Crowd Power

Creating a global business model for collaboration to fight disinformation and political corruption

This original image was created, in part, with the assistance of DALL-E.

The coveted George Polk Awards for Investigative Journalism were doled out last week in New York City to a small group of top journalists, but for those of us past and present winners attending this year’s awards ceremony and 75^th Anniversary luncheon, the lavish festivities were bittersweet.

The 21st century has been a time of great upheaval for American journalism. The digital revolution has transformed the way people get news and information and, in the process, has undermined the legacy business model for many long-standing print publications. At the same time, says Pew Research, public trust in journalists has declined amid escalating political divides and the rise of ‘fake news’ spread by bad actors “to disrupt journalism and democracy,” prompting a reevaluation of journalistic norms.

“We now, as a society, have—sadly—begun to treat the truth as something radical,” CNN international anchor Christiane Amanpour told the Polk Awards crowd. “We need more journalism,” she added, “not less. And we need new business models to sustain it.”

Gerard Ryle—an Irish-Australian journalist, a three-time Polk Award winner, Pulitzer Prize winner and now, the chief of the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—is already building one.

Ryle’s model? A global newsroom and international network of 290 investigative reporters from 105 countries, connected by high-security private data networks and managed to collaborate on in-depth investigations too complex and expensive for any single news organization to pursue on its own. Each project, led by Ryle and involving more than a dozen news organizations participating at any time, has already produced work that’s won a Pulitzer Prize and a variety of high-profile international awards. A current project seeks to expose Russian corruption and disinformation networks.

“The biggest threats to our society, and to all of us,” Ryle says, “have gone global, and it’s stretching the capacity of traditional newsrooms to cover these threats well, so we have to find a new way forward. We now have an amazing opportunity, through cross-border collaboration, to serve people better—and to become a more essential part of their lives to protect democracy and rebuild trust.”

We caught up with Ryle during one of his recent trips to New York, inviting him to our podcast studio to talk with us about his work to re-cast the way investigative journalism gets made and deployed in today’s economically challenged media environment.

What follows are some short, edited excerpts of our conversation. [He’ll also be featured on our forthcoming podcast. Stay tuned.]

MARCIA: So here we are. America is at a crossroads, as is American journalism. There are other democracies around the world that are in the same place. The rule of law, democracy’s core principle, is being tested. Trust in traditional journalism is at an all-time low. And in the United States, which once stood as the global symbol of democracy, a new generation of politicians is flirting with authoritarianism. Is journalism doing enough to help fight fake news and corruption?

GERARD: The biggest issue we’re facing right now is a lack of trust in the media. I think that goes back over many decades. When things were going really well, when the business model that was supporting journalism—advertising—was going really well, we weren’t paying attention to our primary purpose, which was to serve the public. And I think now that is starting to catch up with us. The current business model is collapsing and traditional media are collapsing. And now we all have to find a new way forward.

MARCIA:  You’re creating a new model for collaborative journalism to do just that. It’s a global newsroom that taps into multiple news companies and their reporters to share single, focused projects that couldn’t be done otherwise. And it’s working. You and one of the collaborative, cross-border teams you led some years ago won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism—an investigative reporting project you called The Panama Papers, which was a series of stories using a collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents to expose the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens. Other projects have been as big and also had impact and won awards.

Tell us how this model went from an idea to where it is today.

GERARD: We basically started building this model in 2011, when I took over the organization. As an investigative reporter, I didn’t do a lot of due diligence when I started this job, I have to admit. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists sounded like a fantastic organization and very impressive. I had this image that it had hundreds of journalists around the world, and a huge budget. The reality couldn’t have been further from the truth.

We were the international arm of the center, on a different floor, and there were only four of us. And the budget I’d been promised wasn’t what I was facing. We were a nonprofit and a lot of the funding we were expecting was under threat at the time. I did have some things, though, that I’d brought with me. …I had been recruited from Australia mainly because I attended the University of Michigan as a fellow there, and the director of that program was on the board of directors of the center and he convinced me to come over and take this organization on. They wanted somebody who wasn’t American because the main part of the funding was coming from overseas, and it was under threat. And they thought if they had a non-American working in this organization, we’d actually get renewed.

…So, to get over the fact that we didn’t have any money and didn’t have any resources back then, I thought the one thing that I could do is to find a story and then to trade or barter that story with news organizations for the resources we needed. In this way, we’ve been able to turn a very small nonprofit organization into a very powerful media force that is showing some of the way we, as a news business, need to go forward.

MARCIA: Today, you’ve got a staff of 50 and are operating at a time when you and others say that investigative journalism has never been more important, nor as challenged.

GERARD: Our reporting has to compete against an unprecedented new flood of misinformation and disinformation now that confuses, alienates and divides.

MARCIA: And there are large segments of audiences and readers and citizens who don’t believe the facts. What are you doing to punch through the noise?

GERARD: I do think that collaborative journalism—cross-border journalism—gives us an amazing opportunity to rebuild that trust—to bring investigative reporters from around the world together to work on big stories. My model is to find what I think is a really great story and then to bring that story to reporters around the world, to go to media partners and to say, if you want to work on the story with us, you’ve got to give us your reporters and your platforms.

And the advantage of this is that when they invest like that, you’re going to be able to publish together in a very powerful way, but you also have that added benefit to have success. …The Pandora Papers? In 2021 we had 600 reporters from 115 different countries and 150 media partners all working together on that project. Now, when you have that many reporters all examining the same set of facts and coming to the same set of conclusions, it’s very powerful journalism, as nobody can really dispute it.

MARCIA: Your organization is doing this kind of collaborative journalism at scale. How do you convince reporters to set aside traditional rivalries to uncover corruption, abuses of power and the rest?

GERARD: We have a track record of breaking big stories and being a recognized leader in the global battle for truth. But it’s a different model, a new departure for journalism to persuade the biggest and smallest media organizations in the world to work together to do the watchdog journalism they used to do alone. …It’s not easy. We’re still learning lessons about managing hybrid and remote participants, but we also work it so that each organization contributing investigative journalists to our projects are helping …and have roles and ongoing input and feedback.

…Each project has led to more reporters wanting to work with us, and also leading to more information. …The Pandora Papers had 600 reporters working on that story, including The Washington Post. It was the biggest such project in history. It also brought down another prime minister and put two presidents under investigation for corruption.

The projects, together, have changed laws in more than 70 different countries.

MARCIA: This is a remote newsroom, a global newsroom that meets digitally.

GERARD: Yes, largely. We’re very tech and data driven.

MARCIA: The secret sauce is this open source research platform you call Datashare —a data tool that helps your biggest investigations. It can extract names of things from documents in any format and uses artificial intelligence to help it recognize names, locations and email addresses based on context. Its saves time and helps this kind of reporting.

GERARD: …We also have what we call the iHub, which is an online newsroom, basically. And so you can invite reporters from anywhere, from their computers, anywhere in the world, into your online newsroom. And there they can converse and talk with their fellow reporters as they’re investigating, with the idea that they have to share everything to share context. Not everything is a story … but once you have information as a journalist, you’re able to examine it and to look for patterns, which eventually leads to stories.

… I had noticed, obviously, from working in major media years ago, that we (as an industry) were afraid of tech. In legacy media, we were watching tech destroy our business model. All of my former editors and the powerful people inside those legacy companies were saying tech is bad, it’s destroying us. My attitude, though, was that we should be using tech to do better journalism, and leading this kind of collaboration in my position now with IJIC as a nonprofit, these organizations have more trust in us, too.

MARCIA: So what is the New Rule you can share to ensure better journalism?

GERARD: It’s that we’ve got to think more about the public we serve. We’ve got to get back to having the public trust us—not just worry about getting a scoop and not necessarily trying to even be first with a story, but making sure that what we do publish is correct and unchallengeable. And we need to be more collaborative, across borders.

It’s difficult to argue against 500 or 600 reporters all looking at the same set of facts and coming to the same conclusions. Even Putin can’t argue with that.