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Panel explores the present and future of investigative reporting | JSK

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Panel explores the present and
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The investigative reporting panel featured, from left to right, Michael Rezendes, Mary Rajkumar, John Temple (moderator),
Marina Walker Guevara and Walter Robinson. photo: Doug Zimmerman

The Shining a New Spotlight: Innovations in Investigative Reporting panel was held July 7 at Stanford
University. Video of the panel is available for viewing.
Print newsrooms across the nation continue to shrink and overseas bureaus to shutter as advertising
revenue dwindles and digital platforms take over much of the media market.
Yet the mood was hopeful among some of the worlds nest journalists who gathered at Stanford University
last week. They heard a panel of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and editors who believe technology and
collaboration are allowing the industry, and investigative reporting in particular, to thrive.
New tools are leading to a resurgence of respect for the beleaguered print media.
The satellite imagery that caught shing boats lled with slaves in Southeast Asia; the open-source
visualization tools of massive data dumps shared among journalists across the globe that led to the Panama
Papers; and the shoe-leather reporting by Boston Globe reporters who uncovered sex abuse in the Catholic
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Church.
All are examples of how classic reporting, complemented by new technology and innovative thinking, are
helping journalism to evolve.
We reported our stories at the dawn of the internet era, said Michael Rezendes, an investigative reporter at
The Boston Globe who was on the Spotlight Team that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for
revealing the cover-up by the Catholic Church of sexual abuse by its priests against their young parishioners.
In addition to reporting the story, we posted the documents (online) and they were incredibly powerful
because it made our story bulletproof, said Rezendes, who is a JSK alumnus.
At that time, the posting of documents on the Globes website was innovative and the teams use of
technology consisted of using a spreadsheet. Today, an array of sophisticated technologies power
investigations and accelerate their impact. But the importance of the Globes work gained renewed attention
after the release last fall of the movie Spotlight, which won the Oscar for best picture this year.
Rezendes, who was portrayed by actor Mark Rualo, was joined onstage by Walter Robby Robinson, the
editor of the Spotlight investigative team portrayed by Michael Keaton in the lm.
They were speaking to an audience of some 300 journalists, Stanford students and faculty on the panel,
Shining a New Spotlight: Innovations in Investigative Reporting. The two-hour conversation was part of the
50th anniversary reunion of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, also sponsored by the
Stanford Alumni Association.
As everybody knows, newsrooms today have far fewer resources; most newspapers have half the reporters
that they had 15 or 20 years ago, said Robinson, now editor-at-large at the Globe and also a fellowship
alum. But reporters now are much more resourceful if they know how to use databases.
From the Spotlight teams simple spreadsheets and postings of church and court documents on The Boston
Globe website more than a decade ago, to the satellite imaging that allowed an Associated Press
investigative team to track down small shing boats carrying slaves in Southeast Asia last year
information is still king. But it can no longer live behind the castle walls.
The technology aspect of it is actually really exciting, said Mary Rajkumar, the international enterprise
editor at the AP who edited the series of stories in Seafood from Slaves.
Winner of this years Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the series revealed the slavery tied to the Southeast
Asia supply chain of seafood in U.S. supermarkets and restaurants. The reporting led to the freedom of
2,000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and is leading to reforms. One of the AP reporters on the team,
Martha Mendoza, was a 2001 JSK Fellow.
I knew nothing about satellite imaging until starting this project, Rajkumar said. The AP used a company,
DigitalGlobe, to help the news agency nd boats of missing men who had been held captive for years by the
shing eets working for seafood companies.
As they said, `You cant hide from space, Rajkumar said. We gave them the rough coordinates and they
literally just canvassed the whole area until they found them and then they matched the images to previous
satellite images.
Rajkumar, who has a masters degree from the Stanford Journalism Program, said AP is using this
technology in other isolated and dangerous corners of the world, such as Iraq and Syria, where it is hard for
reporters to be on the ground to verify information.
The technology, the satellite imaging, can show us which buildings have been leveled and which buildings
still exist, she said. Thats how we found that the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq had been leveled.
The panel was moderated by John Temple, managing editor of the Investigative Reporting Program at the
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Also onstage was Marina Walker Guevara, deputy director of
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and project manager of the more than 375 reporters
in 76 countries who produced the The Panama Papers.

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Eleven million leaked nancial and legal records from a little-known law rm in Panama earlier this year
showed how heads of state, criminals and celebrities have been using secret oshore companies to facilitate
bribery, arms deals, tax evasion, nancial fraud and drug tracking.
Guevara said the source of the leaks remains unknown; even the gender of the whistleblower known as
John Doe is a secret.
Unlike the seafood investigation where Rajkumar said it was very hard to document the ma-and-pa
companies that were enslaving their workers Guevara said their problem was the overwhelming amount
of documents the journalists had to sift through.
Technology allowed us to look into these massive amounts of documentation is a smart way, she said.
Being able to rely on the open-source technology that is out there helped us to visualize the networks to
see how the people and money were connected.
Guevara believes journalistic collaborations such as the massive, unprecedented ones that resulted in the
Panama Papers are giving new life to the industry. But investigative editors are going to have to realize that
their reporters are not going to be able to call all the shots.
Were taught to be lone wolves thats what investigative reporters are, she said. And we are telling the
lone wolves now: join the pack and share your scoops. Not with one or two reporters, but with hundreds.
Rezendes conceded collaboration is the future, but called it a dicult radical change.
We used to have seven foreign bureaus and now we have none, Rezendes said of The Boston Globe. So
now were more likely to collaborate than ever before. How else are we going to hold the powerful
accountable with diminished resources?
But reporters have egos, he said, and live to beat their rivals.
Its very hard to shake that spirit of competition, Rezendes said. And documentation, collaboration and
technology are moot if you cant turn the data into a human narrative.
Were in a golden age of data journalism right now, but still, the data has to be brought alive with real
people, he said. In the Catholic Church scandal, for example, the most important thing I did was get a guy
to talk to me.
Guevara agreed. It took hundreds of coders and engineers and programmers around the world to turn the
leaked documents into evidence that reporters then turned into narrative gold. But the students in the
audience who were considering journalism, she said, needed to know that good reporters leave their desks,
talk to people and do the hard work before they break stories.
I think that young students would want to learn about platforms and coding, but lets not forget the basics
of traditional reporting and the collecting your documents and building your case, nding your evidence,
going to court and ling your FOIA requests, Guevara said.
If you dont have all that theres no coding or social media thats going to give you a great investigative
story.

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