The Basics of Investigative Journalism presented by Mark Lee Hunter

thanks folks you know uh i've just been looking at the folks who are here and you know there's old friends from the last 20 years with the gijn it's great to also to see you all here and the new folks as well um what we're going to do today is it has to be a rapid overview of the story-based inquiry uh of the uh story-based inquiry method if you if you want other materials to back it up please go to www.storybasedinquery.com and there's page of manuals and you can download you know the work i'll be

talking about today there's a new teaching package that we just brought out with unesco last week in fact it's in english the manual is there in a number of languages i saw somebody here from uh azerbaijan we have a we have a version in azerbaijani and uh 13 other languages so without further ado i'm going to i'm going to share uh a slideshow with you and uh we will uh you know we will not rely only on this but i would like you to you know be aware that you're going to have a pdf of

this when this is uh when this session is over so the basic idea behind story-based inquiry is that the job is not gathering information the job is putting together a story and also keeping the assets that you create while you're doing a story i mean i don't know about you guys but you know in my generation when we were starting you know we would do stories and then move on and you know we would leave behind boxes of material and then go on to the next thing and we'd have to plunge back into it if

we ever went back to the same subject it's so much more efficient now that we have computers to do this work for us you know to keep the material and spin something resembling a career path out of it now the first step down this is making a hypothesis i'll talk to you about all these things in some detail the second step is putting together a timeline of events the third is putting together a source map of the people who are involved in the events or the people who have information that can cast light on the

events and uh also who can serve as characters in the story now both the timeline and the source map can be used as a narrative structure i'm going to talk to you about that later i want to be clear from the start that we'll talk something about writing but you know about 80 percent of the writing job is having a structure for the story trying to put together a story out of the kinds of quantities of material that we generate is a good synonym for breaking your head from the inside out okay the master file

is what enables you to structure the story before you write it also constitutes a database that you will be able to go back to over the years i think the greatest example of uh of a journalist making a personal database is probably the late andrew jennings he's the guy who brought down fifa and andrew had a database going back 30 years on organized sport which for him was a species of organized crime one of the reasons that fifa came down is that andrew made a lot of that database available to the american fbi so you

know you never know where you're going to have impact or who's looking at you and it's always good to have the control of your material from the start to the end okay now this this guy is edwi planel he founded media par which many of you may know about in the 1980s he was you know the leader of the investigative movement in france and uh someone who in fact later became a source and a competitor to me and he said something that really impressed me at the time which is if you want to find something

you should be looking for it now that's a very interesting idea because it's not the same as saying well i'm going into a subject and i'm going to gather everything i can find on subject and be the world's ultimate expert on the subject that's a really good way to drown okay planel introduced this notion this very simple notion that you know you have to be sensitive to what you're looking for you have to look at what sticks around that central idea it makes the whole process a lot more efficient and if we look at the

meaning of hypothesis we have this definition from the oxford english dictionary which which i love because it's exactly what i thought a hypothesis was before i found the definition and what it is is what you think might be true it's a proposed explanation not a final explanation that you have to prove at any cost you make it on the basis of the evidence that you have in hand limited evidence and then you investigate further so what that means is that instead of gathering material and looking for its meaning you already have a meaning that you're

seeking to verify if it turns out to be true well that's wonderful but if it's not true your chances of finding the truth go up immensely because you know you have you will have been working on something specific and figuring out whether or not it does explain the facts at your disposal and the facts that emerge okay another way of thinking of a hypothesis is is uh what the french call a hack a chapeau or the americans call the nut graph it's the statement that sums up your story that that says what the story is

about and where we're going with it and you know the verified hypothesis fills that function okay now here's how you make it you ask a question and then you answer it now this is rather different from what most of us do naturally which is ask questions you know and for those of you who are teaching you know what students will generally give you when you ask them what they want to work on is a question they'll say you know did the french government reduce uh hospital capacity before the covert crisis safe instead of asking the

question you answer it and then you ask yourself how am i going to verify this answer it's you know it's not going to be easy for people who haven't done this before to get in the habit of doing it but the thing you have to keep in mind is that the hypothesis is not a question it's the answer to a question and then we see if the answer is true or not now before we get into seeing if our hypothesis actually makes sense we want to know if it's plausible if there's any reason to think

that this might be true and you know while we're doing that we have to ask ourselves what what shows us whether the hypothesis is possibly wrong and what could be an alternative all of this all of this part of the job should be done i think before you go full blast into an investigation because if you know you're working on something that isn't really plausible where you don't see the path to verification where you look at the landscape and nothing stands up and says look at me then your job is going to be extremely difficult

and if you haven't considered alternative explanations you run the risk of confirmation bias you'll go ahead and cherry-pick the evidence that shows you know you're you're brilliant and a genius and you know you see everything from the first day and everything you see is what you want to see or you you know there are other forms of bias as well which we're not going to get into now but you want to play with this idea and think to yourself where can this go what might be another explanation okay there's one other procedure that i think

we should be doing before we get further into an investigation and uh i owe this to deb nelson at the university of maryland who was someone who influenced me very greatly and deb you know won pulitzer's as a reporter she also won them as an editor and when people came into her shop with ideas and said well this is what i want to do she would show them this chart and she'd say well is the story important or is it of lower importance is it difficult or easy now difficulty to me you know means how

hard is it going to be to get the stuff sometimes that's very difficult indeed if it's of high importance and easy then you know the only question you have to ask yourself is can i get this done before somebody else wakes up and smells the coffee if it's of high importance and difficult if you're looking at a path that's going to take a couple of years it may still be worth it if it's difficult and of low importance let somebody else ruin their career and if it's of low importance and easy well maybe you can

have some fun with it which is which is always a nice thing to have you know investigation is a muscle and even the easy stuff can develop the muscles but i would urge you especially those who are teaching this stuff that you know when people bring you ideas you plot this out with them you know if it's a student project and and they they have a limited amount of time to do it you know low importance and easy may be a lot better than high importance and difficult and if it's of high importance and easy

put five of them together on the same project so that they can get it done before their professional competitors wake up okay now when you're making your own hypothesis you also want to know what other people who will be involved in the story have already said about it you know the victims have a hypothesis they may have filed a court action or they may have made statements to reporters that says what they think happened that's a hypothesis the initiators people who are responsible for the problem we're investigating will always if anybody has noticed something going

on have made a statement you know one of my great friends was the late anne-marie castare who did the contaminated blood scandal in france you know she brought down a government and uh delivered a very healthy shock to the national health system which was selling blood products contaminated with aids they knew they were doing it they knew how many people they were going to kill and they went ahead anyway because they needed the money not a very good reason to kill people so anne-marie's investigation started when you know someone told her that something had happened

to france's hemophiliacs she went to the head of the national center for blood transfusion and said did this happen and he said yes and gave her a statement that was in three parts she verified every three parts of that statement and found out that they were all false so obviously that official hypothesis didn't make any sense what did make sense her hypothesis was that they made a bad mistake and they couldn't admit it it turned out that it wasn't a mistake and they knew what they were doing but that initial hypothesis was enough to get

her down the path to where she could get the crucial evidence okay adversaries your adversaries or someone else's the adversaries of the initiate initiators will also have their notion of what's going on authorities will have them as well so you know you can collect these and look at them and think which of these sticks to the evidence and if it doesn't then uh you know you have room to move if it does then you know you may not have a story to do okay now there's one other thing i'd like you to think about okay

and i thought about it because i worked for 20 years in a business school they're the people who paid for my research thank you very much insead it wasn't your core mission but you gave me the money okay and uh we're going to be investing a lot of time in these stories time is the major investment we make and time is the only investment that you never get back directly you can always get money back you can always get other resources back but you'll never get your time back so we need to ask what's the

return on investment that we want from this project now we're short on time today so i'm not going to go into this in detail but i want to make you very aware of one thing when investigative journalists think of the return on investment the first thing they think about is what social good am i going to do what social value will i create that's absolutely central and it's pretty much the justification for the whole enterprise okay because you know we're we're saying things that get people angry and they can hurt people's reputations or maybe land

them in jail and if there's no public interest involved if there's no social benefit then we're nothing but thugs but there's other kinds of return on investment you know i usually ask this to my students because i want to see if they're capable of thinking about it and most of them aren't they don't think about whether they can add to their skill base if doing the investigation is going to require them to grow they don't think about uh the sources they will gather along the way and who they want to see among those sources you

know who are the people that they would like to talk to and explore they don't think about creating a database that will serve for future projects and so on down the line you know so i think this is an important question to ask and if i don't know what the return on investment for a project is what impact i hope to have beyond making people aware of the subject which by the way is one reason that i'm also an advocate of collaborating with ngos which was the standard operating procedure of the anti-apartheid press in south

africa and is an example that should be better studied thanks to anton harbour in johannesburg for studying it okay but until you have a notion of what roi you want until you know what your working hypothesis is until you know where the path starts in other words what are the open sources you can access and until you know who the story matters to in other words who are the stakeholders who are involved you don't get involved okay you let somebody else do this or you come back to it when you can answer those questions i

will note that uh robbie robinson of the spotlight team at the boston globe you know focus is very much on the initial path you know he tells his people that if they don't have uh two or three good ideas for where the initial information is coming from the story is on hold they're not going to do it okay we'll see the stakeholders coming back in just a moment you know as we get into the uh as we get into the idea of the uh source map okay for now i'm gonna pause on that does anybody

have any questions about what i just told you don't hesitate to put your mics on okay no thank you mark dr hunter questions or comments for uh mark up to this point uh covered a lot of important material kind of the found foundation but any any questions folks would like to ask i would like to know um what if we have um many hypotheses should we start by the most relevant one or should we just check every single hypothesis and see um whether if it's the if whether if there's a possibility to see if it's

wrong or right or what i would like to know in this case what should we do exactly and thank you you know this is a this is a personal decision and it has something to do with your ambitions but you know personally i would pick the one that seems the simplest to do okay because this is this is always hard work and if you if you're going down a path for example that requires you to get insider testimony and no one has made an insider leak to you for example okay or you're going down a

path where you know there are no open sources or nobody has studied this like a scholar you know that turns into a very hard piece of work from the start i would i would say always pick the one that looks simpler to do i'll give you an example of this a recent example in 2018 i did a project with well that was funded by greenpeace okay they didn't work on the project they gave me a grant to put together a team of people to look at how the eu the european union subsidizes agriculture to see

if they were subsidizing heavy polluters now we had a working group on on agricultural data at the uh mekelin gathering every year in belgium the data harvest and you know one year at that meeting i said well the european union has two official hypotheses about agricultural subsidies they're supposed to help rural development and they're supposed to [Music] to preserve the environment so i said well i have a team that's working on the rural development and i thought it was a great idea because i live in a rural area and we get a lot of european

subsidies and i could see that the place was going down down down so i thought the official hypothesis is wrong and i thought well the way we'll check this is we'll take the 100 biggest recipients of the subsidies and see if they're hiring or firing people it turned out to be a head breaker because a lot of them didn't file company reports because we had to check all the company reports by hand there was a guy at that meeting named stefan verminer who was working at corrective at the time and what what stefan did was

take two european union databases one of them was for uh polluters and the other one was for uh agricultural subsidy recipients he crossed the lists and he came up with a fantastic list of people who were getting big subsidies and dumping like 20 000 tons of ammonia into the environment a year this was a slam dunk and it became the prototype for our investigation so you know on the basis of of my own experience and my own preferences i would say pick the hypothesis that looks the most doable put the others aside for a moment

and then you can always go back to them when you become more expert in the subject has that answered your question khadijah yeah thank you thank you very much my pleasure is it possible to come with more than two hypotheses says maureen uh karorama well yes it is but i never allow my students to do that i say you give me one hypothesis and you know you you can have more than one hypothesis in the brainstorming phase but at the point where you're going to put the vehicle in motion you have to be focused on

one thing or else you don't have to have a hypothesis you don't have a priority you know you're looking at a million things and you're going to get distracted you have to be focused on something now in the course of working on that something sometimes a story comes up sometimes you see something that you couldn't see before because you were not on the path but you know that's a good reason to switch tracks and start investigating you know the the hypothesis the subject the story that makes more sense and where you see that it's calling

to you to get involved you know not to let it go off to the side you know but otherwise pick one and start with that and if you hit an obstacle that you can't get past you go back and do something else okay it's a long it's a long game folks we're in this for a long game you get better over the years and you get better over the months but you know you pick one thing to start with i hope that answered your question maureen and there's we well as i said mark just there's

there's a couple above the one by ismail when there's no other choice can we rely only on open sources kimo chan had one about um giving an example of a popular so there's just there's five questions right that we're a little bit above as well as okay regarding the open sources okay i personally think that open sources are where you start you know even if somebody comes in and gives you an insider's story you're gonna have to get documents to verify that story but the other thing is that you know if you talk to people

in intelligence agencies you know what they will tell you is ninety percent of what we do is open sources and the way it works is that you know you get those open sources you see what they have to tell you okay and then from that you can deduce what is not open and when you approach someone and say this is what i know this is in the public domain this is what it seems to tell me is that true am i am i completely on the wrong track now of course people can always lie to

you but most people don't like to lie you know i mean i'll give you an example of this okay in in a book i worked on it took me four years there was an important subplot that involved the louvre museum basically extorting a picture out of an american museum and uh you know i asked the louvre why don't we talk about this they said no i asked the american museum they said oh no that's the past so i went over all the news clips about this conflict and found a clue the clue was that the

conflict had affected their exhibitions i thought hmm that's interesting so i wrote to them i said uh you're a public institution in the u.s you get federal money you are therefore subject to the freedom of information act and i would like you to be kind enough to send all of your annual reports for the last 10 years which they did and the annual reports showed that uh the exchanges between that museum and other museums worldwide fell to zero so they couldn't put on big exhibits so i then went to the former head of the museums

of france and i said i know exactly what you did you shut down their exchanges what i don't know is how you did it and because people talk mainly from pride or pain and he was very proud of it he said i picked up my phone and i called the heads of every museum i knew in the world which is about all the museums in the world and i said if you ever exchange anything with those people you can forget about working with us and that's how he did it so you get the 90 you

figure out what the remaining 10 percent is or you make it easy for your source to tell you what that 10 percent is and then you get it so that's why important open sources matter in my view uh what was the other question that someone had jeff yeah so there was one from kimo chan saying i'd like the presenter to give an example of a popular story someone worked on and the information they got that got them cleared if he can give a similar one for the opposite it would be perfect wait a minute the

information that got him cleared what does that mean i i'm not i'm not completely sure chemo might you be able to elaborate chemo said that um uh he's in a kind of noisy area so chemo if you can elaborate a little bit on that question uh doc answer that yeah um but but this is a popular story that was or was not published i'm guessing that it was published given that the information got got the person uh cleared uh but but but maybe ah you mean it got somebody off the hook i think they saved

somebody instead of destroying somebody yes yes i believe that's what that's what chemo is asking i want to speak for boy those are some of the best days in your life okay oh before before with three information before a story is cleared by some information oh i see what he's saying okay you're speaking about anonymous sources or you're speaking about any kind of sources that prove the main point yeah you need multiple sources there's absolutely no question about that unless the whole story is about pointing to one document and the response to that document but

uh you know this will come up again in timelines okay which we're going to get into right now so perhaps we should put this aside for the moment and continue uh continue with the process okay that that's fine um just so you know so to button for later there's there's a question about um deepak is asking about victims and stories of corruption and tax evasion who's the victim if it's kind of big you know kind of big business um and then uh guia is asking how long does it take to develop an investigation flow and

then if someone feels wrong but they made a mistake um should the journalists stop the investigation so maybe maybe especially the one about the time frame mark you can work into as you're well i've done investigations that took two days in investigations that took five years okay it depends on the story how complex the story is and how important it is you know but i urge people to you know i urge everyone here don't just think about the big investigations okay think about your skill set and your muscles okay and that means if you're writing

a news story and you can put one investigative sentence in it one thing you found that nobody else found do that if there's a story that you can do in a in a day or so you know that involves a very swift investigation do that you know not everything has to bring down a government it's you know that's a very difficult way to to uh proceed okay back into our thing now this is this is where we get into uh a timeline which you know to me is is the royal road okay as freud said

the dreams of the royal road to the subconscious okay this is a quote from the adventures of sherlock holmes the ideal reasoner could deduce an entire chain of events from a single fact the events that preceded that fact and the results that followed from it that's an astonishingly effective principle when it comes down to your investigation okay you always start with something you noticed okay someone is evading taxes okay well how did they get the idea how what scheme did they come up with to evade taxes that had to precede the day that they evaded

the taxes they couldn't just improvise it they had to figure something out and then there would be consequences further down the road maybe they had to hide the tax evasion maybe somebody started investigating them for it somebody in power maybe uh they went on to do other tax evasions and in the meanwhile somebody else is paying taxes because the government would otherwise come to a halt so if we look at a full timeline it always includes the causes that led to the problem or event we're discussing in the hypothesis the effects that followed from that

event and hopefully the solutions you know i'm a big believer that we have to propose solutions and the primary reason for that is that my career began in the 1970s after watergate when we were very very good at denouncing everything that was wrong with the world and we thought that's where our responsibility stopped and the consequence of that was that we very swiftly became hated you know because we were just going wah wah where and saying we're the only good people in the world and all of you are involved in some kind of corrupt monstrosity

a very poor strategy if you come forward and say well mistakes were made but here's how we can fix them your chances of being appreciated and followed go up immensely and by the way i will note that before a truncated notion of objectivity became the standard in our business investigative journalists did that all the time okay albert laundra's expose of the prison colonies of france obania okay the last chapter of it sets out for reforms all of those reforms were carried through eventually there is there is no logical reason that having shown how something happened

what happened what were the effects we can't move on to do the solutions and i suggest that you incorporate that into any timeline that you make as you move forward into a story okay now you can set out a paper trail as a timeline as well somebody gets an idea they write it down then they spread the idea to someone else and then maybe the idea is carried through and somebody evaluates it this is a very simplified version of the principle but if you come up with any piece of paper in the course of your

investigation if it's an important piece of paper you can ask who conceived it who was informed of it and what was the response to it and that in itself can be extremely important you know were they warned did they do anything about it did they try and fix the problem okay now the third tool we're going to talk about here is a source map and that very simply is a visual representation of everyone and every place that's involved in the story you can map this out before you start and if you don't you're making a

mistake of course the map is going to become more detailed as you get into a story and see who the stakeholders are who the victims are who the authorities are who's driving it who's profiting it from it who's getting hurt okay these things will emerge in much more detail as you proceed but you have to start somewhere or you're not going to know what you're looking for so let me show you a visualization of a map this one is about this one is from a story that my uh partner luke sangers did about uh pipes

that leak toxic chemicals into drinking water very terrifying story and you know they brainstormed the story before they went down the path if you look in the lower left corner you see chemical scientists the story started with an academic study by some chemical scientists who documented the migration of toxic chemicals from plastic water pipes into drinking water okay just next to them are consumers they're the people using the pipes then there's the government which authorizes the use of the pipes and then there's the plumbers they're the people who put the pipes into houses and and

workplaces and by the way they were a crucial source because one of the questions they had to answer one of the hypotheses they had to verify more exactly was that in fact these pipes were already in wide use if they weren't in wide use there's no story so the first call they made was to the national plumbers union in the netherlands and they said are your people installing these pipes the guy on the other end of the line said well actually 30 percent of all the installations are plastic pipes bingo we have a green light

okay chemical companies people providing the chemicals to the pipe manufacturers who are at the center and the pipe manufacturers are at the center because without them there's no story if no one is making these pipes then they can't be installed in the first place finally biologists who can verify the health effects and watchdog groups who are keeping an eye on the environment these are the initial actors in the story and you know i think of i think of a map like this as a village i grew up in a village i live in a village

now i've lived in cities too but what i've noticed is that in any story there's a village and in that village everyone knows everyone else or has heard of everyone else and you look at a map like this and you think who's going to open the door to me where am i going to get in first it's not going to be the pipe manufacturers they have reasons not to tell you anything it's not going to be the chemical companies probably okay you can look at their advertising you can look at their product brochures and all

of that to get an idea of what they're doing but then i might not be happy to hear from you the government yeah maybe when you have something to talk with them about but the chemical scientists can't hide because they publish their research and on every document they publish as a paper as an article in a scholarly review they put their addresses phone numbers and emails it's like they're saying call me oh okay great i'm calling i read your paper you read my paper my god i think you're the first journalist who ever called me

after reading one of my papers well there's always a first time let's talk about this paper oh i'll be happy to you map the village and you say to yourself who's going to be glad to see me show up and then you say to yourself what documents are inside every house in the village what paper are they keeping what can i get from them etc and once you've done that you have eliminated one of the key anxieties news reporters in particular absorb like mother's milk which is i've got to find somebody to talk to before

the end of the day i've been there too okay it's not a fun position to be in and the other anxiety they have is pardon me what if so-and-so doesn't want to talk to me what if the key person in this story doesn't want to talk to me well what do you care if they don't want to talk to you go talk to the person in the house next door and by the time you come back to them you'll be able to say listen uh you know we really should talk because your name keeps coming

up in conversations and your name appears on documents that are coming into my possession and really wouldn't you rather explain this so okay you can think of other people to add to your village there may be lawyers there may be doctors there may be all kinds of people but until you start mapping them out you're not going to realize all the paths that you have to get at the center of your story and get what you need to have now i've noticed increasingly that the people i work with like to set out their source map

as an excel file you know because they just find it more practical i personally prefer to use word file or another you know document creator because you know i like to keep everything in the same format all the way through but some people find this very natural so what you do is you can make it like this you have your timeline here's an event on the timeline okay scientists discover dangerous chemicals we're going to interview the scientists we're going to get a public document we'll have some confidential stuff but the scientist thinks that they couldn't

put in the article we'll go to the laboratory so that we have a nice scene to put in the story which will bring it to life etc you can make an excel file that has as many columns as you like you can also make a timeline as an excel file if you find that a congenial way to work i don't see the advantage over doing it as a word file as long as your timeline includes the dates the event that occurred who was there and whatever they said or did and any documentation you have from

that you will cite an interview you will cite an article you will cite a speech whatever okay you keep the information and its source together at all times so that you don't have to cut back and forth looking for things okay in business school and economic parlance this is called search time and it's the principal reason that people say investigation is slow investigation would be a lot slower if we kept our information and its sources together at all times that does not mean that you put a whole book in your timeline it does mean that

you put the extracts and the citation from the book and by the way if any of you were working with lawyers who fact check your stuff to make sure that the following libel suit will not bankrupt your organization they will love you for doing this they will love you for being able to show the document that you cited within the 15 or 30 seconds after they ask for it so you know this sounds like extra work it's not extra work it's making sure that you don't waste time and that you know what you're talking about

i'm going to make one more point of this about this okay actually a couple the spatial representation of a paper trail takes you through every set of hands that must have touched the paper now what this means is that you have multiple sources for every document you want you are not confined to the author you are not confined to the organization that ordered the document a lot of people will have seen any document that is involved in an exchange okay there may be confidential newsletters or emails or you know uh reports that are seen by

only a few people and by the way when someone on this list gives you a document the first thing you should say to them is how many other people have seen this because if it's only one other person you are putting a noose around their neck if you even refer to it okay always make sure that any document you cite has been seen by multiple people the more the better okay and ask your source if referring to that document will get them in trouble because sometimes it will and nothing justifies destroying someone's life just because

they were stupid enough to talk to careless journalists okay i hope i've said that strongly enough okay now the the point i wanted to make was that there are basically two ways of structuring a story one of them is chronologically a sequence of events i'll tell you a little more about that in a moment the second is as a journey around different places it's the difference between the iliad and the odyssey which by the way i think every journalist working in the western tradition should read okay in one of them we have a sequence of

events that begins with the cause of the trojan war and takes us up through how it unfolds in the other we have a hero trying to get home and moving from one place to another around the agency one of these two structures is going to be right for your story if you're working in documentary film it's probably a voyage if you are if you're working in print or you're writing a detailed history of something it's certainly going to be a chronology i'll tell you a little more about how to make that choice but listen you

have to make that choice before you write the story before you write the final draft of the story okay now here's where we get into what we call the master file a master file is one document that starts with your hypotheses moves on through the timeline into the timeline you add quotes from documents or enter or interviews okay if you have several sources who talk about the same event you can put quotes from those several sources under the events as you're doing this you're going to be getting ideas insights summaries write them into the file

because when you sit down to write the final story it's going to be waiting for you like christmas cake okay you want to note where you can find your sources how to contact them just one thing here never ever ever put the name and contact information of a confidential source in your master file or any other documents on your computer computers can be hacked or stolen don't do that please okay and then you know under an event if there's something more to verify put it in and note when the last time was that you had

contact with a given source because one of the things you're going to do in an investigation that you don't do in standard work is call them several times maybe a dozen times maybe 50 times in the course of an investigation you know you'll go back to them for one detail after another like columbo hounding his prime suspect by the way i watched colombo because uh one of the best cops i ever met told me that colombo was his model as a as a human being and as an investigator and he was a great investigator so

i thought maybe i should check this out too if a great investigator tells you that they pay a lot of attention to someone pay attention to that someone because you know that's how they learned and that's how you learn okay as we're going through the master file and by the way when i'm working on a story i read through the whole master file every day sometimes it gets pretty long in that case i'll just look at the last stuff i put in but you want to know what haven't i done yet where are the contradictions

in the story there are always contradictions either because people tell you different versions or because they're making a mistake or because you know life is chaotic unfortunately it isn't as straightforward as uh as as whether a train runs on time okay is there anything that seems to suggest that the hypothesis is wrong if that's the case change the hypothesis generally the change will make the story stronger your hypothesis has to account for all of the information or at least all of the information that makes sense if there's something there that says hey wait a minute

wrong track you have to go back maybe what looks like disproving the hypothesis is simply a question of degree not every priest in the catholic church is a pedophile okay so if your hypothesis is all of the priests are pedophiles you should be big enough to recognize that it's just not true but some of them are okay so take into account the information that doesn't make sense and finally look for connections across that information you know some of the most beautiful moments in an investigation come when you see the link across time or space between

two different facts or two different statements and suddenly you know it illuminates the story you won't be able to do that unless you are going through what cops call the case file and what we call the master file frequently okay and this is one of my favorite models jim steele the guy who said get a document state of mind and thereby changed our business besides writing a lot of amazing stuff and jim says write early and often well when you write early and often make it excerpts make it little hits of insight or understanding and

put it in that master file you're going to use it very soon now here's how i suggest you write the story and for those who have to leave in a couple of minutes this will only take a couple minutes save your master file under a new name so you don't lose your source material as you revise it now what you do is read it through look at what matters and cut the rest this will take several iterations fine then cut and paste it into the order you want to use you'll be getting more ideas as

you go put them in so on the one hand you're taking stuff out on the other hand you're putting stuff in that's fine in the end you'll take out a lot more than you put in okay now is when you have to decide is this story a chronology which for me works best with things like crime or policy failure or it could work with tax evasion okay or is it an odyssey where we're moving around different places i once wrote a whole draft of a book that was based on a chronology and and it stunk

it was unusable it was about the french national front and extreme right movement and i realized that it was a heterogeneous movement that was doing many things in many places at the same time so i had to restructure the whole book with the help of my late wife sophie julianne and you know we put it we put together a new version in three weeks that worked think of the structure first guys don't waste three weeks out of your life like i did trying to make your data fit into the wrong structure okay if you're doing

a chronology keep a couple things in mind it doesn't have to be a straight line it doesn't have to run from the past to the present to the future typically most investigations structure start in the present moment because that's where we grab people this is happening to you now folks and then the next question they're going to have is how did that happen and you tell them and then they want to know how do we get out of this and you tell them that so the present structure becomes present past future you can restructure your

chronology when you edit the master file that's the order of use okay i know of one great example of an investigation that began in the future prior to climate change which is changing a lot of things in our business it was rash barriola's investigation into the uh union carbide explosion in uh in india in 1984 okay he predicted that event he predicted it many times he wasn't able to stop it but he was certainly able to cause a lot of trouble for the people who caused it typically you use present past future you can use

any one of them but you know just use one that works and not one that looks cute or makes you look like a literary genius and speaking of literary geniuses if you can't think of any other way to structure your material look at the uh at the narrative curve in a tragedy we start out with a great idea it looks like it's going to happen and then something falls off the tracks and we come crashing down to earth in a comedy which by the way is not for laughs it's something that ends well we start

in a place where we think the world is great and then we start going down just like dante going into hell which is why by the way he called his great work uh the divine comedy and we go down into hell and then we come back to a place where at least we can understand what happened and say this is what we have to do so that it won't happen again keep those in mind okay and finally if you're trying to write the story and it doesn't work it's because nine times out of ten it's

because your structure is screwed up if you are having a very hard time writing this story stop what you're doing and go back to your structure and see if you have the material in the order of use so that you can do the transitions and make it together okay well i can't believe it we got through all of that in something like 55 50 minutes now if anybody has to leave i understand perfectly thank you for staying with us if you want to stick around i'll answer your questions well no thank you uh very much

mark dr hunter please join me first in giving uh mark a big round of applause thank you that was fantastic [Applause] i think everyone has their microphones off or else or else i'd bored you silly well that's okay it won't be the first or the last time so i just i just wanted to mention uh as we talked about uh mark has very graciously agreed uh to stick around for a little bit so we can make that transition before we do that um esther has placed an evaluation uh which literally takes two minutes so if

you can uh please fill out the evaluation this is very helpful for us as we provide more uh trainings for people and the other thing i just wanted to mention is that we welcome you to join our community at ccij and so i have put a link in in the chat we we do have a paid membership we also are very flexible we understand people in very different financial circumstances so we do have a sliding scale but we do welcome you to uh be part of our community so uh given this yeah we we we

do have um it looks like we have at least uh at least one hand up from uh jubilee so jubilee would you would you like to ask ask your question to uh dr hunter and then from there uh we'll see who who wants to stick around and again you're you're welcome to stay we'll stay for you know kind of 25 30 minutes i will need to leave relatively soon but um uh esther will then you know kind of take the questions forward from there so jubilee the the floor is yours and thank you so much

thank you so much um jb malamba home television one of the biggest private tv stations in zambia here i've enjoyed the session but one of the questions which i love to find out is are you capable of sharing the the presentation uh via whatsapp as well as after this kind of a session which we have enjoyed so so much uh are you in the position to share or maybe to give us a some certificate of attendance for me personally if i attend with a very big organization like this one uh here in zambia it means

a lot in my career as a journalist the other question is um under your organization do you normally empower journalists if you we have a group which you want to to to do the t.o.t in zambia here is it possible that you are able to fund those uh organization i thank you hang on just a moment i i'm not sure i understand it let me answer your first question okay the uh presentation has been shared in the chat okay and uh if not if not just ask ccij for it you know i gave it to

you so you know you can you can have it yeah and on on that on that specific point thank you um jubilee we we will send out a follow-up note which will thank you for your attendance at the uh participate at the event at the training it will have the uh presentation it will also have a link to the evaluation so that will be uh that will be available to you after after the presentation to confirm that you did in fact attend okay the jubilee what was the second part of your question because i'm not

sure i understood it you were asking can you collaborate with other organizations yes my question was like here in zambia we don't usually receive such kind of a training so we find there's an opportunity to share a good message to this one now do you normally collaborate with some media bodies like hey zender we have mr zambia zima to train journalists on these issues which are taking place right now as well as are we expecting to have a certificate of attendance regarding this training because for me this one means a lot i thank you and

okay uh i don't give out certificates but yet but but yeah i'll you know i work with people all over the place so if somebody wants me to work with them they just get in touch with us you know and you can you can reach us through story based inquiry dot com yeah and and we we are also at ccij open to that uh conversation about uh collaborating and trying to support um local journalists so so both you can reach out to dr hunter and and we can think about some possible avenues of of collaboration

as i said earlier jubilee the email will confirm that you that you attended we don't have certificates at the moment we do have an email thanking you for for attending okay okay miss dewitt david perhaps wants to wants to ask a question please please put your mic on okay i ah now you can hear me right thank you so much first of all for the opportunity to be a part of this um i am a freelance journalist but with no official background uh as in schooling i trained myself lucky you most journalism schools do not

train people in investigation you're very lucky that's good because i started myself and i wrote a small book on the effects the mafia has on a certain region in italy i'm dutch i'm not living in italy but i was very familiar with the area what a great book i like it um what was bothering me during the whole writing process was the fact that as a foreigner writing about another country i needed to investigate through the internet through my acquaintances and uh well the mafia isn't exactly a topic people locally want to talk about although

i did visit the region try to have conversation and i did actually get some interesting interviews done but the question i have is what do you need to do to prevent something becoming slander is it enough to use other news articles or no what else do you need to i mean maybe maybe okay but you know you know extensive news coverage has been a factor in a number of stories i've done i worked on contaminated blood and i i did a high profile criminal case in france there were journalists all over it and a lot

of them were just nonsense they didn't know what they were talking about okay so if you're going to use those articles you have to try and verify them the other thing is try to get you know try to get the sources that they refer to and by the way wikipedia is great for that articles in wikipedia direct you to primary sources okay so the the basic thing for investigative journalists is verified verified no the basic thing for investigative journalists is primary sources a primary source is someone or something with direct knowledge of the event okay

a journalist is a journalist is an observer it's not an he's not an actor he or she is not an actor a witness pardon me uh when you have a witness of an event is that witness the prime source the yes it's one prime source you want more than one witness you know or you know or you need to look at the effects of an event if there were only two people in the room and one of them talk to you they're at risk okay but you know you want to get as close to the

primary material as you can peer-reviewed scientific research is a primary resource the data on which the uh study is based is a primary source okay personal observation is a primary source okay but you need to be very clear about that okay an investigation based on secondary sources is analysis or opinion it is not investigation investigation is about getting the direct proof yeah thank you so much my pleasure okay thank you very much mr whit and i appreciate people sharing uh questions or contact information or comments uh in the chat uh anybody else and at this

point after uh we field the next question i will need uh to sign off when esther as i mentioned we'll continue the conversation and thank you so much mark for a tremendous presentation in your generosity and staying beyond the the allocated time really thank you very much my pleasure thank you other questions or comments uh that people wanted to ask uh uh drunk it looks like deepa yeah deep deepak had a a question earlier so why don't we hear from uh deepak it looks like kata has one as well so deepak over to you hi

mark uh thanks for your presentation i have been a great fan of your book story based inquiry and it's good that you know we finally have you in person you know talking about your wonderful work and the process so my question is i've uh i had investigated a tax evasion of a big multinational company yeah in tax heavens and you know across the world in many many countries but i struggle to find the victims you know because it's a big company and you know like because as you said you know you need to put a

human face in a story you know so that in that case as well as you know in a corruption historian big you know although you mentioned that you know it has a direct impact because uh if there is a corruption you know people would suffer but in order to put a human face a direct you know victim so how do you go about it well why don't you you know why don't you look at uh some of the people who are dependent on tax revenues for example uh why don't you look at the budget of

national education let's say that the uh that the company evaded 500 million dollars i don't know how many corona that that makes in indian rupees but you know how many schools can you build for that how many toilets can you put in schools a lot of schools don't have toilets you know how many teachers could you hire you know look at what the tax money could have been used for and then then ask the people what could you do with 500 million dollars okay thank you for that question and thank you mark for your response

kata has her hand raised kata yeah hi hello hello hello hi so i have like a generic question regarding um the sources uh identity and safety uh i'm more a science and environmental journalist just stepping into investigative journalism on many occasions personally i always fear for my sources and like i'm very happy if they're like willing to go on record but sometimes i feel like maybe they are not totally aware of the consequences that it can happen and what do you think what is the right technique to balance of having sources on the record but

also feeling ethically responsible for them and maybe briefing them about the possibilities well one thing is you don't want to quote them on anything that's defamatory okay first of all because you know they're responsible and you're responsible okay um a second thing is that uh oh and by the way this this applies to ms debit as well you know one of the things you should be doing is reading libel judgments handed down by the courts in any jurisdiction you're working in you know i i have a very good working knowledge of american and uh french

libel law because you know because i have to okay i don't want to find myself in a courtroom except there's a witness okay now the uh the other thing is you know i'm very aware that a lot of environmental activists have been killed in recent years okay and i'm sure you're very aware of it too so what you can do in such a situation is use what they tell you and see if there is any paper for example an environmental impact statement a legal action whatever that verifies what they say you know the absolute master

at this technique is seymour hirsch you know a lot of seymour hirsch's um sources are former cia people okay he you know he gets the cia the there's an association for former cia guys and women and he you know reads that to see who's just retired and then he takes them to lunch you know so oh well it's brilliant it's simple and brilliant like most things that are brilliant and uh you know from them he will hear what's happening and then he will look for the documentation i mean this is an inversion of the way

that people like me work okay because i will look for the paper first you know to see to see if i can understand the mechanisms to see if i can map out an ideal process that people in power are supposed to be following and then i will see where they diverge from that process okay he does it differently and i strongly suggest that you read his story on abu ghraib which is you know a great great story in the history of the profession and it's an open access on the new yorker site look at how

he does it okay because he he does refer to documents there but he goes looking for the documents after he knows what he's looking for okay maybe his sources tip him off to it or maybe he just uses his his fertile mind he does have an extremely fertile mind but you know you can document what you are told in interviews after the fact and then you don't have to cite the source okay okay because many times they're like peasants working in the land and they see a lot of things by their eyes but they're might

not be aware of the consequences that they can broaden themselves by you know witnessing and telling me about those things yeah yeah i know i know but you know there may be objective objective things that you can witness or get a record of okay that will point you you know point you in the right direction and you know i've already said you can't really rely on newspaper accounts but when i did the story of pollution in france okay you know that i found an interview with one of the owners of these polluting farms where he

said 70 of our margin comes from intensive hog raising okay well that's him if he didn't file a libel charge against the newspaper that quoted him then then i can use that yeah okay i mean there's different stuff but the basic thing is this okay once you know what happened there should be some way to document it the fundamental problem is figuring out what happened the hypothesis is the first step okay and then you're verifying that to see if in fact that does correspond to the available information but you know if someone gives you it

gives you a tip you know follow it up you know if they say well they're taking our land they're doing this well there are land records if land is being [Music] not necessary i'm based in ecuador and here people yeah i know that okay i understand in a number of places there isn't but you can you know you can uh you can perhaps see if anything's being built on the land yeah okay that's a giveaway you don't build a you don't build a house on somebody else's land or a warehouse or a barn or whatever

you know if you're if you're if you're a machinery is going on to the land it's probably because you're using it etc yeah you know there there are different things you can spot and then eventually you have to go to the targets and say look what does this mean yeah all right thank you so much mark okay i i hope that helps yeah totally thank you okay mark we have a question in the chat um i'll read that out loud from lisa redmond and your example of keeping it simple and agricultural polluters getting subsidized etc

where did you get the two lists especially where did you get the list they were published by the the eu uh keeps the pollution database i didn't even know it existed you know i mean this allows me to make another point okay i'm not a data guy i'm i'm from uh i'm from a generation that was slow to figure out how to do data analysis but it's not a problem because there's so many people out there who are great at it you know so if if you belong to this organization or to the global investigative

journalism network you know you see who these people are and you you contact them so in this case stefan vermeyer knew that there was an eu database of polluters we all knew that there was a database of agricultural subsidies so stephen knew how to cross those lists okay it's it's uh god what is the name for it a geographical mean i can't recall at the moment but he had a data technique that enabled him to cross the two databases and come up with a ranking of the people who are at the same time getting subsidies

and polluting okay so in in that case we knew where we were starting but you know the larger answer there is that there's a huge amount of information available in the public domain and understanding where those sources are you know compiling a personal library of those sources is part of the job you know some of those sources you can go back to for 10 15 20 years you know the the agricultural subsidies database has been mined by hundreds of reporters over the years to uh to do a number of great stories you know i mean

honestly when we started out i said to myself is there is there any other way we can use this stuff and you know yes there are other ways to use it but first you have to know it exists and you won't know it exists if you're not looking for it you know oh my god i remember i was doing an investigation of uh of uh an art dealer in france who you know we suspected of getting a disproportionate amount of the the ministry of cultures subsidies and in fact there was a database that detailed those

subsidies that said who got what and uh you know i discovered it by accident i was interviewing uh a functionary at the ministry of culture and she was typing on her computer over the phone and i said what are you typing and she said i'm going into the database and i said oh what database you know so you know you find these things as you go along or you can create your own databases if you have a sufficient number of documents you know besides i mean all of the documents you should you find should be

databased in one way or another you know you should have a list of these things and what their contents are but you know then you mine them and you see if there's any way you can combine them mark we have time for one more question this was in a post earlier in the session from gia i'll read that question out loud one of the investigative news stories is to answer social issues if someone feels wronged but they did make a mistake should the journalists stop the investigation you mean if the person who who made the

initial complaint was wrong if gia is still here if you can provide some clarity to that question otherwise mark i will invite you okay okay i'm here how do you do yeah so uh i'm a journalist from radio river indonesia and i just came up with one issue as suddenly as one of them feel like i disturbed their what is it like their case so they don't wanna me to continue what i already did before so yeah must i hope or maybe i just continue because i think it's very sensitive because i just work on

government so what must i do okay thank you okay well is the story important okay first let me ask another question do you think the story is true yes uh the story is true i mean like uh i have like uh corruption issues and then about um illegal logging at riso oh yeah it's very important to up that those kind of case on the media but uh the problem is i work for government so i think i must stop but the society needs those kind of news so so so you're working for a government agency

or media and their friends are the people who are doing the wrong is that it yeah yes okay well there are a couple things you can do with that one is you can gather the information and uh keep it in a secure place and if you ever leave that job and go someplace else you can use it you can gather the information keep a file and uh keep a master file on it chronology documents etc and if you ever change jobs you can use it another thing you can do is hand it over to someone

else if you feel that the situation is urgent and you're not in a position to do the story you can pass the material to someone else okay who is in a position to do something with it okay you know but if if you can't do the story without losing your job then you know my advice would be not to do the story until you change jobs okay i think i get it mark thank you okay you know i you know i hope that doesn't sound too cynical but you know if if you lose your job

and you don't have another one and you need the job to live you won't do any more stories so you know you need to think you know ultimately if you're working in a place that keeps you from doing the work that you think is important you have to find another place to do your work and one of the things you might consider is going to work for an ngo okay i mean the the current estimate is is that about 60 of all what all of what we call investigative journalism is being done by ngos you

know so you know if if this is a story if if you know the the effect of corruption on the environment is something that you think is of vital importance and you can't do it in your job and there's an ngo doing this why not look around and see if they would like to have someone who really cares about the subject and knows how to investigate to work with them okay thank you for that mark and to that point ccij being one of those ngos we do collaborate a lot with other journalists to do those

very kinds of stories and we ourselves have the opportunity to fund uh stories that folks pitch uh so uh that's just one of the many opportunities uh that ccaj offers to the investigative journalism community mark i just want to thank you so much for not only presenting for 60 minutes but willing to stay another 30 minutes it was clear in the chat box what a tremendous presentation it was people walked away with some really good information um so thank you once again everybody if you could please uh share your appreciation and chat or however else

as i mentioned in the chat we will be following up with you all with an email um including his slide deck um the evaluation as well some more information about ccij so on behalf of ccij i just want to thank everybody have a wonderful morning afternoon or evening depending where you are at mark would you like to say the last words yes i would if anybody here is teaching unesco just published a 10 model 10 module teaching package about uh you know that's that's the the major update of story-based inquiry of the manual since 2009.

it's set out with power points teaching notes and everything else if you're training other people to do this or you're thinking about training other people you can pick it up on the story based inquiry.com website or from unesco it's called i'm going to type it into the chat and then i will release you and it's called investigating sustainable development because if you look at the sustainable development goals they're a template for uh just about any subject that you want to investigate voila thank you mark and we thanks sir yeah no problem happy to share the

wealth so everybody have a wonderful morning afternoon and evening