It's for the state, the show where journalists talk journalism, coming to you from 2SCR in Sydney on Gadigal Vans at the Eora Nation, right across Australia on the Community Radio Network and directly to your device across the Global Fire podcast. I'm Olivia Roseman and today we're broadcasting from the Walkleys annual Journalism Conference Astoriology with a special panel I hosted on Thursday on Investigative Journalism with a distinguished panel of four top investigative journalists from around the world. The world is full of problems. It always has been, that's nothing new, but what has changed in recent years is the willingness and indeed the ability of big news organizations to pay for the long and expensive investigations.
So today we're going to talk about that problem. We'll be asking our distinguished panel here how they decide where to dig and which to be possible to lead somewhere and if the end always does have to justify the means. I'm joined here on the stage by Aaron Glance, a senior reporter with Reveal from the U.S. Centre for Investigative Reporting, the Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Jared Ryle, Kate McKimmon, senior journalist with Fairfax Media and the founding editor of the Wire in India, Cin't Half of Aradaric Jam.
So our time is short today and we'll be covering a lot of their biographical information over the course of the conversation so I'm not going to waste your time reading that out. It's all there in the program as well. I just want to jump right in and Kate, I'll start with you. In your 27 years at the Sydney Morning Herald, you've built an extremely strong reputation investigating legal issues.
I can only imagine that anyone with some juicy info about something going on here in Sydney would have you at the top of their list of journals to contact. So I'm interested to know how many tip-offs do you receive, let's say on a week to week or month to month basis. So I'm interested to know how many of those, how many do you follow up, how many actually end up leading somewhere and how many are you just simply unable to follow up with legal and behavioural resources. I think I get about five per day and I'm finding increasingly as our newspaper organisation as the amount of journal shrinks, the more people come to you with their story ideas and of those, I would say maybe one out of 30 is any good.
And you know, yesterday someone sent me an email saying I want to know if the Sydney Morning Herald would write something about one of its sponsors and you go, yes, I'm sure we would. Well, can you speak to your editor about it? And finally I just said, look, can you please get to the point? Tell me what the story is because often people just, you know, me and are around and you just say, look, just tell me, just give me the nugget of what the story is and I can say yes, no or more information please.
But you do find that a large proportion of your day now is dealing with people's information and you don't know until you talk to them whether it's going to be or not. Although having said that, when anyone uses random capitals or uses red by red by red on the arrow or quotes a Sam or any biblical reference of any kind, you know they're not so there were any tip-ups in your recent memory that you regret not having followed up. Look, I did get one earlier this year telling me to look at the water issues in the Murray Darling Basin and I said look, that just sounds fantastic but we just don't have the resources at the moment to look at that. And then Lyndon Besser from Four Corners does a fantastic story with that information and you do think, but having said that, I think some stories do work really well on television and trying to tell the same kind of story and trying to get a word picture across of the huge nature of the war resources and dance and things like that.
Sometimes you think actually that did work much better where it ended up. See how does that number of two puffs per day compare with what we receive at the while? No, I can't say it's five or five a day at all. It would be more like 10 or 12 reasonable sound tips a month.
Readers write in with suggestions, I'm not classifying that as a tip. I would say a tip is when somebody in, typically a whistle blower of some kind or the other reaches out and suggests that we look at something. That's a good tip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But very often they're not in a position to provide any documentation. And we have until now reasonably robust right to information system, which the current government building on the reluctance of its predecessor to share information has effectively sought to undercut. So typically three or four years ago, if you got a tip off and the person giving the tip didn't have information, you could craft a proper set of questions and send it to the several government departments and eventually get something out in a month or two. Today that process has become virtually impossible.
So short of cultivating particular sources and actually getting hold of information, those kinds of tips are very hard to follow. And we are also in an environment today where the government is actively discouraging people from, so people in government from even dealing with a data basis. So there's a lot more kaginess on the part of those in the know and companies are also increasing the result of the slapsuits of one kind or the other. So the environment for this kind of reporting is becoming more difficult in India.
Aaron, is there a limit to how long a reporter at Reveal can spend with a tip off or a hunch without getting anything concrete before they just have to move on? Well, I mean, I wouldn't think of it exactly in those terms. You might just back burner it, you know, so we have to be productive, right? We have to get stuff done.
But there's also, you know, there's like a two year investigation that I might do. But that doesn't mean that I'm only working on that for two years. I found that there's a lot of natural waiting involved in investigative journalism. So for example, one of the biggest stories that I've done has been about the overviews of narcotics by our Department of Veterans Affairs.
And we ended up making a tremendous impact there. And now that problem has actually been largely solved thanks to our work. And in December of 2014, I got this fantastic tip from this former worker in a VA hospital saying that the chief of staff of this particular Veterans Hospital was being called the Candyman. And that the veterans called the hospital Candyland.
And these are his words, zombifying his patients. And he had a lot of all caps. And he was just crawling like me. No, no, no, no.
But this is actually like a related point which is read past the all caps. Yeah. And just kind of skim. And sometimes even if the person's first was totally nuts.
But that didn't mean that he didn't have something. Right? So then I said, Ryan, what is this about zombifying? Can you give me anything else besides your rant?
And then I just kind of went back to work. Two weeks later, he leaks me an internal audit of this hospital that had been buried by the federal government. Right? And then I'm often running online investigation.
So I think that giving your tipsters homework is very important in terms of you assessing if it is a good tip. And also kind of like not making you so bogged down that your editor walks around and says, Aaron, you've been working on this for a long time. Maybe you should produce something. And you do.
Sometimes you have to say to people, could you give me five bullet points of what you say your claim is? Because often when people bring up, they get agitated and they try to tell you and you just say, just stop for a moment. Just pretend that you're telling a relative. What is it that is exciting you about this?
And then the next question is, and two, you have documents. All right. Well, speaking of documents, Darren, the Panama Papers leak was one of the biggest in the biggest battle leaks in history, 11.5 million documents, 2.6 terabytes of information. I wonder if you are able to quantify how much time and effort and how much investment went.
First thing to working out how much of a story was actually buried in that ocean of data. We're still working on it now two years later. But I think the first thing you ought to do when you do get a tip office is try to establish whether or not it's true, I think. And that's the very simple point, but it actually is often forgotten by journalists.
In terms of being tip-offs, my role is always like, it's got to be something that is of general interest to everybody. Because often the people that come to you are obsessed by a topic. And because they are obsessed by the topic, they think everyone's interested in it. There is, in fact, often it's of no general interest at all.
So I think it's very important to interrogate the sources to make sure that what they're telling you is of more general interest. Again, never say no to information, I think, is the biggest lesson for the Panama Papers, because we know that the John Doe gave the information, eventually to the German newspaper who gave it to us, had actually shocked that material around to some very major news organizations before you finally found the Germans. So again, never say, I remember years ago, when I was working at the agency paper, this guy contacted us to claim that there'd be the secret unit inside the Victoria Police. And he was a secret agent, essentially, for them riding around in a motorbike with a radio at the back.
This was back in the old days. And then he was basically enrolled as a student at the university undercover for the Victoria Police. It sounded insane. It turned out to be completely true.
And I think the lesson there is that you need to listen to everyone that comes to you and do your work at that point. But like Kate says, most of them are insane, unfortunately. Sit up. You've written that for good journalism to survive and thrive.
It needs to be both editorially and financially independent. And indeed, that's the structure that you've established at the while, which you founded in 2015. And before that, you had a substantial career in the traditional newspaper industry, including a stint as the editor-in-chief of the Hindu. So can you tell us a little bit about how those editorial and financial relationships constrained or interfered with investigations while working in a newspaper environment?
Well, I think the Hindu is the director for two years. It's in many ways a unique paper in the Indian media landscape because even though it's privately owned, like all newspapers are, the family is harsh. I put it not very ambitious or greedy. So they're quite satisfied with a level of profit that would frustrate other newspaper owners and they're not chasing after easy or quick money.
This paper was traditionally was always run by the family. And they received professional advice on the context of infighting within the family that they needed to tap somebody from outside to run the show. And that's how I became editor. During the time, I was editor, I faced zero interference from them in terms of, so I actually had a, I was in the unique position of being able to do a whole range of stories that the paper never did earlier.
This was when the Congress party was in power. So we did major stories exposing dodgy land deals involving Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law. We tracked the role of senior ministers in a major telecoms scam that was unfolding at that time. We tracked the role of the manner in which India's largest company, Reliance Industries, was essentially gold plating a joint venture with the government for on gas production, costing the exchange of billions of, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars.
These were stories that were available for every other paper to do, actually. The person shopping the oil and gas documents, for example, was knocking on everybody's door. But because of the influence of Reliance, no newspaper order to touch them. As editor of the Hindu in a situation where I knew the publishers didn't care, I had a free hand to rumbles.
The irony is that once, the feuding family patched up, and I was stuffed up. I was going to say, but I was tough, because of the kind of journalism that I was doing. They just hang on, I'm going to be, we know that I have his job, right? So I was out, and it's so happened that the political climate of the country also changed.
So a lot of those investigations, the Hindus stopped doing. But by and large, I would say the environment in India is such today that the lack of financial independence, or should I say the over-dependence of editorial on proprietors who make money from multiple businesses, many of which are vulnerable to government, shall we say, you haven't signed that form, or you haven't got that clearance. This way is putting pressure on media houses, and the government is itself getting increasingly intolerant of criticism. Big companies are more likely to slap suits than in the past.
So this has had a terrible effect on investigative reporting. But I was a critical reporting of any kind. A lot of the best stories that we've done, because a very small team, maybe eight or nine journalists, actually full-time, lots of contributors and freelance writers. And we sponsor a lot of investigations done by people that we trust were not formally part of our organization.
But the best stories that we've done are investigative pieces that are hiding in plain sight. These were stories that were there for everybody to do, but because of a political sensitivity involved, or because nobody wanted to knock a particular corporate house, say, newspapers and TV channels just chose not to do those. And we've had great success doing that. We've also, for sure, been two years, collected for defamation suits, running into hundreds of millions of dollars, including from Mr.
Adani, who you know and love. So that's, I guess, the occupational hazard. Kate, you touched on this before. But what has your been your experience?
Have you ever had an investigation cancelled, or limited due to editorial or financial interest at Fairfax? No. And I think it's what's it after saying as well, is that traditionally the Fairfax newspaper has not had other business interests. It hasn't had interest in gambling or in other areas of commerce, which means that there have been times in the past where major advertisers in the paper have threatened to pull their advertising and have done so, not because of any of my stories.
But they're the kind of pressures that journalists, I mean, usually the editors keep that from the journalists at the time. There hasn't been any pressure not to do this because we're about to lose advertising. So, you know, and I think that's one of the joys of working for an organization like that is that they tend to back you, you know, very well. And I couldn't work freelance just because of what's in Africa saying, it's about the legal costs, just about every single story that I do, I'm on sort of like auto dial to our in-house lawyer, to run by, you know, the implications, you know, maybe tweak a word here, a word there.
And I couldn't do that if I was working by myself. So I think investigative journalism, sadly, you still need a powerful organization to back up your work. Aaron, Reveal is part of the Centering Vestigative Reporting, which is a not-for-profit that lives within the public radio ecosystem. So I imagine that there are fewer external interests or relationships that might cause an interference.
But I'm sure there's still pressure for a story to be with the investment. So what happens when you come across a story that is a story but that only affects a really small or tiny group of people? How much do you have to weigh up the expense of the investigation with the potential impact? Well, luckily, I'm not in charge of the budget.
I just have in charge of spending the budget as a reporter. But, you know, I think that I personally, in my work, I always ask myself, how many people does the story affect? So within narcotics coverage I was mentioning earlier, you're talking about three million American veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of them are being over-medicated and dying at an alarming rate because of the drugs that our government is prescribing. So that's a wrong that if we fix it, a lot of people will be helped.
And I'm always looking for stories like that that are not about one person doing wrong or two people doing wrong. But something where, you know, if we have a successful impact, if the story lands properly, that it will be worth everyone's time. But, you know, my bosses also like stories that are just great stories. And, you know, for example, one of the big issues in the US is sexual assault.
And the fact that women frequently cannot get the perpetrators of sexual assault prosecuted. And we had a fantastic story last year that when many awards were, it was this one woman who had been sexually assaulted who happened to be a journalist who investigated why her own assault wasn't being perpetrated. So she put her considerable investigative talents to work on investigating her own case. And, you know, it had tremendous impact with the audience in a different way, which is that a lot of people understood this issue in a way that they never had before.
Jared, I want to talk about the impact of technology on investigative journalism. Prior to joining the ICIJ in 2011, you spent 20 years working as an investigative reporter, which takes us back to the early days of the internet. Now, compare that to the panel papers, which involved one of the largest data drops in history, a year-long collaboration between 370 journalists and their respective news organisations around the world, and proprietary technology to process that data. So how much has technology made large-scale investigations easier and cheaper, or has it just made it more complicated and more expensive?
You think of all of the above, but I think that we're, you know, for me, it's about bringing opportunity. I mean, our industry is basically being killed by technology. You know, the business models that have sustained all of our reporting in the past, like when I worked with Fairfax, it's all dead now. I mean, no one's advertising the same way Facebook and other organisations are taking away that profit that used to pay for the journalism.
But I actually don't think that's a bad thing. I think that we're actually, you know, and I think, reveal is an example of this. We're reinventing journalism. The technology is allowing us to do that.
Now, we had 11 and a half million documents with a panel of papers, and we're able to basically make all those documents available and searchable, and we're able to pipe them around the world to every journalist that looked at the document. So it was almost like making them, you could Google anything you wanted in the documents. But not only the states, stages further, we actually turned every name and address and offshore company, in this case, into a node, and the journalists were able to see very complex structures. So they would never have been able to do 10 years ago or even five years ago.
So I think it's all great. I think these days journalists got to embrace technology because the technology that's killing us has actually got a chance to remake us, and I think that's what we're seeing here. And I think you're seeing a lot of nonprofits in the US, one of which we are as well. Basically learning how to experiment.
I think that's where a lot of experimentation is being done at the moment. But it is like to answer your question in a short way. It's actually making journalism easier, not harder. So, as you've touched on the politics, but let's talk about that a little bit more.
What happens when you know that there's a good story, but that the current politics will just be completely un-receptive? How much is that a consideration in what you choose to investigate? No, that encourages us to do it. The downside is that very often, there is virtually no follow-up.
So a story that we do, which is a great, I'll give an example. India's largest state is called Uttar Pradesh. It's home to nearly 100 million people. And they recently had elections where the party which is ruling at the national level, the party which is right-wing party won that election.
And in the kind of bait and switch, they wheeled out this very, very extreme politician, hate-mongering guy actually, who was never declared as chief of nesterial material during the campaign. And he was wheeled out and presented to voters as the chief of nester, after the election was over. This is a guy who has had a 10-year or 15-year career, not just delivering hate-sleeches against Muslims, but also involved in, he has a kind of a paramilitary or a kind of a volunteer organization that was involved in acts of violence. So we looked into cases that have been filed against over the years, and why these cases hadn't progressed, even though many of the cases were filed by rival parties.
But it emerged that at the end of the day, there was all this great material establishing his culpability, including material generated by the state police and the investigative arm of the state, but which he now, as the executive head of the state, was in a position to suppress. So we got that material out and we ran these stories. I think it perhaps had an impact on the court. So the public airing of this material may be emboldened judges to hold the life, but there was zero follow-up from big media, simply because this particular production despite his horrible background is being airbrushed and presented as a man who stands for development and growth.
So that's the most frustrating part, but at the end of the day, we've now learned to live with that. There are going to be stories that we do, that we have to do because of their public importance, which will not be followed through by other media. When other media follows through, the impact is obviously much greater. But I would imagine that even so, there is an impact even if you don't see it immediately.
Kate, we spoke yesterday and you told me that you had put a lot of effort into trying to expose what a shank video was before people took any notice. So what do you think changed that finally made the story, yet, as big as it got? Look, I think the fact that ICAC decided to investigate. It is one of those frustrating things like, you know, you write another story about video beating, you think, this time, you know, someone's going to follow it up, this time, this is really going to do it, dead silence, nothing.
And you just think, oh, you know, what is it going to take for people to realise what kind of person we're dealing with here? And it was only having the Independent Commission Against Corruption do not one inquiry. So they ended up doing five inquiries that touched on EdioBead. And they were basically things that we had revealed, you know, over the years.
But it was still that ability of an organisation to get tax records, to get behind trust companies. That's one thing that impedes investigative journalists is that you don't have access to those records unless someone leaks them to you. So in some cases, you have to realise that there is a limit to your investigative journalism, and you really do need a corruption body or the police to go that next step. But I mean, I think we are absolutely crucial in exposing what we can and giving impetus for other organisations to follow up on our work.
All right, now we are running on time, and I'm aware that many of you, short of time, not on time, we're actually running a little late, but I'm aware that many of you will have questions for the panelists. I'll just ask one more question and then we'll open it up. Aaron, reveal is a weekly public radio show and podcast, and it was America's first, American public radio's first investigative reporting show. Now I'm a big podcast fan and I listen to a lot of podcasts and I'm not aware of anything really quite like it.
Now, reporting for audio production is more resource-intensive, I would say, than reporting for the written word. So why do you think audio is a medium is so successful in presenting investigative stories? And what does it have to offer that the printed word doesn't? Well, I actually think that all of the medium have something unique to offer, and I started my career in radio that I've worked a lot of print and television, and I love them all.
And one of the things that we try to do at the Center for Investigative Reporting, which every media outlet is trying to do nowhere. Now there's take advantage of everything that each of these platforms have to offer and give people multiple cracks at the same story and multiple ways into the same story. I mean, I think that radio can give you tremendous reach, especially if you have a national program, you get people in their cars, you get people with a brush of their teeth and taking a shower. That's really great.
You can introduce them to people. And I don't actually find, at least for myself as a reporter, that it's a huge lift because all I have to do is take my tape recorder with me and record everything. And then the bigger lift actually comes when I get back to the office and I have to conceptualize the way that I'm going to tell this story across the different platforms and say, well, in the radio I might really focus on this one character, but in the print story I'm going to write a very traditional news lead, but they're both going to actually be about the same thing. Right.
And so Reveal does have the podcast, the website, and a very active social media feed. So what are the numbers in terms of engagement to each one of those? Well, I mean, the reach on the radio show is the highest run over 400 radio stations now. We have an over the air audience of over a million people and we have about 300,000 downloads on our podcast each week.
But the thing that concerns me a little bit about radio is that it's still, even though it's very shareable now with podcasts, it's still going to be very ephemeral. And print offers the ability to quickly read and click and share, especially data, right, which data is almost impossible on the radio. And video offers something which is the person can sit there and it's the most, I think, immersive because you have somebody's full attention. They're sitting there watching it.
And so to the extent to which we can work across all those platforms ourselves or partner with somebody else, not necessarily on the scale of the Panama Papers, but on a smaller scale to make sure that this information is conveyed in a variety of ways, that's the winner. Especially now that the audience is so fragmented. The idea that we are going to hit everyone who needs the story with our news product is just laughable. And it's the same for pretty much everyone in the world except for the New York Times and two or three other outlets.
All right. I think we have time for a couple of questions and some mics, perhaps. Yeah. This one down here.
Oh, yes. Oh, here first. Okay. I'm interested that you just touched on it, Aaron, and also from Jared, to hear from you about collaboration.
I've been involved in a number of collaborations at the ABC, which sometimes to be honest, quite fraught. They're fine, journalist to journalist. But once you get up the chain of command, it's like, oh, well, we're at PayPal, we want to run it on Saturday, we want to run it in the morning, we're running it in the evening, and also about kind of, I guess, their exclusivity. Even though I've found whenever we have done one, we get more traffic to both outlets, you know, because the story just is everywhere.
So the level of interest is magnified. I'm kind of interested to hear about what you think the future of collaboration is, whether people are becoming a little bit more relaxed about it and how to really, really make it work, as well, perhaps, you know, across the TV radio. Okay. You know, we have the same issue, in fact, we've multiplied, because, I mean, we find that everyone of our partners have got a different day, that they want it, they've got a different time of the day, they've got, you know, every, I think the most important lesson we've learned is setting the rules from the beginning.
So when you enter into the collaboration, you set the rules for the reporters, that then become cast and stolen by the time it gets to the editors. So walk in there with a very clear plan. I think your point of greater audience for both is true. We've found, in fact, that we're magnifying the audience.
When we did the panel of papers, Panorama, which is the BBC, kind of, equivalent to four corners here, they weren't able to publish their story until the Monday we published on the Sunday night. So they had a way 24 hours, but they still had the highest rating show because of the audience built from working with the Guardian, which was their print partner in the UK, but also working with BBC radio, which really built that story up. I think you've just got to do a few times to teach the bosses that it actually works. I mean, I remember when I went over to ICIJ years ago and trying to convince these media organizations that this was a good idea.
I got nothing but resistance from the bosses. And eventually I learned that if I went to the reporters, that the reporters could do the selling for you, so deal with the reporters, but set the rules and stolen from the beginning. And then by the time the boss is here about it, they've got no choice because you've already signed the dotted line. When I heard this about the Panama Papers, I said, oh, no, wonder it worked so well.
You know, because you guys, I think another key is that you worked with the reporters who really knew they would do well with this particular material. And I think that was also, sometimes when things are managed from the top down, you end up with maybe the wrong journalists. But you knew that you had journalists who knew this topic and basically liked each other. But we also learned the lesson of doing it wrong.
And I think so. We have to admit that we get things wrong until we get them right. But yeah, I think the reporters care about stories and they're passionate about the story. So they will go into the sell for you in the organization.
I do think there are more collaborations happening now because the media organizations are struggling and they're more willing to listen to new ways of doing things. And I think that's what you're seeing. It's definitely the future. But of course, I'm a great convert to it.
So I'm always going to say that. But I think you'll also find it is good. All right. Now we've just got two minutes left.
So we might get two short questions in. If anyone has one down here in front of you. Hi, thanks for the talk. It was fantastic.
I guess I'm just asking terms of freedom and information. I'm sure you guys have gotten a lot of tips that you've needed to get information from governments and things like that. I wonder if you've had any tips for how you approach that, especially when maybe information that a particular body might not want out there. Look, one of the secrets is going on a massive fishing expedition is more likely to result in being rebuffed.
You need to be fairly specific about what you're looking for. Because otherwise they say to you, that's going to cost you $30,000 because it's going to take five people working 300 hours each to find it. So if you can, try to get specific information to target what you're looking for. But I think generally people are not keen.
And you also have to be prepared to fight it in court. If you're not satisfied, you can challenge it in the administrative appeals tribunal and more people should be doing that. I think that developing human sources is really great. Even if you have to file a freedom of information, if you can then call your human source and have your human source actually walk the document over to the freedom of information, an act officer and then you can call the freedom of information, act officer back and you can be like, I think this might already be on your desk.
Playing these sorts of games is really helpful. And then another thing that is often helpful is don't be afraid to go with what you have. So I don't sit around waiting to get everything. As soon as I get something, then I'm publishing and I'm raising public consciousness and then they learn that they can't get away with it because the chance that document will actually be leaked to me anyway goes way up.
And I'd just like to pick up on that as a general proposition. Nowadays you don't have to wait until you've got the whole picture. Sometimes you have to say to yourself, okay, I'm going to go with what I've got. It's not what I initially started out hoping for.
But often just the ability to put, you know, if you've got more information, please send it is now providing people with a new impetus to give you the rest of the picture. So don't be afraid to just run with what you've got even if it's not the whole picture the first time around. All right, I think we might have to leave it there, unfortunately. Jaren, Aaron, Kate, sit down.
Thank you so much for your time. That's it for the State this week. This was a special broadcast from the Walkley's 2017 Sioriology Conference. As always, stay in touch with us on Facebook and Twitter.
Our handle is for the State AU. I'm Olivia Resman. Thank you for listening and don't forget to tune in next week.