Several years ago a whistleblower reached out to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung with an enticing message: “Hello, this is John Doe… Interested in data?” That story would become the Panama Papers, the first in a number of international collaborations for investigative reporter Frederik Obermaier. Read his tips and advice about investigative reporting.
The award-winning Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora is the founder of elPeriódico, a publication known for its investigations focused on government corruption. When he was arrested last year, local and international organizations called for his immediate release amid concerns of rising hostility to the press in the Central American country.
The crises of South America’s giant rainforest basins ignore national borders. So should journalism, writes Andrés Schäfer, in this article exploring how different outlets in the region are investigating what is happening along the banks of the region’s largest rivers.
GIJN’s global team has reviewed some of our favorite investigative podcasts from 2022. Some dig into scandals and allegations of sexual assault. Others take a deep dive into the backgrounds of leading political figures or explore national scandals. There are tragedies, public interest stories, politics, crime, and corruption, with stories drawn from around the world.
GIJN’s Portuguese editor, Ana Beatriz Assam, offers her editor’s picks for the best investigative journalism in Portuguese in 2022 — featuring stories from Brazil, Portugal, and Mozambique.
Censorship. Imprisonment. Threats and violence. Online harassment. Legal battles. Exile. The list of challenges facing investigative reporters in Latin America is extensive. But despite the difficulties, journalists across the region are doing incredible work and holding those in power to account with their reporting.
Although watchdog reporting in Bangladesh faces a series of challenges, all of which make investigative journalism in the country increasingly difficult, reporters in 2022 continued to produce serious exposés on critical issues as corruption, environmental crime, and systemic injustice.
In Turkey, authoritarianism is increasingly undermining media pluralism and is limiting the freedom of journalists to report and receive information now more than ever before. Despite this, GIJN Turkish found numerous praiseworthy stories produced by watchdog reporters this year, and here feature eight notable examples of investigative journalism, photojournalism, and documentary work.
Accusations of sexual harassment against the head of a state-owned bank, the transnational growth and influence of Salvadorian gang MS13, and the striking accumulation of wealth by the president and his family in one of the poorest countries in Central America. These were some of the investigative topics among the prize-winning stories featured at the 2022 Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism.
When Rowan Philp’s editor finally agreed to send him to cover a White House story, he was sure a meaty investigation was headed his way. In a sense, it was: read how he uncovered a delicious scoop at the heart of a Thanksgiving tradition.
