2025-11-27 16:00:49
Religion is an intrinsic part of people’s lives — influencing communities, countries, and sociopolitical developments. But these very factors make reporting on religions and faiths challenging.
Journalists from New Zealand, Colombia, and Peru spoke at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in a session titled “Uncovering Stories Connected to Religious Groups” about how to find stories and angles when reporting on issues linked with religious groups and faith-based cults.
A big challenge when reporting on religion is terminology, said Anusha Bradley, an investigative reporter with Radio New Zealand. “Learn the lingo of the religion. You have to understand what they are saying,” she explained. Religions tend to have their own terminology and words, with specific meanings that may be unfamiliar to someone trying to investigate them for the first time.
“Understand the top-down structure,” she added. Many religions operate as a business, and it helps to understand the hierarchy and the way the institution is constructed. It is also important to understand power, control, and coercion — and how they are linked with the religious institution.
Bradley cited her reporting on the impact of shunning and child protection policies among Jehovah’s Witnesses in New Zealand. Her investigation uncovered how the religious group controls access to justice for victims of various forms of abuse. “There would be victims of domestic abuse, and they were told to pray harder,” she said. “Sexual abuse would require the presence of two witnesses [to confirm that the abuse occurred]” — practices that effectively blocked accountability and justice for victims and protected abusers.
Colombian journalist Juan Pablo Barrientos has been facing harassment for close to a decade for his extensive reporting and investigation into reports of the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in his home country.
Barrientos was attempting to analyze how the Catholic Church, as an important national institution in Colombia, handled cases of priests accused of pedophilia. The title of Barriento’s investigation, “The Secret Archive,” refers to a section in the Code of Canon Law — which governs the Catholic Church — that decrees the establishment of an archive that is to be locked up and “protected most securely,” containing records of what the Canon describes as “criminal cases in matters of morals,” including a brief summary of what occurred.
“This, to me, is a criminal confession,” said Barrientos. This archive was critical to his investigation. The Catholic Church blocked access for years, and Barrientos and another journalist took their fight to access these church records in Colombia to court.
“Article 44 of the Constitution of Colombia says that the rights of minors prevail over all other rights,” said Barrientos. “The court argued that this is private information. But [we] were not asking for medical records, for financial records, for the sexual orientation of the priests. [We were] asking for information on crimes committed against children,” he added.
In June 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court upheld the journalists’ rights to access — based on the constitutional principle of child protection — information about priests in the context of investigations into alleged sexual abuse.
Paola Ugaz, the Peru correspondent for the Spanish daily newspaper ABC, has for years investigated allegations of sexual, physcial, and psychological abuse against minors by Sodalicio Christianae Vitae (SCV), a powerful Catholic organization founded in Peru in the 1970s. After a book she worked on with former Sodalicio member Pedro Salinas, titled “Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados” (“Half Priests, Half Soldiers”) was published in 2015, she experienced retaliation — including various forms of targeted harassment and a criminal defamation complaint by people associated with SCV.
In April 2025, the Vatican formalized the dissolution of SCV.
The “Aha!” moment can come at any time during investigations, the panelists said, and shared a few general pointers for investigating powerful religious groups.
Bradley suggested checking the document trail. “The congregation would document the meetings they had, and the secretary would file everything” about those discussions within the church, said Bradley. “Many members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who retired or left [the church], took these documents with them.” She also noted that “every victim has a story… so it’s important to show a pattern by exposing the system.”
Barrientos urged journalists not to be afraid to ask questions of the Catholic Church in their own cities: “Ask for that secret archive that is in every one of your cities… Every city that has a Catholic Church… they have these secret archives.”
2025-11-26 16:00:26
When Russian customs data for coal exports is sorted not by price, but by tonnage, an obscure company suddenly stands out. It is registered to a small building on the outskirts of the southern border city of Rostov-on-Don, next to a car repair shop and a construction store.
The paper trail shows that this enterprise shipped nearly half a million tons of coal abroad in two years, mainly to Turkey. The coal is declared “Russian,” but in reality, reporters say that the product comes from mines in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. An investigation by the independent outlet iStories reported that this firm, Energoresurs, is closely linked to Oleksandr Yanukovych, the son of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and that the profits are routed through an offshore company while the war continues.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, the author of that investigation, iStories’ Maria Zholobova, joined Jelena Cosic from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Armando.Info’s Joseph Poliszuk, and Indonesian visual investigations producer and OSINT researcher Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan, who works for Narasi.
Together they explained how they build dossiers on oligarchs, mine corporate and sanctions databases, construct their own datasets, and combine leaks, customs records, and local registries — all while navigating the legal and security risks that come with investigating powerful figures that may not want you digging into their corporate exploits..
For Jelena Cosic, every oligarch investigation begins in the same place: with a person and a spreadsheet.
“We always should start, no matter who we research, with these things,” she told the panel. Reporters should record basic identifiers — date of birth, addresses, passport numbers — all spelling variants of names, relatives and in-laws, business partners, offshore companies, and intermediaries. “Each line in the spreadsheet is a verified piece of information that can later be searched, filtered, and cross-referenced.
“Each row you would fill with another [piece of] information,” she said. “It will help you once you are stuck somewhere and you’re not sure where to go next.”
The second step is to feed that spreadsheet with documents. At ICIJ, Cosic’s team uses Datashare, an open source tool that can be installed locally. Reporters can scan and upload printed documents to make them searchable, while large PDF dumps can become an internal archive where names, addresses, and companies can be found across thousands of pages in seconds.
Court records are another priority — “the gold mine for many of these guys,” Cosic noted.
Image: Screenshot, IStories
Once the basic profile is built, Cosic connects people to corporate and sanctions data.
ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.
Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:
She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.
For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.
Maria Zholobova’s investigation shows how customs data and leaked databases can be combined to map opaque trade schemes.
Instead of looking at prices, which can be manipulated, she sorted several years of Russian coal exports by shipment weight. Among them, she noticed an unfamiliar company that, since 2023, had converted into a much bigger player: a firm registered at a modest address in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Corporate records showed that the company had taken loans from firms registered in the occupied Ukrainian territories and from entities linked to the former president, Viktor Yanukovych, and to his son’s business network. To identify the real owners and managers, Zholobova turned to an ecosystem of leaks and unofficial data markets that have emerged as official registers in Russia have closed: databases from banks, mobile operators, and taxi services, often accessed through Telegram bots.
By checking employment histories and how phone numbers were saved in other people’s contact lists, she found that the nominal owners and directors were, in fact, employees of companies associated with Yanukovych’s structures.
Foreign journalists may need to cooperate with Russian-speaking reporters when investigating similar networks, because this work depends on Russian-language materials and informal channels.
Joseph Poliszuk spoke about the experience of the Venezuelan investigative outlet Armando.info in tracking the oligarchs that circled around former president Hugo Chávez, and are now linked to his successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Poliszuk’s investigations in Venezuela focus on the “boliburgueses” – business people who have become wealthy through their proximity to the Bolivarian government.
One of them was the government’s leading food supplier — but investigations into the quality of the food his organization was paid to deliver to the hungry, and especially the powdered milk delivered to poor households, found it to be nutritionally inadequate. Reporters combined trade data, corporate documents, and laboratory tests to show this.
“We tested eight brands of the milk of the government,” Poliszuk recalled. “In one of the cases… one normal glass of milk was the same as 41 glasses of that kind of milk that they were giving to the people.”
The investigation led to a defamation case and pressure on the newsroom; after an insider warned that authorities planned to visit reporters’ homes, some team members left the country, and many of them now operate from exile.
In other projects, Armando.info reporters relied on property and corporate records. In one, they showed how the family of Venezuela’s first lady had bought out an entire street — 14 houses — using a proxy owner who was a former classmate. Proving ownership required cadastre documents, social media, off-the-record sources, and cross-checks with a separate court case in Miami.
When official data was missing, the newsroom searched elsewhere to build their own databases. Reporters compiled a national contracts registry from scattered documents and matched it against lists of generals and senior officials, exposing an oligarch who secured the state’s best contracts. They also matched the names of Chavez and Maduro officials with company records in Miami, finding that many had businesses — and often homes — in the United States.
Indonesian journalist Aqwam Fiazmi Hanifan showed how local registries and OSINT tools can reveal oligarch networks in Indonesia. Many corporate records are only available by purchasing documents from the Ministry of Law.
The AHU database lets you search profiles of Indonesian limited liability companies and view both a “latest profile” (current status, address, directors, and a snapshot of shareholders) and a “full profile” with the company’s complete legal history, including all changes to deeds, shares, and management. It also helps you trace ownership structures by showing direct shareholders, multi-layered corporate chains, nominee owners, and offshore vehicles, including those registered in jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Singapore.
“Oligarchs don’t just put the money into mining or private banks,” Hanifan said. “Sometimes they also put [it] into different businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, and football clubs. By hiding the real owners behind multiple layers of companies and using football clubs as a public face, wealthy people in Indonesia can quietly move and launder money, mask conflicts of interest, and shield other shady businesses from scrutiny.”
In one project that used the AHU database, Hanifan mapped a complex ownership structure behind a professional football club, showing links back to extractive industries.
For phone-based research, Hanifan uses Getcontact, which shows how a number is saved in other users’ address books, and OSINT Industries, which maps social media accounts linked to a given phone or email. But he warned that using data from breaches or leaks can be risky under Indonesia’s IT law. “You can be arrested,” he said.
The panelists agreed on several core lessons:
2025-11-26 12:03:59
Meet La Chama and El Pana.
Two AI-powered news anchors introduced themselves to reporters at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia. They were created not to spread disinformation, but to fight it.
“They (our editors) wanted to leverage the trust that the media outlets were willing to place in two aviators to disseminate the content,” one of the AI anchors said in a Venezuelan accent, explaining why they were built in a video showcased at the “Collaborating to Fight Electoral Disinformation Campaigns” panel.
Created by CONNECTAS, a Latin American investigative journalism network, AI-generated avatars La Chama and El Pana presented news to combat President Nicolás Maduro’s media crackdown during the 2024 presidential election. It was a response to the extreme hostility and censorship that journalists faced in the country. And it was one of the three projects showcased at the GIJC25 panel.
At a time when AI-powered disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the internet, Carlos Eduardo Huertas, director of CONNECTAS, was showing ways to use the same technology to combat it. And the stakes in this battle are very real. The World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2025” identifies misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term risk over the next two years.
The AI avatars of La Chama and El Pana were part of the CONNECTAS effort, “Venezuela Vota” and “#LaHoraDeVenezuela”, to counter government disinformation and censorship. When traditional reporting became risky for reporters, they turned to AI. In all, 14 outlets, information platforms, and independent organizations worked together, using their own resources, to counter official propaganda during the election.
“AI could be a disturbing tool during the election process because it’s easy to create misinformation and disinformation and spread lies,” Huertas said to GIJN after the panel discussion. “But if the journalists can work together in innovative ways, they can use the artificial intelligence to protect journalism.”
Along with Huertas, Kwaku Krobea Asante, program manager at the Media Foundation for West Africa, and Sonia Bhaskar, program head at DataLEADS, shared strategies to fight disinformation campaigns in Ghana and India, respectively, where elections were held in 2024. Nayeli Roldán, a Mexican investigative reporter from Animal Politico, moderated the panel.
In Ghana, during the 2024 election, members from Fact-Check Ghana, Ghana Fact, and Dubawa, combined to form the Ghana Fact-Checking Coalition. Asante said they brought in civil society organizations working on information integrity and resilience to join the collaboration.
The coalition created two media situation rooms — one in the northern and the other in the southern parts of Ghana in December 2024.
Covering elections becomes more challenging amid a spike in technology-powered disinformation campaigns, which spreads much faster. Launching these types of campaigns during elections undermine the outcome as well as voter trust in democratic institutions worldwide.
“When you try to work alone in silos, you achieve very little. And you may end up doubling the work that you have done in different ways,” Asante said. “When you join forces, you can reach more. You can get more in and address them.”
The coalition conducted live monitoring of narratives around the elections to spot misinformation, disinformation, and polarizing content, producing real-time fact-checking reports to counter the identified false narratives.
“We found coordinated networks engaging in disinformation astroturfing on X. And recycling of old photos and videos,” Asante explained.
Back in India, as the 2024 general election was underway, Shakti: India Fact-Checking Collective, a consortium of 100-plus fact-checkers and news publishers in India, worked collaboratively to aid early detection of online misinformation and deepfakes.
More than 6,600 fact-checks were distributed and amplified across more than 10 languages, according to Shakti’s website. This effort was also supported by deepfake and synthetic media experts and lawyers, according to Bhaskar.
The effort was led by DataLEADS in collaboration with The Quint, Vishvas News, BOOM, Factly, and the Press Trust of India, among other leading fact-checking organizations and news publishers.
For effective collaboration, panelists highlighted the need for trust among members and for strategies to be clear to all.
“It is important to ensure there’s enough transparency on where funding is coming from, who is doing what exactly? What is the structure and flow of work?” Asante shared.
They also highlighted the need to assess the sustainability of the fact-checking initiatives.
“But if you’re able to… have plans in place that can sustain the work. It’s really important that it can help.” Asante said.
Despite the tools available for AI detection, experts say old-fashioned reporting skills remain essential for fighting disinformation campaigns.
“The tools have evolved so much, the detection tools are really playing catch-up,” Bhaskar said to GIJN after the panel. “Detection tools can only help supplement, but they’re not good enough. We are very far away from our silver bullet.”
“We are still relying heavily on our journalistic skills,” she added.
2025-11-25 16:00:27
Early in her career, business and investigative reporter Selina Cheng gained rare access to women who alleged that they had been abused by Bey Logan, an associate and former top executive of Harvey Weinstein — the Hollywood producer sentenced to prison and on trial for multiple counts of sexual assault.
Survivors trusted Cheng with intimate details, which supported a strong investigation, but there was a personal cost — the ire of Logan, the Weinstein associate at the center of the story.
In 2019, two years after the investigation, Cheng says Logan called her, tearing into her, calling her names, and swearing.
“He’ll just send me stuff when he feels hateful. I don’t know if he’s drunk or something,” said Cheng, speaking as part of a panel about the particular risks and dangers female journalists face at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia.
This kind of harassment and aggression is especially common for female investigative reporters. A study by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) suggests online and offline risks against journalists are increasing and are disproportionately impacting reporters who identify as women, as a person of color, or LGBTQIA+.
The rates of incidence are staggering — and the impact far-reaching. An estimated 70% of women journalists have received some form of harassment, threat, or attack. Around a third have thought about leaving the profession because of these attacks and threats.
Threats such as harassment and intimidation sit alongside less discussed risks, such as negotiating equal and fair pay, or maybe having to assert yourself in a newsroom of predominantly older, male colleagues. These challenges rarely occur in isolation. They stack up, intersect, and often transcend borders and beats.
On the GIJC25 panel, Cheng was joined by fellow journalists Dragana Pećo, investigative journalist and researcher at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP); Hayatte Abdou, co-founder of National Magazine Comores; Mais Katt, founder and editor of Women Who Won the War; and Taís Seibt, chief of strategy at Fiquem Sabendo. Sarah Ulrich, an independent investigative journalist and GIJN’s German editor, moderated the session.
The experiences of the women on the panel revealed not only how common certain challenges are, but also the creative coping strategies they have developed to help them stay safe and keep reporting.
Serbian investigative journalist Pećo described the terror of finding her apartment turned upside-down a few years ago. Nothing was stolen — the violation was just a psychological tactic to remind her that her private world could be breached.
As part of the team that set up KRIK, an independent digital newsroom focusing on corruption and organized crime, Pećo was involved in high-profile investigations that included the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers.
It wasn’t the first attempt at intimidation. Pećo and her team had already endured smear campaigns, surveillance where “they literally knew what we were talking about in the office,” and messages stating that she and her colleagues should be “lined up and shot.”
Instead of retreating, Pećo strategically made her case public — detailing not only the break-in but the pattern of harassment against her newsroom.
“I wanted them to know that if this is the way [they think they can] stop me from doing my story, that’s not how things work. If you’re going to play this game, I’m going to set the rules,” she said, adding that it was the help and support of her colleagues that emboldened her and stopped her from feeling alone.
Speaking out delivered two forms of protection: international attention from other media rights groups and an outpouring of financial support from donors who recognized the attacks as efforts to silence watchdog reporting.
Globally, women still earn nearly 20% less than men on average. According to the International Federation of Journalists, the gender pay gap in journalism persists across continents, newsroom sizes, and reporting beats.
When a salary increase at the end of a probationary period did not materialize, Cheng was assured by her boss that she was not being paid less than any of her colleagues. Instead of arguing about it, Cheng did her own performance review. She listed her most important stories, added internal data on page views for each, and pasted links to other publications that had picked up or mentioned her stories. In the end, she got the raise.
A 2025 Reuters Institute study revealed how gender disparities persist in newsroom leadership. The study analyzed 240 major online and offline news outlets across 12 countries. Across these outlets, women make up just 27% of top editors, even though women constitute roughly 40% of journalists in the same countries. Strikingly, in every single market studied, including those where women outnumber men in the profession, men still dominate senior editorial positions. The data reveals a stubborn leadership gap that continues to shape newsroom culture, priorities, and opportunities.
Taís Seibt, chief of strategy at Fiquem Sabendo, works actively to shift the pipeline from the ground up. She intentionally invites women speakers into her university journalism classes, believing that seeing women leading investigations helps students imagine themselves in those roles.
“I believe in the community, in the power of visibility,” she said. “It is a small contribution, but it is important.”
Across a decade of teaching aspiring reporters, she has watched representation reshape confidence and ambition. Beyond the classroom, she has created fellowships specifically for young women, offering training in reporting, design, and secure research methods. Of eight fellows in 2024, half have been shortlisted for major investigative awards in Brazil, she said.
Cheng, who also heads a journalists’ union in Hong Kong, described the grind of reporting in repressive environments with threats that can last for months, years — even decades. To reset physically and mentally, she organizes hikes, beach days, and informal clubs that include cooking nights and book circles.
The joy of relaxing and distancing from the relentless news cycle builds stamina, she explained: “People need to have fun (…) they can continue for so much longer.” Joy isn’t a luxury but essential to protect against burnout-induced exits from the profession, she added.
Authoritarian crackdowns don’t stop at borders, and neither should journalist support systems. The speakers, as well as members of the audience, called for networks that connect women across countries so that threats to press freedom that disproportionately affect women, such as the Taliban’s erasure of women in Afghanistan, receive collective global pressure, not isolated outrage.
GIJN’s Women Investigative Network and groups, including Women Who Won the War, train, mentor, and advocate for women across the MENA region. The panelists and the audience called for an expansion of these models through more mailing lists, gatherings, resource-sharing, and even informal coffee chats at conferences. When women journalists unite, authoritarian systems lose one of their strongest strategies — making us believe we are alone.
Other tips shared during the session included:
Hayatte Abdou, co-founder of National Magazine Comores, said a male Australian colleague regularly checks on her well-being and connects her to global investigative teams: “If I am the investigative journalist I am today, it’s because of him.” Real allyship amplifies women without overshadowing them.
GIJN has compiled this comprehensive guide for women, female-identifying, and non-binary journalists to help them navigate harassment, discrimination, and countering isolation. These resources include guides for connecting with peers, seeking support, and asserting their rights.
2025-11-24 15:37:22
Human demand for fresh water is depleting rivers, aquifers, and reservoirs far faster than natural systems can replenish them.
Cape Town, Beijing, Tehran, Los Angeles, and many other cities have had supply crises in the 2020s and face water scarcity in the future. According to a recent UN report, half the world’s population faces severe water scarcity at least one month per year, and the situation is deteriorating.
In countries such as Argentina, Jordan, and Egypt, intensive mining and agricultural projects are devastating water sources. Journalists and editors covering water scarcity issues in these countries discussed their methods and strategies at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in the session “Investigating the Water Crisis Through a Local Lens.”
The panel included Edgardo Litvinoff, co-founder and editorial director of Argentina’s investigative outlet Ruido; Eman Mounir, an Egyptian journalist that has reported extensively in the Middle Eastern and North Africa region for outlets such as National Geographic; and Jordan’s Lina Ejeilat, executive editor of 7iber, shared a panel moderated by Andrés Bermúdez Liévano, an editor at the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (El CLIP).
The panelists said that while their reporting on the issue was local, they have all encountered four common obstacles in their reporting:
They also noted that they have had success in overcoming these obstacles with similar practical tools — that regardless of where in the world you report on water crises, there is a roadmap to help you address these particular challenges that will also be helpful to investigative journalists who cover environmental issues generally.
“Water problems are never just technical,” said Ejeilat, executive editor of Amman, Jordan-based 7iber. “They’re also political and economic.”
Jordan currently has only 61 cubic meters (13,420 gallons) of renewable fresh water available per capita per year; countries with fewer than 500 cubic meters (110,000) of water per capita per year are considered to be experiencing “absolute” water scarcity — when the demand for water exceeds its water resources.
Ejeilat has covered the intersection between water, politics, and economics in Jordan, in particular its changing uses of the Disi Aquifer — shared with Saudi Arabia — which have included agriculture and supplying drinking water to the capital, Amman. Accessing public information is difficult in Jordan, where there is a gap between the relatively open access to information laws on paper and what journalists can actually obtain from FOIA requests.
“We had no access to the contracts between the government and these companies [involved in water-related projects] to know what sorts of rights and concessions they were given, what sort of privileges,” said Ejeilat.
When Eman Mounir was investigating Arabian Gulf desalinization plants dumping brine back into the ocean — potentially causing hypersalinity, which harms aquatic life and public health — she also encountered a serious lack of information. “The Arabian Gulf is very closed and there is no data. Nothing at all,” said Mounir.
Ruido co-founder Litvinoff encountered the same problem when reporting on mining companies depleting rivers in Argentina’s side of the “lithium triangle” — a region shared with Bolivia and Chile where 65% of the world’s lithium is mined.
“In Argentina, the mining concessions are given by provincial governments, and they are very shady governments, very opaque governments,” he said. “It’s very hard to get public data. You can’t get concession contracts in some provinces.”
Ejeilat, Mounir, and Litvinoff were able to address the lack of data with the following methods:
In Argentina, Jordan, and the Gulf States, access to mining, agricultural, and waste dump locations can be extremely difficult. Journalists were either barred from entering the sites, which were in inhospitable locations with precarious roads, or it was simply impossible to access a specific location. The reporters were able to overcome access difficulties by:
All the journalists on the panel have struggled to make sense of complex technical data with which they weren’t familiar, and with taming large, raw databases. Information you’ll find while reporting water supply, mining, and agriculture —such as sample analysis, biological and chemical data, and business documents — might be overwhelming and difficult to read. This is how they tackled the issue:
Edgardo Litvinoff, co-founder of Ruido, Egyptian journalist Eman Mounir, panel moderator Andrés Bermúdez Liévano, and Lina Ejeilat, executive editor of 7iber (left to right) speaking at the Investigating Water Crisis panel at GIJC25. Image: Suzanne Lee, Alt Studio for GIJN.
Let’s say that after months or even years of research, you have findings you believe are explosive. How do you get them out there? How do you navigate efforts to silence them or the risk that the audience might not understand it, or might not even care? Litvinoff pointed out that mainstream media outlets may be compromised. They are part of large conglomerates that have vested interests in mining or extractive projects, or they depend on their advertising money.
These ideas can help you spread the word:
Bear in mind that many of these tips and tools used by water reporters to overcome their challenges may be used for many other topics in environmental journalism, such as deforestation, decline in animal populations, and most forms of pollution. Go through them, take what works, and jump over your hurdles.
2025-11-24 15:34:42
Managing a career as a freelance investigative journalist is like captaining a small, independent vessel in an unpredictable sea. Freelancers must not only focus on charting the course of an investigation, but also be the ship’s owner and crew — from accountant and mechanic, to insurance agent and safety officer.
Speaking at “Conducting Investigations as a Freelancer” session at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, Sylke Gruhnwald, a Swiss investigative reporter who left a staff position and went freelance in 2020, said she had expected the biggest challenge of freelancing to be finding stories. She has realized, however, that “freelancing isn’t just about stories but surviving between them.”
Zimbabwean investigative journalist Linda Mujuru said staff journalists in her country are typically poorly paid. Freelancing offers flexibility — she is able to negotiate her fee with multiple newsrooms and maximize her expertise as a local journalist with specialist knowledge.
For every challenge of freelancing, there is a perk. “Everything [in freelance journalism] is a trade-off,” added Nithin Coca, a Japan-based, Asia-focused freelance journalist.
The veteran freelancers shared a range of practical tips — from managing burnout to pitching and organizing investigations — for anyone trying to build a long-term freelance career.
Freelancers must think like business owners to keep the lights on in their newsrooms-of-one — even if that’s the lights in a corner of their living room. The speakers urged freelancers to itemize every cost in their budgets for stories, including time required for administrative tasks or travel expenses.
Freelance investigative journalists must track the time and money required to do their job and run their businesses. Time spent writing invoices, drafting pitches, chasing money, revising work, and fact-checking should be accounted for when negotiating rates or setting budgets. Equipment, software, and other operating costs should also be factored in.
“Your day rate must cover not just the writing time, but the admin work as well,” said Gruhnwald.
Gruhnwald explained that she had created a limited liability company (LLC), where she is the only employee, to protect her from being personally liable when investigations are published and to create a more formal, salaried arrangement.
Not every freelancer works in countries where their work is adequately valued or where they can pitch a budget for a project, however. In these contexts, it becomes even more critical for freelancers to understand their financial worth and target international media that can pay better rates, said Mujuru.
“You can get paid, but you need to make sure you’re approaching the right organizations,” she said. “Learn to say no, because if you accept everything and anything, people will take advantage.”
Each speaker had stories of having to chase payments, renegotiate unexpected edits, or insist on the addition of a kill fee. For investigative projects, a per-word rate of pay isn’t enough, said Gruhnwald. She sends a detailed spreadsheet capturing all anticipated costs to editors.
For grant-funded work, the newsroom publishing your investigation still needs to pay you, added Coca: “Editors do try to trick journalists into taking less money just because you have the grant. They shouldn’t, and we should stand up against that.”
Freelancing is often viewed as a solitary profession, but the most impactful investigations today are rarely produced solo. Working with partners or in teams can enable reporters and their investigations to reach sources, places, or communities they could never access alone, said Coca.
Mujuru said she is part of a group of women journalists in Zimbabwe who might share contacts, but more often provide emotional support. In the same vein, where journalist unions exist, freelancers should join them, urged Gruhnwald. In Switzerland, for example, union membership includes access to legal counsel. Where unions don’t exist, freelancers should consider creating their own, she added.
Safety — whether digital, legal, or physical — is a “do it yourself” necessity for freelance investigative journalists, said Mujuru. It’s crucial to clear your digital footprints and frequently check if passwords have been compromised.
She recommended tools such as VeraCrypt or Cryptomator to encrypt sensitive data; Bitwarden or 1Password for password management; and enabling two-factor authentication everywhere. Dedicated devices for work are also important.
Mujuru notifies her husband and another journalist of her movements every two hours when she is in the field and encourages freelancers to have trusted people with which to check in. She keeps a media lawyer on speed dial and never posts real-time updates from the field on social media.
Insurance is non-negotiable, added Gruhnwald: “Health insurance, equipment insurance, legal insurance — get them all — and always get written confirmation that your travel insurance covers crisis regions.”
Perhaps the most urgent advice from the session — protect yourself legally.
If a newsroom contract includes clauses that shift legal liability onto the freelancer — from defamation risks to lawsuits triggered by investigations — don’t accept such terms, the panelists warned. “If a contract pushes liability onto you, walk away,” advised Gruhnwald. “You need a healthy environment that keeps you safe legally, financially, and emotionally.”
She pointed reporters to tools such as Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors’ (FIRE) contract template. If an editor refuses to negotiate on unreasonable clauses, it’s a red flag and a reason to leave, she added.
Income from freelance investigations can be slow, low, and unreliable. The speakers encouraged freelancers to develop other income sources to supplement their work without shame or hesitation.
Gruhnwald teaches at two art schools, creates investigative theater productions, and gives paid talks. “These activities subsidize my journalism,” she said. “They add income, visibility, and sometimes new collaborators.”
Mujuru, meanwhile, is a farmer, growing maize and raising chickens. It’s not glamorous, she said, but it keeps her liquid during slow periods or between commissions.
“Grant funding is really important as a freelancer,” Coca added. “The challenge is that a lot of grants only fund the reporting process.” Smaller or less well-known grants may get fewer submissions, so look out for and target those, he said.’
Swiss freelance journalist Sylke Gruhnwald noted that freelance investigative reporters should make sure they protect themselves legally. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
When you are freelance, there’s no office to leave, no clock to punch in or out, and no manager insisting you take a weekend off. Overwork and burnout are significant risks.
Mujuru spoke candidly about the psychological toll of pitching and rejection. To stay grounded, she builds a daily routine and sets strict working hours. She uses to-do lists to prevent burnout and sets boundaries with editors to avoid midnight messages expecting instant replies.
“You must let editors know when you are not available, otherwise they’ll assume you are always available,” she said.
Gruhnwald added that freelancers must schedule time off deliberately: “Burnout is not a badge of honor. No story is worth emotional damage.”
