2025-12-12 16:14:06
Archives offer journalists new muckraking avenues and stories, from revealing how the US government broke promises made to freed slaves in the 19th century to uncovering crimes against humanity in Syria and Brazil.
During the “Digging into Archives — Historical Investigations” panel at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Juliana Dal Piva, columnist and investigative reporter from the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) and ICL Noticias, Hadi al Khatib, managing director of Mnemonic, Jennifer LaFleur, data journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and moderator Tristan Ahtone, editor-at-large of Grist, shared how to create and use archives to strengthen journalistic research and legal accountability by wrongdoers.
When describing Mnemonic, a digital archive created to investigate international crimes, Hadi al-Khatib explained some of the decisions archivists make.
“We started this work ten years ago because most of the information we collected was posted on social media platforms, and it was being erased because of the algorithms these platforms used,” he said, highlighting how vital information, such as proof of attacks on hospitals during the Syrian civil war, needed to be saved.
Clips that proved international crimes were committed were being deleted by platforms such as YouTube for its “graphic or explicit content” to comply with the algorithm’s standards. Thanks to its team and sources, Mnemonic has archived more than 30 million records and 400 terabytes of information from over 100,000 sources.
As both an online archive and an investigative team, Mnemonic conducts essential work to find out what happened to people disappeared by the authorities after being detained in checkpoints and roadblocks set up by the Syrian army during the early years of the war.
Everything stored in the archive aims to meet the extremely high bar that courts demand for accepting videos, photographs, recordings, and documents that aren’t original. They’ve also designed software to prove that these items haven’t been altered. Mnemonic archivists also transcribe audio from video using machine learning software to enable keyword searches.
Some lessons learned from Mnemonic’s work are:
Jennifer LaFleur explains how they scoured the archives for material for their investigation into historic injustices and slavery. Image: Alyaa Alhadjri for GIJN
Ultimately, an archive’s potential is realized when a researcher uses it to tell a story that uncovers wrongdoing relevant to present-day readers or viewers. LaFleur and her team from the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal proved in the “40 Acres and a Lie” podcast and multimedia platform that, after slavery was abolished in the United States, the federal government rescinded a Special Field Order from 1865 to give each freed slave family up to 40 acres of confiscated land.
This act set off a chain of injustice against African Americans linked to contemporary structural inequalities and racism that was laid bare when the researchers interviewed the descendants of African Americans who received land that was later taken away.
“We spent a lot of time in archives and museums and historical centres trying to get records to fill in all the blanks,” said La Fleur. She added that her team also built a tool to enable other researchers to search documents in one of their main sources, the Freedmen’s Bureau — established by US Congress in the 19th century to help former slaves transition to freedom and which contains names and information for hundreds of thousands of people.
Dal Piva, in her book “Crime Without Punishment: How the Military Killed Rubens Paiva,” examines how Brazilian congressman Ruben Paiva — who in 1971 was taken by armed men who claimed to be members of the Brazilian Armed Forces — was murdered by a former military member, and details what happened to him while he was “disappeared.”
Paiva’s kidnapping, torture, and killing are painstakingly described — illuminating aspects of a past with which Brazil hasn’t fully grappled. “There’s so much about the dictatorship that hasn’t been done,” said Dal Piva. “It’s even difficult for us to do stories on this, because there’s a culture of silence.”
Both investigators highlighted how they approached the archives to tell a story. La Fleur’s team grounded the archive’s findings in storytelling by later finding and interviewing the descendants of former slaves. Dal Piva — who used judicial archives and court records to help uncover what happened to congressman Paiva — tapped into storytelling techniques to narrate the twists, turns, and surprises that come up when uncovering new documents in an archive.
The main tips they shared to approach archival research are:
Dal Piva suggested getting to know the archive almost like you would a friend. Indeed, more than a passive information vault, archives are architectures of information moulded by people and institutions through choices. Be familiar with them and also let them surprise you: They might hold the key to stories others gave up on uncovering long ago.
2025-12-11 21:48:42
The Sentry is seeking an experienced and dynamic EU Senior Policy Advisor to lead the organization’s strategic engagement with the European Union and its Member States on a range of policy matters related to illicit finance, corruption, human rights, conflict, and related investigations conducted by The Sentry. This role will play an important part in The Sentry’s effort to support the EU in leading the global fight against corruption and illicit finance by providing information, analysis and policy recommendations.
The EU Senior Policy Advisor will engage with European policy makers in Brussels, including EU institutions and members states; in EU capitals with member state government officials; in program countries with EU delegations and embassy employees; and with the private sector, including EU banks and other private sector stakeholders that have the power to halt illicit financial flows, block transactions, and freeze assets. The role includes organizing in-person and online briefings, bilateral meetings, and roundtables; engaging in public-private partnerships related to our country programs and thematic priorities; and publishing policy papers including op-eds.
This position calls for a mission-driven, highly strategic critical thinker who thrives in a fast-paced environment, is versed in a range of policy options, and is skilled at strategic advocacy with a broad group of government, multilateral bodies, private entities, and civil society groups.
2025-12-11 20:37:02
Mnemonic works at the intersection of archiving of open source information and leveraging that preserved content as evidence, for accountability. Our legal work involves building digital evidence archives, litigation support, and open source investigations into international crimes and human rights violations.
Legal & Research is a cross-functional programme at Mnemonic: it fills an essential coordination role, aiming to connect the dots on research methods and activities across all Mnemonic programmes and ensure good compliance with open source research and evidence standards. More specifically, Mnemonic’s legal team endeavours to secure the evidentiary potential of the open source archives and support all Mnemonic programmes in their efforts to leverage the archived material to advance justice and accountability for serious harms including human rights violations and international crimes. Mnemonic legal contributes to legal projects or potential legal projects such as case-building work, requests for information, and any other activities involving legal systems or analysis.
As a Legal Advisor for Mnemonic you will provide technical legal support to all research teams and programmes: Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, Sudanese Archive, Ukrainian Archive, Rapid Response, and our Technical Team. Your input might include advice on legal interventions, detailed review of research outputs, feedback on the design and implementation of new research tools or methods, and more.
Our team is small but impactful, meaning this role entails both groundbreaking advancements in international legal practice and essential-but-mundane system maintenance responsibilities. You will help to brainstorm innovative ways of leveraging digital open source evidence for accountability, and you will also meticulously check all legal outputs for basic typos and formatting issues. You will be involved in building cases for creative and strategic impact – sometimes by formatting dozens of footnotes under tight deadlines. We are looking for a new team member who is fully on board for all that this working spectrum entails, and who recognises that these types of jobs can often involve more time on the daily grind than the cutting edge.
2025-12-11 16:00:40
Reporting on climate change and global finance may seem like separate beats, one burning, the other boring. One driven by spreadsheets, the other by fossil fuels. But in reality, the world’s warming is tightly interwoven with private capital flows. Investment funds, insurers, banks, and other corporate actors are shaping the future of the planet arguably more than any single climate summit. And while these financial structures may appear far removed from everyday lives, the impacts are painfully real.
Communities lose their homes and livelihoods, forests vanish, oceans heat up, and emissions keep rising. From Asia to the Americas, powerful politicians, tycoons, and well-connected investors are positioning themselves to profit from the “energy transition.” Liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals are rising next to vulnerable coral reefs, rainforests are cut down and turned into wood pellets, “sustainable” timber is flowing from conflict zones, and Indigenous communities from the Amazon to sub-Saharan Africa are being pushed off their ancestral land for a fraction of its value.
One of the places these impacts hit the hardest are humid tropical regions, places that depend on vulnerable forests, reefs, and rivers to survive. Yet the decisions that shape their futures are often taken in distant, air-conditioned boardrooms. As the speakers in Kuala Lumpur at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) session “Exposing Private Money Fueling the Climate Crisis” argued, any journalist can learn to read the financial documents behind these decisions, unmask hidden owners (including powerful politicians), and confront the banks, auditors, and regulators enabling environmental destruction. The key is not expertise. Instead, it’s about methodology, persistence, and collaboration.
The Verde Island Passage in the Philippines is one of the most biodiverse coral regions on Earth, and an unlikely hotspot for a wave of LNG terminals. LNG is vastly more expensive than renewable energy, but several of these facilities are already operational, with many more planned. But local fishing communities say their catch has collapsed since the terminals have been built.
For journalist Ed Davey, something didn’t add up. Why would a province rich in wind, tidal, and solar energy push a resource that could endanger both the environment and the local economy?
This contradiction was his entry point. Then he learned something important: years earlier, a company tied to the provincial governor had quietly bought some of the most strategic coastal land. Later, the governor resigned as chief executive and his wife took over running the company. But the timing, the location, and the scale of the landholdings raised red flags. LNG terminals require huge stretches of strategic coastal land.
So, Davey went door to door, asking residents about land sales, ownership, and company visits. Many residents were reluctant to speak with him. “Let’s say I am not the most welcomed person on that island anymore,” he acknowledged.
Tracing these companies through the Philippine Stock Exchange revealed one shell company after another — not a single real owner appeared.
At this point, most investigations stall. But Davey persisted. Even though the Philippine registries failed to show the true owners, he looked for another way in: Orbis, a powerful (and expensive) international corporate database. Most newsrooms cannot afford Orbis alone, and Davey didn’t have access to it either. This is where the real power of collaborative journalism came in. A colleague of his at another organization granted him access to the database. In it, he found hundreds of documents that didn’t show up in the Philippines registry.
All of them pointed to the same person: the governor himself. Davey’s investigation for the AP showed that the governor was still effectively profiting from the LNG boom. (In response, the governor “denied his associated businesses were involved with the buildout and called natural gas the best choice for the country.”)
At GIJC25, investigative reporter Ed Davey discussing his Associated Press investigation into the land owner behind numerous proposed LNG terminals in the Philippines. Image: Vivan Yap Wei Wen for GIJN
Davey’s full method, in simple steps.
When politicians’ decisions don’t seem make economic sense or benefit the public good, Davey explained, sometimes private interests can provide the explanation.
ICIJ reporter Scilla Alecci examined another hidden engine of climate harm: the private auditors who certify forests, palm oil, and timber as “sustainable.” Labels such as FSC, PEFC, and others shape global markets and burnish corporate standing in consumers’ eyes. But ICIJ kept encountering the same troubling pattern: these certifications did not match the reality on the ground.
The forestry industry is global, highly fragmented, and governed largely by voluntary oversight. So Scilla’s team built the dataset the industry refused to provide, and launched a major investigation involving 43 media partners with reporters from 28 countries called Deforestation Inc.
The investigation led by Alecci and her team at the ICIJ took numerous, detailed steps.
The investigation exposed how flawed environmental auditing and certification systems have allowed companies to greenwash products linked to rainforest destruction, illegal logging, and human rights abuses. This exposure prompted major brands into dropping suppliers, and sparked government probes in different parts of the world.
One striking example discussed at GIJC was the Blood Teak scandal, where lumber harvested under a brutal military regime ended up in luxury yachts in Europe even though the EU placed sanctions against it. The investigation showed that the imports continued, and sometimes under misleading sustainability claims, thanks to gaps in auditing and enforcement.
The Deforestation Inc. exposé found numerous cases of misconduct.
Alecci’s investigation also showed that a sustainability label is not evidence. It is a lead. One that journalists should investigate, not trust. Scraping certification lists and comparing them with violation databases is a highly replicable method across industries.
Mongabay’s Philip Jacobson showed how climate reporting can expose harm before it happens. It is an unusual challenge for journalists: how do you report on deforestation before the chainsaws arrive?
His starting point was a contact in North Kalimantan, an Indonesian province on the island of Borneo. This person reported that villagers were being approached by a company seeking land for a massive wood-pellet biomass plantation. Biomass is marketed as carbon-neutral and is in high demand by Japanese and Korean energy firms, but numerous studies and experts have shown that wood pellets are not truly sustainable and can even increase emissions.
Jacobson located the company’s deforestation location permit, revealing a concession of about 19,000 hectares. That is nearly twice the size of Paris. He and his team decided to visit four villages inside the zone. They found that each village had been offered a different deal, a sign of how little information communities received about the project’s actual impact.
Many villagers didn’t understand the future impact because they were not fully informed about its true impact: loss of hunting grounds, loss of clean water, loss of forest products, loss of income, and permanent loss of ancestral land. They only realized later that a monoculture plantation meant the forest, the foundation of their livelihoods, would disappear.
Jacobson’s investigation also uncovered that the biomass company was linked to a coal conglomerate repositioning itself as “green.” The foreign consumers, especially Japanese and Korean power utilities justify this as sustainable through deeply flawed carbon accounting rules, while villagers lose their ancestral land with little information.
Their reporting helped draw international scrutiny and contributed to broader questioning of biomass sustainability in Asian energy markets.
The takeaway: Deforestation can be documented long before the first tree falls, if journalists obtain permits, map concessions, and speak directly with affected communities.
Mongabay’s Philip Jacobson detailing his exposé on a biomass company’s campaign to buy access from Indigenous communities to rainforest land in an Indonesian province on Borneo. Image: Vivian Yap Wei Wen for GIJN
Panel moderator and award-winning freelance journalist Nimra Shahid showed how even a single contradiction can spark a major investigation. Her work uncovered greenwashing at some of the world’s largest banks and “green loans” involving a global fossil fuel company.
“You don’t need to be a finance expert to expose greenwashing. You just need to ask for the data no one else asked for,” Shahid said.
Her method was simple:
Her analysis showed one British bank helped arrange US$41 billion in sustainability-linked financing for fossil fuel companies. Her reporting contributed to the introduction of a new anti-greenwashing rule in the UK.
Climate finance is not abstract. It is the story of who profits while ecosystems collapse. And as this session showed, journalists can expose the hidden engines of climate harm with simple, powerful methods: follow the filings, test the green labels, trace the owners, and speak to the people whose lives change long before investors feel the impact.
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.
