2025-09-18 15:00:55
It was in March this year that Chloe Hadjimatheou, a narrative editor and an award-winning investigative journalist, received an unusual tipoff.
While her previous work had seen her digging into left-wing political parties, sex scandals, and chemical weapons traders, this call was about “The Salt Path,” a best-selling memoir written by Raynor Winn about a life-changing journey along one of England’s coastal paths taken with her husband, Moth.
First published in 2018 to worldwide acclaim, the book recounted a 630-mile walk that the couple undertook after being forced to leave their home in Wales. Winn followed up with two more books, writing that after each of their epic journeys, her husband Moth, who had been diagnosed with a rare and typically terminal neurological condition, started to improve.
Hadjimatheou, a narrative editor at Tortoise Media and The Observer, published her story in July. In it, she alleged that Winn had obfuscated and manipulated key details about the couple’s homelessness and financial dealings in her books, and also suggested that the books had been misleading by implying that a disease with a life expectancy of circa eight years could be treated by walking.
“The story, no doubt, has elements of truth, but it also misrepresents who they were, how they started out on their journey, and the financial circumstances that provided the backdrop,” Hadjimatheou concluded in the piece, after speaking to former employers, scouring court records, and property transactions. One of the nine neurologists and researchers specializing in the condition Moth had been diagnosed with said the story did “not pass the sniff test.”
Hadjimatheou’s story sparked a furor, prompting one charity to cut ties with the couple and the book’s publisher, Penguin, to release a statement. It said they had undertaken “all the necessary pre-publication due diligence,” including legal vetting, and had not previously received any concerns about the book. In response to the story, Winn also released a response, calling the article “misleading.” She said: “‘The Salt Path’ lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives.”
Chloe Hadjimatheou, a narrative editor at Tortoise Media and The Observer who was formerly with the BBC, published her story on the couple behind “The Salt Path” in July 2025. Image: The Observer
Other compelling investigations that Hadjimatheou has worked on recently include Lucky Boy, a four-episode podcast released by Tortoise, which followed a middle-aged man who said he had been in an abusive relationship with his school teacher years ago, and The Gas Man, about an international fugitive who sold chemical weapons.
Prior to working for Tortoise, Hadjimatheou had been at the BBC and worked on several documentaries, including one about sex scandals in the world of K-pop and the rise of a new force in Greek politics. Hadjimatheou spoke to GIJN about her Salt Path exposé, audio investigations, and reporting techniques. The answers have been edited and condensed for style.
GIJN: I wanted to begin by asking about your Salt Path investigation. It started with a tipoff, right? Why did you think it was worth investigating?
Chloe Hadjimatheou: When I got the tipoff, I didn’t know anything about these books. This was somebody who had met the couple and spent time with them, and was concerned that they weren’t being honest about the health condition. So I started looking into it. I spent a few hours just looking at the general symptoms, life expectancy, and I could see that the way in which this man, Moth, presented was very different from what was being said in the literature about the life expectancy and the symptoms. Immediately, I became curious. My editor said it’s extremely difficult to prove that somebody’s not ill, and journalistically dangerous, because illnesses are a gray area; you never quite know. You can’t look at medical records or speak to doctors.
But what this person who gave me the tipoff also gave me was the real names of this couple. It seemed very curious to me that… this couple were both using names that were not their own. However hard I looked, I couldn’t find any connection to their real names. That’s why I thought that it was worth looking at.
GIJN: You must get a lot of tipoffs, how do you figure out which ones are worth following?
CH: I get a lot, and most of them lead nowhere. Most of them tend to be somebody who has a personal gripe, or I get sprawling, rambling messages without any kind of focus. I always read every single tipoff and respond to everybody who writes to me, but very few of them lead to anything.
[With the Salt Path story] it seemed curious to me that I couldn’t find any other journalist who had questioned it. On the one hand, as a journalist, you think: “Does that mean that I’ve missed something?” On the other hand, my instinct was telling me there is something here. There seemed to be some rumors in Wales, in the town where this couple originally lived. One of my editors is Welsh, and said “Welsh rumors are not a basis for an article” — which is a fair point. I had to have more than that. And so at that point, it’s about persuading your editors to give you the time to dig.
GIJN: What kind of reporting did this project involve; legal papers, interviews, shoe-leather reporting? Can you talk a little bit about the methods?
CH: When people hear investigative journalism, most people think that it’s exciting, sexy work.There are moments when it feels like that, but a lot of it is really quite boring stuff like trawling through legal documents. I had these people’s real names, so the first thing I did was to see if there were any county court judgments against them, any criminal fines or records against them. I also began to look into the one central thing in their story, which was the way in which they lost their property. So I went to the Land Registry in the UK. I had their names and the address, and with those details I was able to gather as many documents as I could. These are public records.
I then had a solicitor who specializes in property law who helped me. I’m often picking up subjects that I know nothing about. So it’s about finding the resources that you need to help you understand that small world. The solicitor was able to talk me through the documents and say, actually, you should go back to the Land Registry and ask for these other documents, which I would never have known to do. So I gathered as many of these documents as I could, and immediately there was this one that stood out as strange: This couple had taken a cash loan against their house from a private individual. It’s not something many people do. That said that there’s a story there somewhere. I didn’t know if I could find out what that story was.
But then I began to look for the property solicitors on the documents and the names on the documents, and I took some time to go to Wales. I had his one bit of information about her former employer, who was an estate agent. So I went into every estate agent in this town and just sort of said: “Hi, this is what I’m doing. This is going to seem really strange. Have you heard of this couple?” It’s a slow process with a lot of digging and a lot of luck, and the harder you dig, and the more you don’t let go of the threads that are dangling, and you keep pulling, the more you increase your luck.
GIJN: Typically, how long would an investigative story take you?
CH: I have a very niche way of doing journalism, which is that I do an investigation and then I turn it into a narrative podcast series. That is a long process. Typically, a story that I work on takes about a year, but often I’m working on other things at the same time. Sometimes I have two or three investigations going on. Having the luxury of a longer period of time with this story trundling in the background means that things come out. The Salt Path story took far less than the typical investigation. The previous one I did, Lucky Boy — from when I first spoke to the main character and got the story to when it was released — it was about a year, but I did other things in between.
GIJN: When you were doing the Salt Path reporting, did you know what form it would take? How do you decide what form best suits the story that you’re working on?
CH: It’s an editorial meeting. We have a conversation. And because I have quite a long history of making these series, I have a feeling for whether or not there is enough there. I didn’t feel there was enough for a series early on, so I published the initial story in the newspaper, and then a lot of people approached me afterwards, and they’re still approaching me. Lots more has come out since the publication, which was what we hoped. We felt that there was [enough for] an episode; it’s still a discussion about whether or not there’s a series there.
GIJN: Can you tell me a little bit about how you work out the narrative potential of an investigation? How do you go about both the narrative part as well as the investigative part?
CH: In order for a story to carry across a whole series, it requires lots of elements. One is enough of a story with lots of twists and turns, so that different episodes tell different parts of the story, but in and of themselves, they are a story. That requires a complex story and a long journey, usually. Often it also requires a central or a couple of central characters that will take you through it. So if I’m doing a story about a company, that’s more challenging for me, because the kinds of listeners who will listen to it and will persevere will be far fewer. What we connect with is people, and so I often need to have a central character.
And then there needs to be an investigative bit that hasn’t finished, a way in which I can unravel something. The more that is happening in the process of the podcast series, the more interesting it is to listen to.
And then of course, the other thing that’s really important is that the entire story has to amount to something bigger. I need to be able to tell the listeners something bigger about the world, about the human condition, about the way in which we understand ourselves. If you are telling a fantastic story that amounts to nothing, then people feel short-changed at the end of it. So all of those elements need to be there, which is why it’s very difficult to find something that merits a series. I don’t get them very often.
GIJN: What are the different methods or skill sets that you have to deploy when you’re doing investigative reporting?
CH: It’s so varied and random. I have done freedom of information requests. Honestly though, the majority of the really good stuff that I uncover is by speaking to people, persuading them to trust me. Often the best documents I have, the best information I have is because I’ve spoken to somebody who’s opened up. You can dig as much as you like in the legal sort of wider periphery, but the kinds of stuff that I do, which is at their core, human stories, require the ability to speak to people, to understand people, to empathize with them, and to persuade them that you’re a safe person, that they can trust. Also something else — not giving up. There are so many times when you hit a wall and it feels like “I don’t think I can get anywhere further.” And then you think, “I’ll just make a couple more calls…” and it’s at that point that you have a breakthrough. With Lucky Boy, I couldn’t get people to speak to me. I felt stuck. And then slowly, I started to get breaks, but only because I just didn’t stop. I can be quite an annoying person in real life, because I don’t let things go. But in journalism, that’s super useful.
GIJN: When do you know when something is not working out and it’s time to stop?
CH: That’s a good question. As a journalist, I never lose the voice in my head that says, “What if you’re wrong?” Usually, the kinds of investigations that I do in which I’m pointing a finger at somebody and saying this person has done wrong, and that often means that that person is going to be damaged by my investigation. That is a huge responsibility. I have stuff that I haven’t been able to answer, that I still suspect, but I would rather keep it and not broadcast it, than broadcast something that could be wrong and hurt somebody.
GIJN: You’ve talked about the ethical and moral aspects, but what about the legal protections? Do you worry about people suing you or the government suing you?
CH: That’s definitely a hazard of the job. And that’s why I have always had close relationships with the lawyers that we work with. A brilliant lawyer really knows the law and understands the finer points of the law, but they’re also an enabler. They’re somebody who wants you to do your journalism, but they’re also somebody who’s going to keep you in check and make sure that not only are you protected, but also the people that you’re reporting about are protected, that we’re being fair to them. They are such an integral part of the journalism, and they often don’t get the credit.
I’ll give you an example. We were so concerned with the Salt Path story because of the sensitivities of it, both because this couple was so well loved around the world, but also because there was an illness involved. We spent a lot of time working on whether or not we felt there was a public interest in this, and I did that with the lawyer. We created a whole document where we worked out whether or not each element of the story was worth reporting on, and whether or not there was a public interest in it.
GIJN: Apart from tipoffs, how do you get your stories?
CH: Everywhere and anywhere is where you get your stories. Lucky Boy was through a friend of a friend. I did a series called Mayday while I was at the BBC and that was from a news report about a man who had died under mysterious circumstances. The thing with the news is that it moves quite quickly, so it will tell you a story, and then there’ll be loads of questions hanging. That’s when we come in and pick up that news story, dig in, and have the time to look at it more broadly. Each time the story comes to you from such random places. I think the key is understanding what makes a story and being open to it, because when it lands on your lap, you need to be able to see it. It’s very easy to miss it.
Bhavya Dore is a journalist based in Hyderabad. She has written for Caravan, Quartz, Wired, the Guardian, and the BBC, and focuses on criminal and social justice. She was a Kim Wall grantee at the IWMF. You can see previous stories she reported for GIJN, on investigating the COVID-19 pandemic in India and on investigating in an election year.
2025-09-17 15:00:16
While we prepare for the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia from November 20-24, we are excited to share more speakers who will be part of the event.
We are expecting more than 300 world-class panelists and instructors will join us in Kuala Lumpur. This group includes veteran reporters and editors, data and coding gurus, fundraising and sustainability advisors, and subject matter experts on everything from documenting war crimes to conducting forensic finance to uncovering the pharmaceutical industry.
Here is a selected list of some of the latest confirmed GIJC25 speakers. Don’t miss sessions with these panelists:
If you are catching up with GIJC25 information, don’t miss our recent posts and announcements:
Registration for GIJC25 remains open until November 10. Get your tickets now.
2025-09-16 15:00:20
We call for nominations to the Board of Directors of GIJN. This year, we are electing three regional representatives (Europe, Asia/Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa) and four at-large directors for the 15-person board.
To be eligible to run, candidates must be affiliated with a GIJN member organization and their candidacy must be endorsed by that organization.
Candidates should send a photo, short bio, and a statement about why they want to join the GIJN Board to [email protected]. These will be posted on the GIJN website. Candidates should also submit a letter of endorsement that confirms their eligibility. Only one candidate from an organization may be nominated. All nominations must be submitted by October 1, 2025 at 23:59 CET.
Once those nominations are in, details of the candidates will be circulated and posted on the website. A ballot will be emailed to the designated representative of each member organization. Voting will take place between October 9 and October 25, 2025.
Each of GIJN’s 263 member organizations is entitled to one vote, which is cast by its designated representative (on record with the GIJN Secretariat). If member organizations are unsure who their representatives are, please contact us.
To ensure diversity, the GIJN board reserves seats for representatives from six geographic regions. Another eight seats are for at-large members. A 15th board position is reserved for a representative of the host organization for the next global conference.
Regional board members are divided into the following regions and two election groups:
This year we will vote on the three regional members from Group 2 and four at-large board-members. Board members serve for a two-year term.
GIJN is a US-registered nonprofit corporation, and the board serves as its governing body. Board members play an active leadership role, carrying out the fiduciary (financial) duties of oversight, and providing strategic direction, administrative oversight, and general support to the organization. Duties include (but are not limited to) attending board and board committee meetings, setting key GIJN policies, approving new membership applications, approving the annual budget, evaluating and overseeing the executive director, and providing fundraising support.
Board members, as representatives of the membership, will also be asked to provide advisory input into — but do not carry out — conference organizing, training, and other program activities. Conference and program activities are overseen and carried out by the staff.
Board Election Rules (bylaws)
If only one candidate, or no candidates, run for the board in that region, no election will be held for that region. If only one is running, he or she will be elected. If two or more candidates get equal votes, the election committee will decide by flipping a coin. All member representatives are entitled to vote for election of the four at-large members. Each member organization can vote for a maximum of four board members.
If an individual has already been elected as a regional representative, he or she shall be removed from the list of elected at-large representatives. Similarly, if an individual’s election would mean one region exceeds the allowable amount of four at-large representatives, he or she shall be removed from the list of at-large representatives.
The four candidates with the most votes are elected, unless it will conflict with the two rules mentioned above. If there is a tie in the voting, the decision will be made by the election officer flipping a coin.
The board member for the organization hosting the next global conference does not count in the calculation on maximum five members in the board from one region.
If there are more candidates than seats, we will hold an election using electronic voting. Voting will be open from October 9 at 12:01 am CET to October 25, 2025 at 23:59 pm CET.
Brant Houston, a current board member not running in this election, will serve as the election officer, overseeing the voting process, with the GIJN staff. Results will be certified by the GIJN executive director, overseen by a GIJN committee of board members not up for election this year.
The results of the electronic voting will be announced following completion, tabulation, and certification of the vote. The new board members will replace the previous members at the next board meeting in December 2025. Board members serve for a two-year term.
2025-09-15 15:00:57
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia, GIJN is publishing a series of short interviews with a globally-representative sample of conference speakers. These are among the more than 300 leading journalists and editors who will be sharing practical investigative tools and insights at the event.
Having previously exposed abuses such as illegal mining and drug trafficking as a reporter for El Universal, Joseph Poliszuk has since led a trailblazing and courageous team as co-founder of Venezuela’s pioneering investigative journalism outlet Armando.info.
Despite being forced into exile, this newsroom has relentlessly investigated high-level corruption and human rights violations in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America, and employed innovative approaches ranging from the use of data-gathering algorithms to active cross-border collaboration and the pursuit of urgent, undercovered topics. Their follow-the-money investigations have included the Miami Nostro series that exposed secret US investments by hundreds of former Venezuelan military officers, and key revelations in Latin America’s vast Odebrecht corruption and money laundering scandal.
Poliszuk will share key insights on investigating oligarchs and managing projects from exile as a speaker at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia (GIJC25). This is the second in a series of interviews with key speakers who will be in attendance.
GIJN: Of all the investigations you or your team have worked on, which has been your favorite, and why?
Joseph Poliszuk: I think that question is like asking a musician to choose their best song or album. For me, journalism is a way of life, and I’ve enjoyed every season of this series: from my first trip to the clandestine mines of southern Venezuela to, 20 years later, programming an algorithm to geolocate them. From tracing — through data journalism techniques — generals and colonels who, against the law, became the state’s biggest contractors, to exposing corruption — through traditional reporting — in the promised public works of Brazil’s Odebrecht in Venezuela. From documenting torture and systematic human rights violations in clandestine detention centers in Caracas — including Nazi-style practices such as Sippenhaft — to searching the country’s dusty physical archives for Nicolás Maduro’s elusive and symbolic birth certificate.
GIJN: What are the biggest challenges for investigative reporting in your country/region?
JP: Venezuela is a closed society, where there is no free access to public information, and fear extends from government sources to the most independent ones, who worry about reprisals against their families. That’s why I feel that, despite the good work being done, we still fall short: there are vast voids and information deserts in a media ecosystem that is practically non-existent. In many cases, we don’t even fully know how the state operates, the systematic human rights violations being committed, or the crimes carried out directly by those in power.
In this context, journalists face a mix of political pressure, legal harassment, and economic precarity. Independent teams are usually small, underfunded, and exposed to digital threats or intimidation. Authorities themselves are implicated in corruption cases and even in crimes against humanity. This makes sustainability a constant challenge: producing investigations that may take months or years while keeping the team safe and operational.
GIJN: What reporting tool, database, or technique have you found surprisingly useful in your investigations?
JP: In our work, we’ve advanced alongside technology: from structuring large databases and using machine learning to search through archives and massive leaks to designing algorithms to track satellite images. Technology is undoubtedly helpful and must be taken advantage of, but it is not the foundation of journalism. The principles remain the same, and everything depends on what we are investigating and what we want to find.
GIJN: What’s the best advice you’ve received from a peer or journalism conference – and what words of advice would you give an aspiring investigative journalist?
JP: I remember that, at the dawn of what came to be called “computer-assisted reporting” — long before the boom of “data journalism” — Gianina Segnini told us that the digital world is not so different from the physical one; just as an institution stores documents on paper, it also stores them on its servers. Starting from that idea, I use and flip the same advice to say that before thinking about technology — and its “little toys”— we need to be clear about what we want to prove, and only then choose the best methodology, whether digital or traditional. And in our experience, the best defense is doing the best possible work: biting into a topic and not letting go until we’ve pieced the story together.
GIJN: What topic blind spots or undercovered areas do you see in your region? And which of these are ripe for new investigation?
JP: I believe today’s journalism has developed some methodologies to uncover corruption and money laundering, but I feel we still fall short when it comes to tracing financial flows in depth, from accounting ledgers to crypto assets.
GIJN: Can you share a notable mistake you’ve made in an investigation, or a regret, and share what lessons you took away?
JP: I think journalism in exile has been somewhat romanticized. Thanks to technology, we’ve been able to continue our work from abroad, but we’ve also lost a great deal, starting with timing and direct observation, which are natural building blocks of journalism. I worry that, in our newsroom in particular and in Venezuelan journalism more broadly, much of that has been eroded — and I see it as a serious shortcoming. At the same time, exile has given us greater safety. Not long ago, I published a story about front men and overseas assets tied to one of the heads of Venezuelan intelligence — a piece that would have been reckless to release in Caracas and then go to bed peacefully that same night.
GIJN: What are you particularly looking forward to at GIJC25 in Malaysia, whether in terms of networking or learning about an emerging reporting challenge or approach?
JP: I am very interested in seeing what is being done and how investigative journalism is being carried out in Africa and Asia. In Latin America, we are in touch and follow the work of colleagues throughout the region, and we also keep an eye on experiences in Europe and the United States. But since the conference will take place in Malaysia this time, it will be especially interesting to listen, observe, learn, and share with colleagues from the other side of the world.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-09-12 15:00:48
We dug into an investment fund when it was just in its infancy. Fiagro, a financial instrument created by the Brazilian parliament to mobilize private investment to fund agribusiness in the country, was entering its third year of operation when we decided to open our investigation.
The fund was successful in its start in the market: It reached a net worth of US$8.1 billion on the Brazilian Stock Exchange (B3) from March 2023 to March 2025, while its major financial asset, Agribusiness Receivable Certificates (CRA, its acronym in Portuguese), increased in volume by 46% during the same period, reaching US$28.3 billion.
Fiagro is like a big box filled with dozens of hidden packages or financial assets — each one tied to a different company or project in the agribusiness world. To understand what’s really inside, you have to open each package and look into it closely. It takes time, tools, and knowledge, particularly in financial and geospatial analysis, to answer our investigation question: Is Fiagro financing land-grabbing and/or socio-environmental violations in the Amazon rainforest? With the support of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, we unpacked the box and published our findings in the series Financial Market: A Black Box Over Green Areas.
Journalists working at O Joio e O Trigo had already uncovered that Fiagro was financing illegal agribusiness activities in the Cerrado. This Brazilian ecosystem, often considered the country’s “water tank,” which supplies water to the entire country, is also threatened by the expansion of monoculture crops. We aimed to check if Fiagro had the same impact on the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Initial suspicions about Fiagro arose from its own regulations. The Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários/CVM), the government body responsible for regulating all financial instruments traded in the Brazilian capital market, has no rules preventing Fiagro’s resources from being accessed by farmers and companies engaged in illegal commercial activities.
Brazil has a history of socio-environmental violations financed by government rural credit and bank loans, but such abuses have been addressed and halted by regulations to exclude “dirty” farmers and companies. It was a lightbulb moment when we realized that there’s a lack of stringent, sustainable rules for Fiagro.
Hence, the hypothesis that we set out to prove was that farmers and companies were borrowing money from bonds pooled by Fiagro and applying it to expand their operations and profit from illegal activities.
After some interviews with fund managers and financial workers, we identified datasets that would be useful to test the hypothesis. The starting point was a database maintained by the Brazilian Stock Exchange, which contains mandatory regular filings for all public investment funds. These reports, available as PDFs, list the financial assets like CRAs included in each Fiagro fund. That’s what led us to take a closer look at the assets themselves.
The documents related to these assets are stored in private databases, but they are also publicly accessible through the online database of securitization firms — the companies responsible for issuing CRAs, the bonds backed by agribusiness receivables. That’s where the real digging began: We coded several scrapers using Python, a programming language, to scrape more than 10,700 PDF files from the websites of eight different securitization firms: True, Opea, Virgo, Ecoagro, Provincia, Canal, Vert, and Ceres. These PDF files contain detailed information of the Fiagro assets, allowing us to identify the amount of money involved, where it was going, and most importantly, the names of both individuals (such as farmers) and companies (such as those in the biofuel and meatpacking industries) connected to each bond.
We uncovered companies that accessed huge amounts of credits through CRAs to fund their operations, including meat giants JBS and Minerva Foods, as well as “green” ethanol producer FS Fueling Sustainability.
Once thousands of PDFs containing reports and financial data were in hand, we could determine the amount of credit received by companies of interest. Image: Graphic by O Joio e O Trigo
There was more to keep diving into: Some documents contain lists of rural producers — such as corn and cattle suppliers — paid with funds from Fiagro assets. As those lists surpass hundreds of pages in PDFs, we had to make use of table extraction tools including Tabula (open source) and ExtractTable (paid) to extract the data from the PDFs into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
After organizing and cleaning the names, we cross-referenced them with a range of environmental crime datasets downloaded from the official database of the Brazilian environmental agency (Ibama). This gave us details of each crime, such as terms of embargoes, notes of infraction, and fines. The cross-reference was done on RIN Data, an internal data platform developed by the Pulitzer Center based on Aleph, the open source data platform by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to support investigative journalism.
Another helpful approach was to connect with research and data organizations specializing in the data we were interested in. We formed partnerships with the Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA) and Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN), which shared their databases and supported the investigation with their respective expertise in the field of meat supply chains and land conflict within Indigenous lands.
This analysis identified individuals and companies linked to land invasion and conflicts, Indigenous people’s expulsion from their territories, and illegal deforestation in the Amazon region. Using Brazilian government databases including the Land Management System (Sigef), Rural Environmental Registries (CAR), and Integrated Information System on Interstate Transactions with Goods and Services (Sintegra), we were able to identify the locations where these actors were carrying out commercial activities, such as raising cattle and growing crops. Such information guided our field reporting trips. It was crucial to visit the locations to verify what was happening on the ground and talk to affected communities.
In Rondônia, the first Amazonian state we visited, we witnessed cattle being raised inside an embargoed area overlapping the Tanaru Indigenous land. That was a clear violation of the law, as all commercial activities are prohibited in embargoed areas. Using GTAs (cattle transport permits), we tracked the cattle from the embargoed area to another legal farm owned by the same family to be “laundered” before being sold to JBS and Minerva Foods, the two largest meatpacking companies accessing Fiagro’s funds to purchase cattle.
In another Amazonian state, Mato Grosso, Indigenous members of the Kawaiweté/Kayabi people told us they tried to return to their ancestral land in the early 2000s after they were expelled in the 1960s. However, they were threatened and warned to leave the territory by producers of soy, corn, and cotton who operated farms on the recognized Indigenous land. Two of them are shareholders in a biofuels company that profited from Fiagro assets.
One of the biggest limitations in the financial data was the lack of detail about where the money actually ends up. Only a few investment funds and bonds include lists of entities who receive the credit raised from the capital markets. When those lists are available, they are a gold mine, as they often include names and identification numbers like CPFs for individuals or CNPJs for companies. But issuers are not required to publish this information, which makes it harder for journalists to trace specific companies or rural producers who benefit from the loans.
One key lesson we learned is that we should have looked at the bigger picture from the start, especially by examining the underlying Fiagro assets earlier in the process. In the beginning, we focused heavily on the Fiagro documents themselves. We later realized the real value was actually hidden in the documentation of the assets, which sat on the sidelines of the main Fiagro documents. In fact, much of the data I ended up scraping midway through the yearlong investigation came from those asset-related files.
Finally, financial jargon can be a barrier for those unfamiliar with the language of the capital markets. Still, with time and effort, it’s possible to break through and make sense of it.
Journalists and newsrooms can replicate this methodology to help improve transparency in Brazil’s capital markets and beyond. It offers an investigative path that connects two key points. On one side are companies or farmers accessing credit through the stock exchange with little or no public scrutiny. On the other side are investors seeking financial returns through bonds and funds that may be linked to threats on Indigenous lands or protected territories.
The tools and datasets mentioned earlier can support investigations into other companies and supply chains, not only those involving meat and corn, as shown in this case. They can also serve as a starting point for uncovering other underreported aspects of the financial market.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Pulitzer Center and is reprinted here with permission. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
Bruna Bronoski is a Brazilian freelance journalist specializing in the intersections between land grabbing, the financialization of agriculture, and the financial market. As a Fellow, she analyzes the impacts of financial instruments from the Brazilian stock market in the Amazon rainforest. Her work also includes socio-environmental issues and the use and occupation of land in Brazil, which has been published in such outlets as O Joio e o Trigo, Repórter Brasil, Agência Pública, UOL, Climate Tracker, among others. Her work has been republished by newsrooms in Latin America and Europe.
2025-09-11 15:00:32
For years, over coffee in Nairobi cafés, Verah Okeyo and Anne Mawathe traded stories of health investigations that took weeks to report, only to be condensed into a few paragraphs, two-minute clips, or dropped entirely.
Both seasoned health journalists, they grew frustrated with newsroom constraints and began to imagine a platform where health reporting could breathe. They envisioned longform, deeply reported stories that communities, policymakers, and global audiences could not ignore.
Out of that frustration came DeFrontera, created to fill a gap in African media with sustained, evidence-driven health journalism.
Already, DeFrontera’s reporting has covered investigations into how a once-model maternal health program in a Kenyan county collapsed under the weight of systemic failures; how simple but transformational protocols in another county dramatically reduced maternal deaths from postpartum bleeding; the alarming resurgence of deadly parasitic disease kala-azar in northern Kenya amid waning donor and government support; and an innovative “one health” initiative that delivers both veterinary and human vaccines to reach nomadic communities.
Guiding this ambitious editorial vision are two leaders with deep roots in both journalism and health. Okeyo, the chief executive and publisher, combines global health reporting with leadership experience at health nonprofit Jhpiego and the Nation Media Group, where she honed her ability to design editorial systems that uphold rigor and nurture emerging health journalists.
Mawathe, the editor-in-chief, brings decades of experience, including senior roles as chief producer of visuals for Africa at Reuters and Africa Health Editor at the BBC. She is recognized for transforming complex health data into engaging stories that have driven policy change and institutional accountability.
Together, the co-founders are positioning DeFrontera as a trusted voice in African health reporting, providing a platform for stories and perspectives often overlooked by mainstream media. I asked them about their vision, the challenges of building an independent outlet, and the role African journalists must play in global health debates. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q: How does DeFrontera approach telling health stories differently than legacy newsrooms you’ve worked in in the past?
Verah Okeyo: In legacy media, stories are often chosen for advertising, sales potential, and sometimes prestige. The order is politics, sports, then what I call MERSH: medicine, education, research, science, and health. Politics and sports receive investment, training, and resources. Science, health, and education are treated as something prestigious.
A recent story by DeFrontera examined a surge of cases of the deadly disease visceral leishmaniasis (kala-azar) in northern Kenya. (Image: Screenshot, DeFrontera
Because of that little investment, the quality of reporting is not going to be there. Too often, health is treated like politics, with shock, yet these are people’s lives, and audiences make decisions based on that reporting. Science coverage requires reading journals and talking to multiple types of people just to triangulate one thing. It is not a “he-said, she-said” kind of situation.
Another gap we were finding is how newsrooms manage content. You can spend a week in the field and end up with a two-minute story. At DeFrontera, we use what we call the circular economy: reusing content until there is nothing left, tailored for different audiences such as policymakers, healthcare workers, and the public. One story might run as a YouTube feature, then be broken into smaller parts for Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, and so on.
Anne Mawathe: Mainstream media tend to report stories because a certain organization has given them data. They have done the research, and the media just report things like, “Kenya ranks among the top 10 countries with the highest mortality rate.” But we are not saying why this should matter. We want to turn these into public impact stories that reach people. We especially want to reach decision-makers with our storytelling.
Q: How do you center communities in your work?
AM: For us, engaging communities is a loop. It does not end when the story is published. We go back to the communities so they can see the story, give feedback, and have discussions. We hold forums with local health leaders. There, the community can share their reactions and pose questions to their local leaders. We want to give communities tools, language, and accessible storytelling so they can claim what belongs to them. We also encourage leaders to grant access.
Q: How do you ensure ethical storytelling in contexts where people are experiencing illness, stigma, or systemic neglect?
Verah Okeyo, DeFrontera publisher and CEO. Image: Pulitzer Center
VO: We have a principle that ours is a do-no-harm kind of journalism because for us, it is paramount that we are respectful in the way we tell our stories. Anne and I are very experienced reporters, so we course-correct as we go, and we also draw from both life and professional experiences to ensure ethical storytelling. For example, at Jhpiego, informed consent was standard. We practice the same: if someone appears in our stories, we explain where the material will go and its impact, then get their consent. We are also intentional about language.
Q: What structural inequities do Global South journalists face when working with international media?
VO: Often, the stories international editors want are inaccurate because they come with a narrow perception of Africa’s health systems. For example, during COVID, Africans were better prepared than assumed because we have long dealt with deadlier zoonotic diseases like Ebola and Rift Valley fever. Our doctors and clinical officers are trained to work in low-resource settings. Yet external editors arrive with “confident ignorance.” They may even try to misframe visuals, such as filming long queues of patients that have nothing to do with the disease in question, just to fit a narrative.
AM: My experience at the BBC and later Reuters showed me that the problem also lies in structural power. Too often, reporting is shaped by parachuting journalists or external fixers. When Africans themselves edit and produce these stories, we reclaim the narrative. At Reuters, as the first African woman in my position, I pushed for Africans to own their stories. But inequities remain: global funding systems, research agendas, and editorial control still sit in the Global North. During COVID, however, we saw that Africa could teach the West how to manage outbreaks. This gives me hope that the dynamic is changing.
Q: What kinds of gatekeeping or skepticism have you personally faced as African journalists reporting on global health, and how do you navigate it?
VO: I’ve experienced gatekeeping on two levels. First, within medicine and global health itself: if you’re not from that background, people assume you’ll get it wrong. Scientists and doctors are cautious, and sometimes won’t speak unless they can review your copy. We refuse this unless it is highly technical and specialist input is necessary. To navigate this, I immerse myself in the field: I read medical journals, attend conferences, and pay for memberships in professional societies, like the Kenya Obstetric and Gynaecological Society and the Nurses Association of Kenya. This helps me understand clinic realities and connect medicine with politics. The second layer is international: external editors often assume Africans are helpless and waiting for saviors. Over time, as they see our expertise and preparation, this gatekeeping lessens.
Q: Have you encountered resistance to your approach from within journalism or from institutions you report on, and how did you respond?
VO: Resistance comes from both journalism and institutions. Within journalism, some dismiss your work as “not new” or “just another startup.” I counter this with my experience and access, which allows me to pursue stories others can’t. From healthcare, resistance occurs because I straddle roles as journalist and medical anthropologist. Physicians may expect me to understand the system fully or refrain from critique, but my focus is on patient needs. Critiquing healthcare practices often meets pushback because doctors are seen as untouchable. NGOs and donors also exert control, sometimes wanting to pre-review stories to avoid upsetting funders. I navigate this by working through counties or local authorities, allowing stories to be published without giving agencies editorial control.
Q: What has it been like to lead a media organization as women in the industry?
VO: So far, our gender has worked in our favor and opened opportunities for two main reasons. First, the respect the industry has given us because of our experience. People expected we would bring different skills. Anne has been in the health and human rights beat for over 20 years in broadcasting. She was BBC Africa’s founding health editor, covering the continent and leading productions where health stories were reported in Swahili, English, and French. She kept that momentum even as Reuters Africa’s head of visual. I have been known for my extensive coverage of medicine and public health, and also for my grant-writing and fundraising work at the Nation. My time working at Jhpiego and pursuing a PhD in medical anthropology also added to that credibility.
There is also a culture that assumes, because we are women, we will report on health better. We have noticed, for instance, that health administrators are more willing to allow us into maternity wards compared to our male colleagues, even when both have official permission.
Q: How are you approaching funding and long-term sustainability, and what challenges have you faced?
VO: For now, funding isn’t an immediate worry. We have seed support from the International Center for Journalism and the Gates Foundation for the next three-and-a-half years. Anne and I have had to learn to think like fundraisers. When we cover a story, we already consider how it can be positioned to attract support while remaining true to our mission. As a nonprofit, advertising is not an option, so partnerships are crucial. Building these relationships takes time, careful communication, and understanding the language of funders. We show researchers the impact of their work through storytelling, without compromising editorial independence. Sustainability also involves operational efficiency and creativity. We reduce costs by sharing tasks across our team and ensure every story is solid, grounded in evidence, and ethically reported. Over time, these small, consistent efforts help build a product and reputation that funders can trust, allowing us to maintain independence while securing support.
Q: What advice would you give to emerging journalists from the Global South who want to cover health stories but face under-resourced or extractive systems?
Anne Mawathe, DeFrontera editor-in-chief. Image: DeFrontera
AM: Stick with the basics. Know why you exist as a journalist and commit to showing up. There is no way to succeed without engaging directly with people. Modern journalism sometimes encourages sitting at your desk, doing social listening, and thinking that is enough. It is not. You must speak to real people, understand their specialities, and extend beyond online observation. You do not have a monopoly on ideas. If someone else covers a story similar to yours, it does not mean they copied you. Put in the work and consistently do your job. The impact of your reporting and the fact that you are producing work with life and meaning should be enough motivation.
VO: Global health journalism also requires an entrepreneurial mindset. Most newsrooms cannot fund health stories due to elitism and limited resources, so you must find ways to sustain your work. First, you need to genuinely care about people and be committed to their well-being.
Second, read widely, particularly in biomedical sciences. Knowledge is essential. Third, you need to be able to sell your ideas. Grant applications and partnerships require persuasion. Study marketing, advertising, and successful campaigns. I observe advertising videos and analyse them for lessons. You need to make your journalism a product that is visible, fast, and compelling.
Finally, speed and timing matter. Your story must reach funders, platforms, and audiences quickly, even before you meet them.
Stick with the basics. Know why you exist as a journalist and commit to showing up. There is no way to succeed without engaging directly with people.
Q. How do you take care of yourselves and manage your mental health?
Mawathe: Going to the gym regularly helps me a lot, and sometimes I unload on Verah, which helps too. Doing post-mortems after an assignment gives me relief. The hardest part is reliving the interviews while editing or producing the story. Over time, you learn to pace yourself. I also watch documentaries, mostly on African history, which shifts my focus from the heaviness of the stories. Giving yourself immediate breaks after intense assignments is crucial, something most journalists in newsrooms cannot do because of the workload. That pause is important for mental health.
Okeyo: I have a strong constitution, and I rarely get shocked. I prepare myself psychologically by mapping out the journey of a story and anticipating challenges. My upbringing helped; my mother was a nurse and midwife, and I grew up assisting her with deliveries and community healthcare. That experience gave me resilience and a calmness in the face of trauma. When stories feel heavy, I use physical activity like the gym or martial arts to release stress. Sleep also helps.
I am also fortunate to have friends and colleagues who are doctors and nurses, so I can gauge the severity of what I witness. They give perspective on cases, which helps me manage anxiety. My personal temperament is naturally phlegmatic, which keeps me steady. Anne and I also balance each other; my calm complements her energy
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published by The Reuters Institute and is republished here with permission.
Maurice Oniang’o is an award-winning freelance multimedia journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has written for National Geographic, 100 Reporters, Africa.com, and Transparency International, among others. A National Geographic Explorer recipient, he has also produced documentaries for National Geographic’s Ultimate Vipers, as well as Project Green, Africa Uncensored, NTV Wild, and Tazama.
