is also an investigation into alleged supply chain exploitation by a big name retailer in France.
We selected eight notable French-language investigations published last year, with a focus on showcasing a variety of topics and investigative techniques while also reflecting the diversity of regions and media outlets. Some of the outlets featured on our list are GIJN members, but our list is not exclusively for member publications.
What is striking is that even in environments where investigative reporting is hugely challenging — for reasons of war, conflict, and security — and when it broaches topics that are challenging and complex, there are many brave journalists who continue to do their work and dig deep.
One thing we have observed this year — there seems to be a trend away from one-off stories, with more and more investigative series, which offer the advantage of addressing different facets and regional angles of complex stories. Bonne lecture! We hope you enjoy reading.
Image: Screenshot, Le Monde
The mobile phone location data of millions of users in the European Union is easily accessible – despite few users realizing their information is up for sale — according to this series of investigations by Le Monde and eight media partners including L’Echo in Belgium and RTS in Switzerland. Through access to a commercial sample of a database supposedly collected only for advertising purposes and sold by a US data broker, journalists were able to geolocate ordinary citizens, some in just a few minutes, French spies, police, and military personnel, alongside staff in high-security prisons, nuclear power plants, and military bases in Belgium. Even the locations of top EU officials in Brussels working for the Commission or NATO have been exposed.
EU data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) are often labeled as the most protective in the world. But the investigation showed how data brokers operate within the “blind spots” of the legislation. The threat to personal privacy but also national and European security is so real that the European Commission expressed its concern following the publication of this investigation, and members of the EU Parliament called for action.
Image: Screenshot, Inkyfada
Between April and May 2025, Tunisian investigative media outlet Inkyfada, a GIJN member, published a series of investigations into the Tunisian sports sector. From an investigation into allegations of “empty promises, opaque decisions, and disappointing results” at the National Olympic Committee to a report on power-grabbing at the Tunisian Tennis Federation, “where the rules of the game have been constantly changed to ensure absolute control,” and into “years of troubled murky management, conflicts of interest, and political pressure” at the Tunisian Football Federation, the outlet reviewed the leadership of these various bodies, sourced original testimony, and cross-referenced material to investigate governance issues with repercussions on sporting performance.
Continuing its series this month in January 2026, in the midst of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON), the continent’s biggest sporting competition, Inkyfada released a new investigation. Published hot on the heels of Tunisia’s elimination in the round of 16, the report suggested that “Tunisia’s debacle at the AFCON is symptomatic of a system where athletes are gradually subordinated to the logic of influence, lobbying, and networks.”
Image: Screenshot, Disclose
Suppliers that may be linked to deforestation in Brazil, “clandestine” textile factories in Bangladesh, and an operation that allegedly exploits the Uyghur minority in China in a form of modern slavery… In February 2025, after a year-long investigation, Disclose published a three-part series that uncovered evidence of these serious issues in the supply chain of one of the most popular sporting goods retailers in France. Among the revelations was video footage of a 12-year-old girl working in a factory in China captured with a hidden camera.
The investigation — which was produced in partnership with French Investigative TV show Cash Investigation — began after an internal source shared with Disclose a list of subcontractors around the world. The reporting team then analyzed dozens of internal documents, collected exclusive testimonies from former members of staff, and went undercover in two Chinese factories to film. The revelations came as a shock for consumers, even though the image of this much-loved brand was tarnished when Disclose revealed, in 2023, that its products were still being sold in Russia. After the release of the investigation, two of the journalists were targeted by a wave of pro-Chinese cyber attacks. In response to the findings, the firm said it has a “commitment to responsible procurement” and that it “strongly condemns all forms of forced labor and child labor.”
Image: Screenshot, Forbidden Stories
More than 230 journalists and media workers have lost their lives during the war in Gaza, launched after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Paris-based organization Forbidden Stories — whose motto is “’killing the journalist won’t kill the story” — united more than 50 journalists from 18 media outlets, including ARIJ, Le Monde, France 24, and RFI, to investigate the deadliest conflict for the press in recent times. The project found evidence that some reporters had been targeted by the Israeli army, while others were killed alongside other civilian victims. In 2025, during the second tranche of the investigation, the team continued the unfinished reporting of Palestinian journalists who were killed or injured covering the conflict, and unpacked what had happened in individual cases, such as that of Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck while wearing a press vest near Jabalia, in the Gaza Strip, in October 2024 and is now paralyzed.
Using a combination of forensic evidence, satellite imagery, video footage, social media posts and interviews of witnesses and experts, the team managed to document how Al-Wahidi was shot — geolocating his position at the time of the attack to an area not designated as an “evacuation” zone. Reporters also delved into how legal investigations into the Israeli military’s role in these cases have been obstructed. The Gaza Project was a finalist for the 2025 Global Shining Light Award. While the Israeli Army has said it rejects “outright the allegation of a systemic attack on journalists,” international organizations like Reporters Without Borders have filed numerous complaints with the International Criminal Court, seeking justice for these journalists and [to] end impunity for the crimes against them.
Image: Screenshot, Ukweli Coalition Media Hub
The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is famously fertile, and the soil is conducive to the production of internationally sought-after products such as cocoa. In this investigation, Ukweli Coalition Media Hub, an investigative platform specializing in the African Great Lakes region, and its media partners Afrique XXI and Africa Uncensored, have documented the existence of “a vast network of cocoa bean trafficking between eastern DR Congo and Uganda,” involving, according to the report, the Congolese and Ugandan armies, civil servants, and armed groups.
Despite the constant risks in this region — which is teeming with state and non-state armed groups and where there is a high level of insecurity for journalists — unnamed local reporters managed to document this trafficking by combining traditional investigative methods with undercover techniques. According to the report, the trafficking tops several millions of euros every year, impacting small producers, fueling corruption, and exacerbating insecurity.
When contacted by the reporters, Uganda’s army spokesperson denied any direct involvement by his country’s soldiers in any illegal trading, saying that soldiers were focused on “fighting the terrorists who have made trade between our populations impossible.”
Image: Screenshot, RTI.Info
In a region of sub-Saharan Africa where it is extremely rare to see a public media outlet conduct an investigation into a nationally sensitive topic, this story stood out last year. For 12 months, award-winning reporter Marthe Akissi, who works for the public broadcaster in Côte d’Ivoire, delved into the intricacies of an extractive sector that has become highly strategic for a country hoping to become a giant in global gold production.
Using satellite images from Google Earth Pro, reports, and expert analyses, the reporter explored the inner workings of gold mining in Côte d’Ivoire. In this first chapter of the investigation, she revealed the “worrying” gray areas surrounding the traceability of gold, dives into production figures and exports, questions generous tax exemptions, and explores unexplained discrepancies in official figures. According to the report, these problems lead to billions of CFA francs (equivalent to millions of US dollars) escaping the state coffers every year.
This investigation is the result of a collaboration between a public television station, Radiotélévision Ivoirienne, the nonprofit investigative organization CENOZO (a GIJN member), and another nonprofit organization, HEI-DA, which specializes in data and tech journalism.
Image: Screenshot, Jeune Afrique
In West Africa, the cybercrime industry has grown significantly in recent years, with dramatic consequences that often extend far beyond the African continent. Jeune Afrique magazine devoted a seven-part series of investigations and analyses to the subject of hackers “barely out of adolescence, and [who] grew up with a smartphone in hand” who have made online crime their livelihood.
The reporting addressed various facets of this thriving criminal activity, ranging from romance scams to ransomware, and shows how it claims victims both in the region and thousands of miles away. Jeune Afrique’s reporting strategies involved classic investigation and research techniques, but the team also went undercover — pretending to be lured into a scammer’s game until the payment stage.
Image: Screenshot, Radio Canada
Lobster fishing in Canada is lucrative, and worth more than a billion dollars every year. But according to this report, up to a third of marine stock could be being fished illegally, out of season, and without the correct license, an “illicit trade” that reporters warn is even fueling organized crime. To understand the lobster black market, Radio Canada used an undercover reporter pretending to be a commercial seafood buyer, based in Montreal. “I’m not supposed to sell this lobster,” one illegal seller confesses to him.
The report quoted experts estimating that lone operators working outside of the system could be earning $4,000 to $5,000 per day in cash (equivalent to US$2,800-3,500). The investigation shows that illegal lobster fishing leads to a real loss of earnings for fishing communities, is a source of violence with threats to fishing agents and their families, and boats have reportedly been set on fire. What’s more, the plundering of resources has serious consequences for sustainability.
Alcyone Wemaëre 
is GIJN’s French editor and a freelance journalist based in Lyon. She is a former staff reporter for Europe1 and France24 in Paris. She is also an associate professor at Sciences Po Lyon, where she is co-responsible for the Data and Investigation specialty for the Master’s degree in journalism, created with CFJ. Alcyone graduated from Celsa and received the François Chalais Prize. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, Slate, Infomigrants, La Chronique, L’Obs, and Le Temps.
Maxime Domegni is GIJN’s Francophone Africa editor and an award-winning journalist with years of experience in investigative journalism. He has worked, among others, as editor-in-chief of the Togolese investigative newspaper L’Alternative. He has also collaborated with different media organizations, notably with the Swiss-based Fondation Hirondelle as West African Correspondent for the justiceinfo.net website.
2026-01-21 16:00:07
When “The Dynasty” was released earlier this year, few expected a 55-minute investigative film about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s family’s business dealings to capture millions of views. Produced by the Budapest-based newsroom Direkt36, the documentary traces how the prime minister’s son-in-law, Istvan Tiborcz, and other close allies amassed wealth through public contracts and state-linked projects.
Within a week, the film had more than 2.7 million views, and is closing in on 4 million — a particularly impressive tally for a country of 9.5 million.
But the story behind the success may be just as significant as its revelations. “The Dynasty” shows how small, mission-driven outlets can use cinematic storytelling to expand reach, attract new supporters, and challenge official narratives.
Jeremy Druker, the editor-in-chief of Transitions, talks with András Pethő, co-founder and director of the Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, about the making of the film and the lessons it offers for other independent media.
Jeremy Druker: This was obviously a result that you did not expect. Looking back now, with all the work that went into the documentary, I’m sure you’d say it was worth it. But before starting, did you have doubts? As a small independent outlet, did you question whether this was something you could really afford to do — or did you see it more as an experiment, a way to test whether this format could work for you in the future?
András Pethő: We didn’t see this kind of big success coming. We didn’t know that we were going to have almost 4 million views in less than a year, but we felt that it was a powerful story. I was pretty confident as the film was coming together.
We were working with professional filmmakers, and I was really happy with the film even before it came out, and I could see the amazing response. Also, this was our second long-form documentary. The first one we made was about hospital infections. It was a healthcare investigation. I think it has about 100,000 views on YouTube, which is not bad for a Hungarian documentary.
We made this decision years ago, that we wanted to expand into long-form documentaries. It seemed like a good fit for us, because that’s what we do in other formats as well. We work on projects for months, and sometimes it works to publish a long article, but some stories just work better through film.
JD: When you were planning the project, were you thinking mainly in journalistic terms, or were you also considering the potential for monetization — through ads or growing your membership? In other words, was the goal primarily editorial, with audience growth as a byproduct, or did you see it from the start as a way to reach new supporters?
AP: It was a journalistic idea. We had no idea that this was going to be so successful, and it was going to add 50% more [members]. When the film came out, we had roughly 3,000 active members in our membership program. A couple of months after the film came out, we reached 4,500 members, which is amazing.
I remember I had a conversation a year ago with my colleagues about how we had around 3,000 members, which we reached in about 10 years. It was a lot of work and a gradual process. So we discussed having a goal of about 5,000 in two or three years. And now, we have basically already reached it, mostly because of the film, and also because of some of the things that the government did. But I think the primary driving force was the film.
If you have such a successful product, you realize the potential for monetization, for using it as a tool, for deepening your audience relationships. We previously were struggling with how to reach the public outside Budapest in the countryside. We tried to organize events. It was quite hard. And now we have this really good product that we can show. We organized this national tour of the film, and wherever we went, we had a really good turnout and responses.
JD: You worked with outside filmmakers on this documentary. For smaller outlets, that might sound intimidating. The film looks very professional — it includes animation and strong visuals. Why do you think other small organizations shouldn’t be discouraged by production challenges?
AP: I’m not a film guy. The way I think you have to look at it is that, if you have a powerful story and you are confident that you can gather and check the facts, you can get the right interviews, and you can do the reporting, then that’s your job. Someone else should make it sing on the screen.
Of course, you need to find the right partners, and you have to create this partnership where you know you have to accept that there are a lot of things that you can’t control and have no idea how to do — like you have no idea how to put together a film. You don’t speak the language of the film. It is very different from an article. But also, the filmmakers will need to understand that you know better how to conduct an investigation. It’s a collaboration, but the editorial control is yours. The whole thing is a constant conversation. So you have to find the right partners.
JD: The documentary runs nearly an hour — longer than what most people think audiences will sit through online. How did you decide on the length? Was that planned from the beginning, or did the story simply demand that much time to tell?
AP: Whether it’s an article or a film, as long as it keeps the attention of the audience. Of course, I understand not everyone is going to watch the whole film, just like not everyone who clicks on a story [reads] the whole piece. But if it works as a film then, yes, I think length doesn’t really matter.
JD: Did you partner with YouTube or monetize the film there in some way?
AP: We don’t currently earn money directly from YouTube. I think if you want to get money directly from YouTube, then you have to have a partnership with YouTube, and then that comes with strings attached. I know we didn’t expect it to be such a big success. But yes, that’s something that you can do, and maybe we will do it in the future. If you watch the film, there are a lot of ads. We don’t benefit from the ads for now, but we benefited a lot from simply the attention that the film got.
Andras Petho, co-founder and director of Direkt36. Image: Screenshot/ Direckt36
JD: What advice would you give other small or independent newsrooms thinking about doing something similar?
AP: I don’t think it should be viewed as a magic weapon. It’s not that. Of course, this was a good fit, and we were lucky with the circumstances in Hungary that this film arrived in an environment where public discourse was very active. The apathy was over, and people were really engaged in public life, and they were hungry for these kinds of stories. We were lucky with that.
We probably wouldn’t have done this film if we hadn’t done the previous one, which was not as much of a success. But we learned, we started to feel comfortable with the format. This film wasn’t an experiment, but the whole process was an experiment. In the end, we realized that it’s a good fit for us.
JD: It really seems like you had the willingness to tell the story in a different way. It’s obviously not sensationalist, but it’s also not boring. You did it in a lively way — shifting between animation, speakers, and undercover work. Some traditional outlets might avoid that kind of approach, thinking it’s not “serious” enough. Do you think that willingness to experiment with form helped make the film so successful?
AP: For me, it’s pretty old school. Maybe it’s not as serious as a Frontline documentary, but it’s not bombastic Eastern European TV. It’s not like that. It’s more subtle.
If this story had been written in an article, then it would be hard to show Orban’s role in this whole story because, in fact, you do not find his fingerprints on any of these deals. You have no evidence that he’s actually involved in the business deals of his son-in-law. But we know that it’s a fact that he designed the political system where this could have happened. And you could write this in an article, but I don’t think it would get a lot of attention.
But in the film, the filmmakers had a really good solution where they brought in his voice. We have footage where we have Orban’s voice. It’s a fair, journalistic solution. Or at the end of the film where we have a group of Orban’s statements and speeches that he has given when he was asked several times over the years about the businesses of his family members. He keeps repeating, “I’m not involved. I have no idea.”
It’s so much more powerful than if you just see this written down. You have more ways to say things in a film. There are different tools available.
This interview was first published by Transitions, a Central and Eastern European media development organization. It is republished by GIJN with permission. You can see the original article here.
2026-01-20 16:00:52
Money is leaving journalism faster than new models can replace it — and “no cavalry is coming.” That warning, delivered without euphemism, cast a somber tone on the “Exploring Traditional and New Business Models” session at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia.
In the wide ranging discussion, panelists Christoph Plate, Gina Chua, Martha M. Steffens, Ryan Powell, and moderator Brant Houston pushed back against the idea that sustainability will emerge from the next shiny revenue fix. Instead, they argued that survival now depends on discipline: understanding audiences beyond clicks, measuring impact in ways funders and communities can recognize, managing costs with the same rigor applied to reporting, and treating journalism not only as a public service but also as a business.
The conversation reflected a broader shift now playing out across investigative newsrooms worldwide. As philanthropic funding tightens, legal and security costs climb, and new technologies reshape how audiences encounter information, long-held assumptions about independence, scale, and impact are being reassessed. Rather than offering a single solution, this GIJC25 panel discussion surfaced a set of unresolved questions about what investigative journalism can sustainably support — and what it may need to leave behind.
For Steffens, metrics are no longer a bureaucratic afterthought but a central pillar of investigative sustainability. A former newspaper editor and now an endowed chair in business and financial Journalism at the University of Missouri, Steffens said journalists must understand how their work translates into demonstrable impact — especially when seeking funding.
“In order to get funds, whether you are being funded by philanthropies or particular nonprofit foundations or individualized, you need to be able to measure your impact,” Steffens said.
She pointed to practical examples from US newsrooms that have redefined how impact is shown. The Post and Courier, in South Carolina, uses a heat map to display the geographic reach of its investigations, allowing readers to click on specific locations and see related reporting. The visual tool, she said, has not only fueled tip lines but also attracted financial support tied directly to those tips.
The Seattle Times has taken a different approach, successfully raising more than US$1.2 million from individual donors, as per Steffens, while anonymizing contributors so investigative reporters do not know who funds their work. “How they show impact there is how they’ve changed things within the city of Seattle and the state of Washington as well,” Steffens explained.
Nonprofit outlets are also experimenting with civic engagement as a metric. The Texas Tribune, for instance, uses a civic action survey to track how readers move from interest to activities such as contacting officials or voting. Steffens said the outlet’s goal is to push impact “towards that direction.”
For collaborative journalism, measuring reach can be more complex. The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom focused on gender equity, developed its own internal metrics to track not only readership but also sharing and social media engagement. “It’s not just viewing, but taking some sort of action,” Steffens noted.
She also highlighted how repurposing investigations can open new revenue streams. Reveal, a California-based investigative organization, doubled podcast sponsorships by adapting its reporting for audio.
Emotional connection, Steffens argued, remains one of the most powerful drivers of engagement and funding. She cited ProPublica’s Lost Mothers Project, which asked readers to submit cases of maternal deaths in childbirth. The initiative generated thousands of tips, deepened reader attachment, and later evolved into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life of the Mother project.
“It’s not only an attachment to this idea, but it was an incredibly powerful metric for individual donations,” she said.
Christoph Plate, director of the media program South East Europe at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, urged journalists to confront a different obstacle: professional arrogance.
Reflecting on his career as a correspondent and editor, Plate said journalists once kept a deliberate distance from advertising and business departments because they didn’t see the connection between their work and the newsroom. “This arrogance was extremely, extremely unhealthy,” he said
Plate challenged the idea that investigative journalism can exist independently of the broader newsroom ecosystem. Large-scale investigations such as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, he noted, were financed by established, profitable media houses capable of sustaining months of research and data mining.
“Investigative journalism by itself, in itself, cannot survive on its own,” he emphasized.
He also warned against an overreliance on philanthropy and donor-funded investigations. “Investigations that are entirely financed by philanthropy are not necessarily independent,” Plate said, adding that journalists must think seriously about economics.
For freelancers and early-career reporters, Plate recommended spending time in newsrooms to understand editorial and financial decision-making. He also encouraged media organizations to diversify income through training programs, public events, book publishing, and other services.
“Don’t be too dependent on one source of income,” he said. “It is the economy.”
Plate emphasized humility toward audiences as well. Journalism, he said, is not about vanity but service — and service must also be financially viable. “Shed your ego, shed your vanity and work on the journalism that serves the communities,” he said.
Ryan Powell, head of innovation and media business at the International Press Institute, approached sustainability from a systems perspective, focusing on revenue experiments and audience strategy. Powell described IPI’s recent survey work conducted with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which examined revenue experiments across 30 newsrooms.
Among the most common approaches were newsletters, memberships, crowdsourcing, consulting, paid content, and selling databases. But Powell cautioned against adopting popular solutions without assessing whether they fit a newsroom’s specific market.
“It’s really important to take a step back before you jump in headfirst to a particularly often prescribed solution,” he said.
Powell proposed viewing investigative journalism as a value chain made up of distinct units — from managing whistleblowers and filing freedom of information requests to verification and narrative construction. Understanding those units, he said, helps identify where monetization might be possible.
First-party data emerged as a critical asset. Newsletter signups, email lists, donation records, and event registrations, Powell said, give newsrooms control in an era dominated by third-party platforms and volatile algorithms. He cited work with Recorder, a Romania-based investigative video outlet that generates about €1.3 million (US$1 million) annually, largely through small donations enabled by a tax allocation system.
What made the model sustainable, Powell said, was not just donations but data. Building a customer relationship management system allowed the newsroom to understand donor behavior and respond when payments failed or lapsed.
“Any newsroom around the world … is able to put together this whole project and ultimately reach and build a sustainable model,” he explained.
If Powell emphasized structure, Gina Chua brought urgency. executive director of the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures and executive editor at large at Semafor, Chua told the room that investigative journalism faces a stark financial reality.
“There is not enough money,” she said. “The cavalry is not coming.”
Costs, she noted, are rising due to security needs, lawsuits, inflation, and technology, while major sources of philanthropic funding — including USAID — have declined. Simply doing good work, she said, will not fill the gap.
“We have to spend more time thinking about efficiency, thinking about consolidation, thinking about what we stop doing,” Chua said.
She also warned that journalism is on the brink of a major technological shift driven by generative AI. While large language models struggle with factual accuracy, she said, their ability to handle language is already transforming how people consume information.
“People are coming regardless of how accurate it is or not, because it is a better UI,” Chua said.
Her advice to investigative outlets was pragmatic: compete on product, not nostalgia. “We can’t simply tell people… you should eat our broccoli,” she said.
Chua argued that journalists must stop seeing themselves solely as content creators and instead as service providers who deeply understand their audiences. That cultural shift, she said, may determine whether investigative journalism remains relevant — even if it increasingly becomes, as she put it, a “luxury good.”
You can watch the full GIJC25 panel below.
Hanan Zaffar is a media practitioner, multimedia storyteller, and documentary filmmaker based in India. His work primarily focuses on South Asian politics, minorities, human rights, and the environment. His reporting has appeared in TIME Magazine, the Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, Business Insider, and other places. He has also had reporting stints in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, and is the UN Foundation’s 2025 Polio Press Fellow.
2026-01-19 16:00:14
At least 142 Ukrainian journalists and media workers have lost their lives since the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. In 2025, Russian strikes on Ukraine damaged the offices of four media outlets: Ukrainska Pravda and Radio Svoboda (the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) in Kyiv, and Suspilne Dnipro and Ukrayinske Radio in Dnipro.
Besides deadly threats, financial hardship, and staff shortages caused by the war, the past year in Ukraine was also marked by attacks against democracy and freedom of speech. There were online campaigns against regional reporters and representatives of NGO staff; pressure campaigns against anti-corruption activists; the surveillance of journalists revealed thanks to wiretap recordings of conversations between corrupt officials — released by the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) after their operations. Ukrainska Pravda journalist Mykhailo Tkach documented in a video report that he was followed in Lviv while investigating the undeclared assets of an employee of the Economic Security Bureau — a story we include on this list.
Мedia outlets played a vital role in explaining to their audiences why legislative efforts to restrict the independence of anti-corruption bodies are dangerous for society. Only unprecedented mass protests compelled the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, and President Zelensky to reverse course. But freedom of speech in Ukraine is further threatened by a bill submitted to the Ukrainian Parliament in September 2025 that journalists warn is a step toward censorship and a threat to investigative journalism, because it essentially declares any information not proven in court to be unreliable.
Despite threats to press freedom and constant power cuts and sleepless nights due to Russian attacks, Ukrainian independent journalists and newsrooms continue their work with depth and skill.
Image: Screenshot, Slidstvo.Info, YouTube
Slidstvo.Info, in collaboration with the outlets Graty, Suspilne, and Reporters Without Borders, produced an investigative documentary (with English subtitles) that describes what happened to Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina in Russian captivity.
The authors traced the reporter’s route through Poland, Latvia, and Russia to the occupied territories, where, according to witnesses, Roshchina wanted to collect information about Ukrainians tortured under Russian occupation in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Shortly after she crossed the border in July 2023, her father lost contact with her. A year later, in September 2024, he received an email from the Russian Ministry of Defense informing him of the death of his 27-year-old daughter.
The Slidstvo.Info team interviewed prosecutors investigating the circumstances of Roshchina’s disappearance and death, her acquaintances from the occupied territories, her cellmate, and former war prisoners who were held in the same prison as Victoria. According to witnesses, she suffered knife wounds and electric shocks, her weight dropped to just 30 kilograms (66 pounds), and she was unable to get out of bed on her own. Russia returned her body to Ukraine in February 2025; it showed marks of torture and was reportedly returned without some organs, labeled as an “unidentified man,” but was identified with genetic testing.
An international team of journalists coordinated by the French publication Forbidden Stories conducted their own in-depth investigation about Roshchina and other ghost detainees in Russian prisons, and continued her work in the Viktoriia Project; Ukrainska Pravda worked on a Ukrainian version of the Viktoriia Project, detailing the detention and torture experienced by Roshchina and thousands of Ukrainians imprisoned by Russia.
Image: Screenshot, KibOrg & NGL.media
KibOrg, NGL.media, OCCRP, and Slidstvo.Info obtained and analyzed leaked internal port documents from the occupied city of Berdyansk, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and identified approximately 20 ships that allegedly participated in the export of Ukrainian grain from the occupied territories.
According to their reporting, over 18 months, Russian companies operating in occupied territories exported more than 400,000 tons of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products from Berdyansk by sea, at an estimated cost of 4 billion Ukrainian hryvnias (US$2.6 million). To falsify the grain’s origin, it is registered as Russian at the ports of Temryuk and Kavkaz in the Krasnodar region. According to the leaked documents, Russia also exports this grain to Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Bangladesh.
By locating ships, identifying captains’ names, and mapping ship routes, the cross-border team was able to name the entities behind the smuggling — such as individuals holding Ukrainian passports and a Russia-based affiliate of a Danish shipping cargo inspection company that received payments for participating in the illegal exports, allegedly by inspecting and certifying the grain. The company’s website no longer lists the Russian branch in question. However, an employee told a reporter — who was undercover posing as a grain importer — that the office was still functioning. Representatives of the company and its parent did not respond to a request for comment.
Image: Screenshot, Bihus.info, YouTube
A series of corruption scandals broke in 2025, in part thanks to wiretap recordings released by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies after they investigated illegal enrichment in the land allocation process in Kyiv and corruption in energy sector that implicated high-level officials in Ukraine’s government. For months, journalists from various media outlets analyzed the released audio recordings to flesh out their previous investigations into corruption and abuses of power. The released wiretaps resulted in three major corruption cases that were covered — and expanded upon — by investigative journalists.
Operation ‘Clean City’: Bihus.Info journalists analyzed declassified audio recordings of wiretapped conversations between officials in the Kyiv city administration and the Kyiv City Council (part of a large-scale anti-corruption operation dubbed ‘Clean City’) involved in an illegal scheme to carve up land in the capital — a plan that Bihus.Info revealed was more sophisticated than previously known.
Luxury Cottages: In July, when a high-level government minister appeared in court on charges of abuse of office and receiving undue benefits, Bihus.Info was able to identify the owners behind a string of luxury cottage developments in Kozyn, near Kyiv. The team analyzed court video footage and court records, found public and open source data, pored through ownership structures and building permits, and examined satellite images and cadastral maps. They also sailed on a boat to get footage showing the full scale of the construction project — four luxury estates on eight hectares (20 acres) on the banks of the Dnipro River. (Ukrainska Pravda, which dug further into the case involving the government minister, dubbed the cottage development “Dynasty.”)
Operation ‘Midas’: By analyzing declassified audio conversations as part of the anti-corruption agencies’ Operation ‘Midas,’ which exposed a large-scale bribery scheme in Ukraine’s energy sector, Bihus.Info was able to expand the investigation to link funds obtained from this scheme — perpetrated by officials and businessmen close to the Ukrainian president — to the luxury cottage development in Kozyn.
Later, Ukrainska Pravda investigative reporter Mykhailo Tkach tracked down in Israel, and interviewed one of the alleged main actors of the Midas case, who neither confirmed nor denied the conclusions of the anti-corruption authorities and journalists, stating that his lawyers would deal with the matter.
Image: Screenshot, OCCRP
Schemes, the investigative program of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service, and OCCRP investigated torture, denial of medical care, sexual violence, and the deaths of Ukrainian prisoners of war in one of Russia’s most notorious penal colonies in Mordovia, a region in central Russia.
In the resulting documentary, the journalists named some prison staff who were allegedly involved in mistreating the prisoners of war — a violation of the Geneva Convention. They also claimed to identify a notorious and “sadistic” prison medic that inmates nicknamed “Dr. Shocker” or “Dr. Evil” for his particular cruelty and his use of a stun gun on prisoners.
Journalists interviewed about 150 former prisoners of war who survived captivity and returned to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange, analyzed open source information — including online video footage that helped survivors recognize the doctor’s voice even though he wore a mask in their encounters — and compared prisoners’ testimonies with satellite imagery to reconstruct the colony’s layout and the events that occurred there.
Five months after the investigation was published, Ukraine charged the medic with war crimes in absentia. When one of the journalists called the alleged doctor during the investigation, he told her he did not work at the colony and ended the call.
Image: Screenshot, Ukrainska Pravda, YouTube
Journalists from Ukrainska Pravda observed that, since the Economic Security Bureau of Ukraine (ESBU) was founded in 2021 to combat economic crimes, official investigations into corruption within the ESBU have been rare, and decided to take a closer look.
Based on information from human sources, their own reporting, and an interview with the subject of the investigation — a top ESB official in the Lviv region — UP exposed the official’s undeclared assets and conflicts of interest, including his links to a controversial tobacco magnate. Based on an analysis of social media, tax returns, and other sources, they also point out that the official’s recent divorce — along with his former wife’s rapid enrichment — matches an increasingly common pattern of officials getting divorced in an apparent attempt to avoid asset disclosure.
UP journalist Mykhailo Tkach noted that during five months of their work on this investigation, he documented several incidents of spying on his team in Lviv. The ESB official voluntarily resigned before the investigation was published.
(Other investigative outlets have reported on a spate of divorces among officials, in particular in Ukraine’s cyber police force, such as Bihus.Info’s: Cyber Police Tops’ Successful Ex-Wives, Cyber Cop and the Treasures of his ‘Ex,’ and Police Style Divorce.
Russian independent investigative media outlet The Insider investigated similar trends of suspicious divorces to avoid asset declarations in the Russian parliament.)
Image: Screenshot, The Kyiv Independent, YouTube
In an investigative documentary, the Kyiv Independent reported on the methods Russia employs to erase the national identity of Ukrainian children, educate them according to Russian educational standards, and militarize them — starting with Crimea and Donbas, occupied in 2014, and extending to territories seized during the full-scale invasion. According to human rights organizations, these actions violate humanitarian law and could be potential war crimes or crimes against humanity.
The journalists found families and teenagers who had fled to territory controlled by Ukraine. Parents told journalists how they were forced to send their children to school under the Russian curriculum. Schoolchildren shared their stories on how they were recruited into “military-patriotic” organizations. Using open source methods, particularly publications and videos from Russian propaganda media outlets, journalists spent months analyzing the activities of numerous youth movements and organizations in both the occupied territories and Russia — and tried to identify the Russians and collaborators who run the system of militarization of children and train them in military camps.
Image: Screenshot, OCCRP
The investigative documentary produced by Slidstvo.Info in collaboration with OCCRP and Investigace.cz recounted the story of 510 Ukrainian orphans evacuated from Dnipropetrovsk to Turkey by a charitable foundation at the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It shed light on shortcomings in the state system of care for orphaned children.
Slidstvo obtained a report from Investigace.cz colleagues that was based on a monitoring mission by the Ukrainian Ombudsman’s Office, assessing the conditions at a Turkish hotel where Ukrainian children were staying in March 2024.
To verify the report’s findings, journalists analyzed the charitable foundation’s promotional video, reviewed video recordings from private smartphones, interviewed the teenagers, their caregivers, and other witnesses, and questioned the head of the charitable foundation responsible for the evacuation and subsequent care in Turkey. Interviewees said children had limited access to medical care and online education, suffered from physical abuse, humiliation, and exploitation, and two underage girls became pregnant by hotel staff. (An important outcome of the investigation is that one of the girls, a 17-year-old, was reunited with her young daughter after being separated.)
In the documentary, the founder of the charity denied forcing the children into participating in fundraising activities and said that his foundation staff had not failed in their responsibility to properly safeguard the teen girls who were impregnated.
Seeking Turkish partners on the story, Slidstvo editor Anna Babynets attended a networking session at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia in November 2025, where she met Turkish journalist Burcu Karakaş. Karakaş sent FOI requests to Turkish authorities and in early December published the story of Ukrainian orphans in the Turkish outlet Agos and on X, which sparked considerable public discourse in Turkey — representatives of civil society demanded an official investigation, and politicians proposed discussing the issue in parliament.
Image: Screenshot, Texty.org.ua
For more than a year, Ukrainian data newsroom Texty.org.ua and Swiss outlet NZZ worked together on a project tracing Ukrainian children taken to Russia.
Journalists developed their own AI-based technology to compare photos and employed both open source tools and conventional reporting — interviewing people, searching for and verifying data — to piece together scattered fragments of information into a complete picture.
With a method developed specifically for this investigation that combined facial recognition algorithms with multi-level manual verification, journalists compared 951 photos of missing Ukrainian children with 41,039 images from Russian and Belarusian adoption databases. This painstaking work enabled them to tell the story of one orphan from Oleshky in the Kherson region. The war drove him to the Urals, where he lost his father, ended up in an orphanage, and was put up for adoption without any mention of his Ukrainian origin.
In July of 2023, the Russian president’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova — after the International Criminal Court in The Hague had issued an arrest warrant for her — reported that Russia had “accepted” more than 700,000 children from Ukraine. According to childrenofwar.gov.ua, Ukraine has documented 19,546 cases in detail.
Olga Simanovych, a native of Ukraine, has more than 13 years of television experience as a journalist, screenwriter, and managing editor. Seven of those years were spent as a TV news reporter for the Vikna-Novyny program on STB, where she specialized in politics, environment, human rights ,and medicine. From 2011 to 2016, she was a media trainer with different nonprofit organizations and participated in SCOOP‘s international investigations. A graduate of Taras Shevchenko National University, Ukraine, she is bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, and fluent in English and Greek.
