Copyright Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Published by One Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138 Adapted from the Spring 2013 issue of Nieman Reports The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard has published this e-book in both English and Spanish to coincide with the 2013 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio de Janeiro on October 12 – 15. The conference is a joint effort of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism, and the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. Translators: Patricia Torres Londoño and Erin Goodman Spanish Copy Editor: Sandra Rodríguez Nieto The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard educates leaders in journalism and elevates the standards of the profession through special programs that convene scholars and experts in all fields. More than 1,400 accomplished and promising journalists from 92 countries have been awarded Nieman Fellowships since 1938. In addition to the Nieman Watchdog Project, which aims to examine and invigorate journalism in its fundamental role of serving the public interest, the foundation's other initiatives include Nieman Reports, a quarterly print and online magazine that explores contemporary challenges and opportunities in journalism; Nieman Journalism Lab, a website that reports on the future of news, innovation and best practices in the digital media age; and Nieman Storyboard, a website that showcases exceptional narrative journalism and explores the future of nonfiction storytelling. English Investigative Reporting's International Impact Cross-border investigative journalism collaboration has achieved a lot, but its full potential is yet to be realized By Charles Lewis As an estimated 1,200 people from over 100 countries gather in Rio de Janeiro for what veteran Brazilian journalist and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas Rosental Alves has called the “World Cup of investigative journalism,” it is fitting to reflect upon how such international collaboration and exuberance for investigating the uses and abuses of power came to be —and where it is going. This is the latest manifestation of exciting, dynamic, synergistic phenomena that actually began long ago. As we come together for the single largest and most international gathering of investigative reporters and editors ever held, with appreciation and humility, let us not forget that this is just the latest milestone in the continuum of experience, knowledge and understanding. South America’s largest country will host the simultaneous confluence of no fewer than three major conferences—the eighth Global Investigative Journalism Network conference, the fifth Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism, and the eighth International Congress of the Brazilian Congress of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. All of these organizations are recent, 21st-century phenomena. The global investigative journalism conferences were the brainchild of Brant Houston, who was then executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the oldest and largest such membership and training organization in the world, and respected journalist Nils Mulvad, co-founder and former executive director of the Danish Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (DICAR). They envisioned multi-day, multi-panel, locally hosted Global Investigative Journalism conferences as a means for reporters to “increase cross-border cooperation.” Such conferences were subsequently held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2001 and 2003, Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2005 (460 journalists from 55 countries; attendance rising with each conference), Toronto, Canada in 2007, Lillehammer, Norway in 2008, Geneva, Switzerland in 2010 and Kiev, Ukraine in 2011. I have attended and spoken at six out of seven of those. In early 2012, a “secretariat” to “better manage the GIJN’s conferences and increase its capacity to support investigative journalism around the world” was created by the various voting delegates, and today it is directed by veteran U.S. journalist David Kaplan. Of course, reporters and editors have long combined their resources and their energies, talents and sources in covering significant public issues. For example, enabled by the invention of the telegraph, in 1846 five U.S. newspapers formed the Associated Press, a nonprofit news cooperative, in order to share the costs of publishing breaking news stories about the Mexican-American War. And there may be no more historically consequential examples of great moments in journalistic collaboration than The New York Times and Washington Post’s publication of the secret Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. (See the recollections of former Post national editor Ben Bagdikian about this). Or certainly the Nixon Watergate scandal, in which numerous reporters including the Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, wrote 201 stories in the first six months, more than twice what any other newspaper published on that subject during that critical time. And more recently, the Times’s stunning coverage over many weeks of the September 11, 2001 attack, involving over 100 reporters, editors, photographers and others. Each of these three instances of excellence in journalism involved substantial collaboration and won the highest Pulitzer Prize award, the coveted Gold Medal for Public Service. But in those instances, the collaborating journalists all worked for the same news organization based in the same country, or the collaboration was largely logistical in nature, sharing office space or expenses or modes of transportation or access to technology. The most evident, first stirrings of editorial collaboration by disparate reporters from different news organizations, at least in the United States, was in 1975, when a small group of reporters—Myrta Pulliam and Harley Bierce of The Indianapolis Star’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team; Paul Williams, former managing editor of the Sun Newspapers in Omaha, Nebraska; Ron Koziol of the Chicago Tribune; columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten; David Burnham of The New York Times, Len Downie of The Washington Post, Robert Peirce of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Jack Landau of Newhouse Newspapers, Frank Anderson of the Long Beach Independent and others—met in Reston, Virginia. They wanted to “share tips about reporting and writing” and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., was born, its first conference attended by 300 reporters in Indianapolis in 1976. Just days before that conference, 47-year-old Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles was blown up by a bomb that had been placed under his car in Phoenix. Murdered journalists in the United States, killed because of their inconvenient reporting, have been a relative rarity in the past century, and Bolles’s brutal slaying shocked IRE members, who resolved to investigate this outrageous “assault on the practice of investigative journalism,” as James L. Aucoin put it in “The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism.” A team of 39 reporters and editors from 28 newspapers and television stations, converged in Phoenix, and led by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor Robert W. “Bob” Greene of Newsday, not only ascertained exactly what had happened and why, but also exposed the deep ties of organized crime to local and state government in Arizona. They produced 40,000 internal memoranda that were filed and indexed, and ultimately, an 80,000-word, 23-part series of hard-hitting stories by participating media outlets about the extent of lawlessness in Arizona. From this important work, Bolles’s killers were identified and subsequently prosecuted. The IRE “Arizona Project,” as the Bolles investigation was known, was, according to author James Aucoin, “a defining moment in the history of journalism, particularly investigative journalism … a rare case when normally competitive investigative journalists set aside their egos and worked together on a story that was too big for any one of them alone … [They had] stood up for freedom of the press … to show those who killed him that the press will not be silenced by violence.” But there had also been deep organizational strains, with internal backbiting, prominent IRE Board members resigning, the financial cost of the extensive investigation running far higher than anyone had initially contemplated, some major news organizations refusing to publish the stories, and six libel or privacy-related lawsuits filed over the stories (five were settled out of court, and only one went to trial, a jury deciding no libel or invasion of privacy had occurred). Bolles’s murder became a call to journalistic arms, and 30 years later, another instance of this kind of solidarity and cross-newsroom reporting was the highly successful Chauncey Bailey Project after the respected Oakland Post editor was slain in August 2007. Under the leadership of Dori Maynard, president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, and Sandy Close, executive editor of New America Media in San Francisco, the leading news organizations in the Bay Area came together, along with area journalism schools, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), IRE, the Knight Foundation, and others. And an extensive investigation into the killing was launched and coordinated by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Robert “Rosey” Rosenthal, executive director