2025-09-30 15:00:01
Multimedia investigative reporter Doğu Eroğlu built his reputation in Turkey not just on the stories he tells, but on how he digs them out. For more than a decade, he has pursued investigations into ISIS recruitment networks, corruption, and environmental crimes in one of the world’s most hostile climates for independent media.
Eroğlu’s 2018 book “IŞİD Ağları” (“Islamic State Networks”) mapped the radicalization pipelines that operated across Turkish cities, while his reporting has also uncovered toxic industrial waste and illegal mining practices. He was awarded an EU Investigative Journalism Prize for exposing a mass surveillance operation in which Turkish internet providers sent sensitive user data to the government’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK). His investigations into the troll armies and disinformation campaigns on social media advancing the interests of Turkey’s ruling AKP, which involved painstaking analysis of accounts and networks, traced how the governing party tries to steer debate and suppress dissent.
Eroğlu started his multi-faceted career as a reporter intern at the Ankara bureau of Cumhuriyet Daily, Turkey’s newspaper of record, in 2011, followed by a stint at Istanbul-based daily paper BirGün and producing investigative stories and videos for broadcast media platform Medyascope. He is also one of three co-founders of Ortak, an Istanbul-based independent investigative newsroom.
Eroğlu’s work is defined by his persistence and imagination. When officials block access to documents, he looks for creative ways to measure what’s happening: tracking chemical shipments to estimate mine output, or setting up cameras to count tanker trucks. For Eroğlu, the joy of journalism lies in inventing new tools of verification, pushing investigations forward step by step, and proving that evidence can still be found in dark or unexpected corners.
GIJN spoke with Eroğlu about his work digging into the reasons people joined ISIS, developing news reporting methodologies, and what keeps investigative journalism alive in Turkey.
GIJN: How did you get started in investigative journalism?
Doğu Eroğlu: I was working at BirGün when ISIS emerged in Turkey. We published some of the first serious interviews with people connected to it, and that moment shaped my path. It showed me the importance of curiosity, of going deeper than surface-level stories. It showed me the importance of investigative journalism.
From the beginning, I followed what I was personally curious about. Those stories didn’t always deliver big public reveals, but they kept me motivated. For me, journalism has always been about pursuing the unanswered questions, not just following the agenda set by authorities or the media.
GIJN: What investigation are you most proud of, and why?
DE: My favorite investigations were the ones I did on ISIS. What really excited me was trying to understand the motivations of people who joined the organization, and how those networks functioned. I wanted to know: how did they build supply lines? What did they need to do in Ankara or Istanbul to keep their operations running? What kind of meetings and connections were necessary internationally to sustain the organization? Those were the questions that drove me.
And I personally believed that would be of public interest, because even though the Turkish state has been fighting against, for example, the Kurdish insurgency and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), there were no extensive studies on the motivations of the people who joined the PKK. That was disappointing. So, I wanted to contribute by looking at this issue in the context of ISIS. I thought that could be helpful if there were to be another wave of violence in the future.
Readers often expected me to prove state complicity. I couldn’t say that without evidence. What I could show were the personal and social reasons for joining. In places like Hacı Bayram in Ankara, I saw a strong sense of injustice: bad urban renewal projects, schools demolished, kids leaving education, young people drifting into petty crime or exclusion. That environment made some more willing to listen to recruiters.
It wasn’t the black-and-white story many wanted, but documenting those motivations mattered to me. Even if I couldn’t illuminate the darkest part, I could at least answer my own questions about why people took that path.
GIJN: Which investigation resonated most with readers?
DE: In 2014, I stumbled upon an unmarked hospital in Gaziantep that was treating jihadist fighters. There was no sign outside. I introduced myself as a journalist, and to my surprise, they still let me in. I ended up speaking with patients, and it turned out to be connected with al-Qaida.
I wrote about who ran it, who was treated there, and what happened to them afterwards. It wasn’t a major investigation — just being in the right place at the right time. But the public loved it. Readers liked the stories where you simply say: “This exists here, in this place.”
Personally, I prefer the stories where I’m forced to be creative and develop new documentation methods. But this showed me that sometimes a straightforward discovery can resonate the most.
GIJN: What is an example of an investigative reporting methodology that you developed?
DE: In 2019, we investigated a gold mine accused of producing far above its declared capacity. We had no access to company data, and confronting the ministry would have exposed us. So, we looked for other angles.
First, we tried speaking with the staff who handled inventory, but that didn’t work. Then we focused on sulfuric acid shipments. If you know how much acid goes in, you can estimate how much ore is being processed.
We even persuaded a friend to install a roadside camera to count the tanker trucks delivering chemicals. The plan was to collect the footage regularly and calculate production from the traffic.
In the end, our friend got scared and stopped, so the project failed. But for me, that’s the essence of investigative journalism: inventing new ways to measure what those in power try to hide, even if not every attempt succeeds.
GIJN: What unique challenges do investigative journalists face in Turkey today?
DE: The biggest problem is that there is no accountability. Officials don’t feel any obligation to answer journalists. They ignore emails, they don’t respond, and they’re not afraid of consequences — because there are none.
Companies and public institutions think: “If a journalist publishes something, I’ll just drown it in PR.” And often that works, because Turkey’s news cycle is so crowded. Every day, there is another political crisis or scandal. Even if you publish something important, it can quickly disappear in the noise.
This lack of accountability makes the public indifferent. One crisis after another, and nothing changes. People stop caring, and they stop believing that journalism can make a difference. That is one of the hardest parts of working here.
GIJN: What is your biggest personal challenge as a reporter?
Eroğlu’s book about ISIS in Turkey. Image: Screenshot
DE: For me, the hardest part is access to documents. Many times, a story ends before it even begins, because we can’t find a way to document it properly. Without evidence, it risks staying anecdotal, and then I prefer not to publish at all.
That’s why starting an investigation in Turkey is so difficult. Once we are convinced that a story can be documented, then the fieldwork — going there, talking to people — is not so hard. But reaching that point is tough.
And even when we do manage to publish, the impact is unpredictable. Sometimes, nothing changes because there is no accountability. After years of this, it becomes harder to convince sources or citizens that journalism can make a difference.
GIJN: Who is a journalist you admire, and why?
DE: I was a big admirer of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein [who broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post]. What I admired most was their persistence. Investigative journalism is not glamorous. It means going over the same detail hundreds of times, making small changes, exhausting every angle. It’s repetitive and tiring.
What impressed me about Woodward was his refusal to give up. He would try again with a new method, make another call, follow another lead. That persistence — even obsession — is what investigative journalism is really about. You never let go until you’ve tested every possible way.
GIJN: What is the greatest mistake you’ve made and what lessons did you learn?
DE: I was in the field [covering an event] where many people had died. I made a statement I shouldn’t have — I said the death toll could be much higher than expected, based only on a few anecdotes. That was a big regret for me. It didn’t cause me trouble, and it probably [happens to] many journalists, but it really disturbed me. Because when I say something, it carries a weight. This is my profession.
The lesson I learned is clear: if information is not based on documents or evidence, I should not say it. Let others speculate. I prefer to stay silent rather than make that mistake again.
GIJN: What is your best tip for interviewing?
DE: It is important to think about the nature of the interview and the bigger project you are working on. When you are investigating logistics, like how an artifact was smuggled across a border, you ask very concrete, measurable questions. But when you want to understand motivations, the questions have to be different.
If you ask someone directly, “Why did you join ISIS?” they will try to give you the ‘right’ answer — the one they think a journalist expects. The answers sound official, clean, prepared. Instead, I ask questions that don’t have a clear right or wrong answer. I ask about their childhood, their neighborhood, what excited them, what frightened them. When people talk at that level, they stop performing. They begin to hear their own voices and give more authentic answers.
Reaching that level takes patience. You have to wait, build trust, and show people that you are not just there to use them. It is slow work, but it brings the most meaningful results.
Of course, you must also be aware of the issue of distance. When you spend too much time with people, there is a risk of getting too close, of starting to think like them. Sometimes you even begin to ask yourself: what alternatives did this person really have? The boundaries of ethics can become blurry. That’s why it is so important to manage distance carefully — to get close enough for honesty, but not so close that you lose perspective.
GIJN: What keeps you hopeful about investigative journalism?
DE: Even in Turkey, where conditions are tough, I see new experiments. We created Ortak because we realized journalists need to collaborate, not just compete. Now we’re expanding partnerships, working with more reporters, and building training programs.
It gives me hope to see younger journalists inventing new methods, and colleagues who still believe in the mission. Yes, sometimes we take on topics because they are fundable, not because they’re the most urgent. But we also keep space for the stories we believe matter most.
That balance, between survival and passion, is what keeps investigative journalism alive here. As long as we adapt, we’ll find ways to hold power accountable.
Serdar Vardar is an investigative journalist at Deutsche Welle’s Environment Desk, specializing in cross-border environmental crimes, climate crisis coverage, corruption, and tax evasion. Winner of the EU Investigative Journalism Awards in the Western Balkans and Turkey, he has uncovered significant stories including the Qatargate scandal, Turkish corporate propaganda in the Balkans, and China’s Belt and Road environmental impacts in Peru and Colombia. Vardar has also worked on major global investigations including ICIJ’s Pandora Papers, Shadow Diplomats, and Deforestation Inc. with his work appearing in Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, and through collaborations with ICIJ and OCCRP.
2025-09-29 15:00:01
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia, GIJN is publishing a series of short interviews with a globally representative sample of conference speakers. These are among the more than 300 leading journalists and editors who will be sharing practical investigative tools and insights at the event.
A member of the Kiowa Tribe, Tristan Ahtone is editor-at-large at nonprofit climate justice outlet Grist, an award-winning investigative journalist, and a leading innovator in methodologies for exposing abuses facing Indigenous peoples. Having previously served as editor-in-chief at the Texas Observer and Indigenous Affairs editor at High Country News, his investigations have featured in outlets from Al Jazeera America to PBS NewsHour to Indian Country Today, and his honors include a George Polk Award.
This year, the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA) recognized Ahtone and his colleagues at Grist with the prestigious 2025 Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Journalism for their Misplaced Trust series, which exposed how some universities profit from more than eight million acres of land stolen from 123 Indigenous nations.
Ahtone will lead a workshop session on Indigenous Data, Colonial Archives: Mapping the Past to the Present at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur (GIJC25).
GIJN: Of all the investigations you or your team have worked on, which has been your favorite, and why?
Tristan Ahtone: Our most recent land investigation, Misplaced Trust, has been a real highlight. The team was a dream to work with, the material was incredibly challenging, and the stories themselves have been eye-opening in terms of understanding America’s ongoing embrace of colonization. As a journalist, I’m not interested in giving readers easy answers. I’d rather ask difficult questions and challenge audiences to think differently. This series does that, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the team behind it and the many conversations that shaped the work. I’m grateful to have such thoughtful collaborators.
GIJN: What are the biggest challenges for investigative reporting in your country and focus area?
TA: The US has become an increasingly difficult and even hostile environment for investigative reporting; that’s well documented. But because I focus primarily on Indigenous affairs, the biggest challenge I see is support. Financial support is part of it, but, more often, it’s the lack of institutional backing for ambitious investigations involving Indigenous peoples and communities.
Investigative reporting in Indian Country has always existed, but in the past decade the tools and techniques available have expanded dramatically. That means Indigenous investigations often look “new” or unusually ambitious to Western newsrooms. Because so few editors have experience working with Indigenous reporters, these projects can feel like risky, resource-heavy bets. Many newsrooms simply won’t make those bets. That’s slowly changing, but it reflects a broader hesitation toward projects that could spark real systemic change. They’re missed opportunities.
GIJN: What reporting tools, databases, or techniques have you found surprisingly useful in your investigations?
TA: One technique that sounds obvious but is often undervalued in Western newsrooms is historical context and scope. Too often, reporters cover an event with little or no historical analysis that explains just why an event has happened.
When reporting in Indigenous communities, for instance, you’ll frequently see poverty framed as just another unfortunate reality, without understanding how a community could go from abundance a century ago to hardship today. That lack of context raises questions: is poverty an endemic problem in Indigenous communities, or are there government policies and actions that may play a major role in whether or not those communities can play a part in an economy? Misplaced Trust, for instance, traces a direct line from federal actions in the 19th century to today’s fiscal policies, and then digs into how laws, lands, and states benefited, and continue to benefit, from colonization.
In short, even the smallest details of people’s lives have their origins in astonishing events that are far removed from them, forgotten, or purposefully buried. But those events still have huge influence on us and can determine how we live our lives. Investigating those events, and incorporating the impact they’ve had over time, is critical to any good investigation.
GIJN: What’s the best advice you’ve received from a peer or journalism conference — and what words of advice would you give an aspiring investigative journalist?
TA: Some newsrooms treat people’s humanity and lived realities as if they’re just topics up for debate. Stay away from those places. Instead, work to build journalism that restores and strengthens the profession for the next generation of reporters and, most importantly, readers.
GIJN: What topic blindspots or undercovered areas do you see in your region? And which of these are ripe for new investigation?
TA: Indigenous affairs isn’t just under-covered in my region — it’s under-covered globally. The good news is that Indigenous journalists and newsrooms exist all over the world. Find them, collaborate with them, and support their work. The ongoing “green transition” offers journalists a powerful avenue to hold governments and corporations accountable for human rights violations affecting Indigenous communities worldwide. Although Indigenous peoples bear little responsibility for climate change, they are frequently asked to shoulder the greatest burdens in mitigating its effects. Many green energy projects — such as hydropower dams, wind farms, and solar installations — depend on the displacement of Indigenous populations. Large‑scale land grabs are often justified as necessary for creating protected areas that meet global conservation targets. Moreover, the shift toward non‑fossil fuel transportation requires the extraction of critical minerals, which is routinely carried out on Indigenous territories. The pursuit of a greener future exacts a heavy toll on Indigenous lands, resources, cultures, and rights. This dynamic presents journalists with rich opportunities for in‑depth investigations that illuminate how societies are shaping — and sometimes compromising — their sustainable futures.
GIJN: Can you share an example of the kind of technique or insight you plan to highlight for GIJC25 attendees — or otherwise what you yourself are looking forward to in Malaysia, whether in terms of networking or learning about an emerging reporting challenge or approach?
TA: I’m excited to share more about Indigenous journalism, its similarities to and differences from Western practices, and to discuss how newsrooms can approach stories with a different, de-colonial mindset to produce stronger investigations. I’m also looking forward to learning from the many talented journalists at the conference, and to meeting editors and reporters who are interested in collaborating across borders.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-09-26 15:00:40
Investigative journalists across Africa, working with limited resources, are pioneering community-rooted strategies in geospatial analysis, data collection, and open-source verification, and in doing so, are filling critical blind spots that global institutions too often overlook.
The End Bad Governance protests of 2024 in Nigeria underscored the powerful role of citizen footage in shaping resistance. These protests were mobilized and sustained mainly through grassroots video documentation — ordinary citizens capturing extraordinary acts of bravery, defiance, and gross human rights violations by officials of the Nigerian police force. However, this visual evidence was fragile. Many of those who uploaded videos, fearing targeting or victimization, removed them. Others saw their content taken down by social media platforms, citing community standards.
To prevent this loss, journalists and researchers from the Human Rights Journalists Network (HRJN) are launching an initiative to preserve crucial footage in a secure database designed not just to archive but to support future accountability processes. In a climate where denial and disinformation flourish, preservation alone is not sufficient. The burden of proof on journalists is exceptionally high. Therefore, to be taken seriously, especially by institutions that tend to side with official narratives, every frame must be verifiable and credible.
Verification presented a new layer of difficulty. Open source tools like Google Maps and Google Earth, widely used for geolocation and context analysis, lacked current and detailed data even for Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. But the team solved that problem through innovation. In the absence of updated Google Street View, they turned to drive-through videos captured by local residents to match streetscapes and landmarks. Where satellite imagery fell short, they sourced drone footage found on YouTube as a substitute. And when videos were shaky, blurred, or incomplete, they employed cross-linking methods, from their collection of hundreds of open source videos, connecting multiple visual images to piece together a fuller, verifiable picture of events.
The global nonprofit WITNESS seeks to strengthen online investigations and digital verification through free resources and databases. Image: Screenshot, WITNESS
One of the biggest gaps in the verification landscape is the heavy dependence on tools-based methods that lack local knowledge. As demonstrated in the investigative report by Aliyu Dahiru, an investigative journalist with HumAngle, uncovering the full depth of a story requires both contextual knowledge and open source tools working together, especially in conflict zones where visuals are ambiguous, locations are intentionally obscured, and cultural references can be easily misinterpreted.
For instance, while monitoring online extremist activity, Dahiru found that jihadist groups used seemingly innocuous emojis to communicate coded messages — like a bomb emoji signaling an attack, or specific animals referencing targets. These meanings were not detectable through tools alone; they required deep immersion, pattern recognition, and cultural fluency. Without this kind of contextual grounding, investigators risk missing nuance, misinterpreting signals, or misidentifying threats entirely.
Similarly, institutionalized workflows miss contextual nuances that community-based verification catches. For example, a blurry video of mob violence without precise GPS coordinates might be dismissed by institutional teams. But as Opeyemi Lawal, an investigative journalist with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism in Nigeria, has demonstrated through her work on mob violence in Nigeria, being embedded in the community allows for verification through context that outsiders might miss.
For example, locals might recognize a hand-painted shop sign, hear a specific local dialect in the background, or identify the kind of response that usually follows market disputes in that town. Or as Lawal notes, they might be able to identify with precision a video of mob violence. These are details that do not show up on Google Street View or in metadata, but they’re evident to someone who understands the social and cultural landscape. This is where community-based verification becomes essential: it picks up the nuance that tools alone can’t capture.
Equally, the issue of epistemic exclusion is the subtle yet pervasive way the voices of community/local journalists are sidelined in favor of distant or foreign journalists who are deemed more objective or credible experts. In practice, this means that investigative journalists from elite institutions or Global North-based organizations are often granted automatic authority, while community-based investigators — those closest to the events, the language, and the terrain — are too often relegated to just being sources rather than equal partners. This dynamic shows up in media citations practices, in who gets invited into training rooms, and in whose methodology is considered “rigorous.” The irony, of course, is that many of the breakthroughs in visual investigation, from identifying off-map locations to decoding local visual cues, depend entirely on contextual knowledge held by local practitioners. Yet their work is frequently validated only after it has been filtered through institutional pipelines.
To address this disparity, WITNESS, a global nonprofit organization, launched the Fortifying Community Truth project, an initiative that centers the role and influence of community-based journalists in open source visual investigations, specifically in geospatial analysis, data collection, archiving, verification, and presentation skills, grounded in locally relevant strategies.
In 2024, WITNESS rolled out the pilot project in West and Central Africa with 17 cohort members of media practitioners from across five countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon. The cohort members gathered in Abuja in May 2024 to develop the basis for a community-based approach to open source verification that they would embark upon within their communities over the next year.
Journalists from West and Central Africa participating in WITNESS’ Fortifying Community Truth (FCT) project. Image: Courtesy of WITNESS
One of these cohort members was Kehinde Adegboyega, executive director of the Human Rights Journalists Network, whose End Bad Governance Archive, referenced earlier, seeks to preserve critical evidence of police brutality during the 2024 Nigerian protests, to support future accountability.
The database, which is still in development by HRJN, will serve as the most comprehensive collection of community-filmed documentation from the demonstrations, where thousands of Nigerians took to the street against rising prices and inflation but were met with severe repression, characterized by excessive use of tear gas, gunfire, and physical assaults. Thousands of these videos from the nationwide protests were uploaded every day to social media.
The database is being built from hundreds of videos and photos uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) by protesters during the August 2024 demonstrations. Dedicated teams have been assembled and trained to carry out each stage of the verification process.
“Social media, particularly X, plays a crucial role. It became both a real-time archive and a frontline reporting platform,” explains Peace Odekunle, a freelance journalist from Lagos, Nigeria, who was one of the open source collectors. “Protesters, observers, and concerned citizens used it to share videos, pictures, and firsthand accounts. Without it, a lot of what happened would have been lost or distorted.”
The project also revealed the limitations of relying solely on social media to source content from the protests. While platforms like X were essential for surfacing real-time footage, inconsistent updates, deleted posts, and the lack of access to verified public records created significant gaps in the timeline.
Emily Loughrey, a student from the Global Justice Investigations Lab at the University of Utrecht, notes that the nature of the footage presented significant challenges.
“While reverse image search is a crucial tool for geolocation, it did not always help our work,” she says. “Much of the collected footage focused on violent incidents, so we were looking at scenes filled with smoke, police vehicles, and chaos. Buildings and background landmarks were often blurred, obstructed, or too distant to identify.”
This highlights an important truth: even with access to footage, verification becomes complex when the visual focus is on urgency and trauma rather than location-defining features.
Another significant obstacle to the Fortifying Community Truth initiative was the lack of sustainable, secure storage systems and limited access to essential software needed for the collection and verification of evidence. These gaps made it challenging to preserve visual documentation safely and verify it effectively, thereby slowing down investigations and increasing the risk of losing critical information.
For many frontline defenders and investigative journalists, uploading sensitive data to servers owned by tech giants is neither secure nor sustainable. These platforms, while widely accessible, often operate under opaque policies, centralized control, and geopolitical interests that may directly endanger those documenting human rights violations. In response, a growing movement is exploring community-owned, autonomous servers as a pathway to independence from tech hegemony.
University of Utrecht student team working with WITNESS and HRJN, (left to right): Judith Buuts, Alonso Cisneros Uribe, Emily Loughrey, and Sophia Eberhard Zolle. Image: Courtesy of WITNESS
WITNESS, alongside partners in Latin America such as Laboratorio Popular de Medios Libres and Sutty, is actively advancing models that reject extractive and institutional digital practices in favor of decentralized, rights-based alternatives. One standout example is Escuela Común, which combines community media training with technical capacity building. Through its methodology, human rights defenders and grassroots journalists learn to utilize open source tools for documentation, archiving, and server management, thereby building secure and locally governed infrastructures.
It is these innovative community-based solutions that are providing security and sustainability for journalists working in at-risk environments in the global majority. They are not waiting for the perfect conditions; they are actively building new methodologies, adapting open source tools to local realities. These efforts must be matched with the requisite investment in skills, tools, infrastructure, and narrative power. The global community must turn its resources to these frontlines where the most innovative, vibrant, and under-recognized work in investigative journalism is happening.
Nkem Agunwa supports activists, advocates, and legal experts across Africa to leverage the power of video and technology to defend human rights. At the same time, working to elevate the role and influence of community-based human rights defenders and journalists to resist delegitimisation, assert truthful narratives and advance justice. She is the senior program manager for Africa at WITNESS.
Georgia Edwards is the program coordinator for evidence and investigations at WITNESS, supporting the documentation, verification, and presentation of audiovisual material to be used in community-led justice accountability processes.
2025-09-25 15:00:17
Most mornings, when 26-year-old journalist Wethzer Piercin walks to work in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, he says he “sees corpses in the street.” Being a journalist in Haiti, he explained, means not only witnessing daily violence but also being one of its potential targets. “It is very difficult to live this,” Piercin says. “Anything can happen at any moment… you can get hit by stray bullets, you can be kidnapped,” he adds. But, “no matter what, you do your work.”
Piercin works at AyiboPost, one of Haiti’s most respected media platforms and one of its last remaining investigative journalism newsrooms. There, he says, they believe in a common mission: “Seeking the truth.”
Since last fall, armed gangs have torched TV and radio stations, kidnapped at least one journalist, nearly lynched others, and killed or injured several more. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Haiti first in its Global Impunity Index — above Israel — for failing to hold killers of journalists accountable. “A weak-to-nonexistent judiciary, gang violence, poverty, and political instability have contributed to the failure to hold killers to account,” the report stated.
The crisis escalated in 2021 after the assassination of then-President Jovenel Moïse, when gangs seized large swaths of the country. At the time, CPJ warned that Haiti’s press faced an “existential crisis,” forcing many outlets to shut down. Yet AyiboPost has endured — remaining unbowed and committed to investigative journalism despite grave threats.
“The streets are deadly, and international interest in Haiti’s stories is far lower than during past crises,” attests editor-in-chief Widlore Mérancourt. “As both an editor and a reporter, my concerns go far beyond the craft itself — I constantly have to think about the safety of my team, relocate staff who are in danger, and run a newsroom that adapts to fast-changing conditions.”
Founded in 2014 by Jetry Dumont and Naïké Michel, AyiboPost began as a participatory blog for Haitians worldwide to share analysis. It has since grown into one of the country’s most trusted newsrooms, with some 20 staff members and tens of thousands of monthly readers. The team publishes primarily in French and Haitian Créole and translates content into English and some in Spanish. AyiboPost finances its editorial operations through sister projects, including audiovisual and sports content, and partnerships with non-governmental organizations that allow it to maintain its independence. Its reporting has inspired youth protests for democracy, exposed corruption, and revealed overlooked details about Moïse’s assassination — including failures in his security systems. Threats resulting from reporting on Moïse eventually forced the team to vacate its offices.
AyiboPost publishes its investigations in multiple languages, as seen in this selection of recent “Explorations” stories. Image: Screenshot, AyiboPost
Piercin joined AyiboPost in 2023. As a teenager, he launched a blog about art, music, and culture with friends, which sparked his love for storytelling. “I love giving meaning to things around me, and I love giving people voices,” he explains. “As a young Haitian, I have a duty to help this country, to involve myself in the memory of this nation that I love… that’s the reason I came to journalism.”
In 2024, Piercin co-authored one of his most notable stories with Mérancourt. It was an investigation that examined the gang coalition Viv Ansanm, showing its terrifying displacement of poor residents alongside its conspicuous luxury property investments in Port-au-Prince’s Village de Dieu. “The reality of Haiti is complex,” Piercin notes. “We are trying to tell the truth of Haiti — not only for Haitians, but also for people abroad — so they can understand the complexity of the situation.”
In 2025, Piercin collaborated with Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit that continues the work of slain or threatened journalists. The joint investigation followed the reporting of Gary Tesse, a Haitian journalist murdered in 2022, and probed the alleged land-seizing schemes of a former prosecutor accused of orchestrating Tesse’s killing.
“AyiboPost is one of the few investigative outlets still left in Haiti,” says Eloïse Layan, a Forbidden Stories reporter who worked with Piercin. “AyiboPost continues to investigate, denounce the corruption of the political and economic elite, analyze the shortcomings of the international community’s actions, denounce gang abuse, and give a voice to victims,” she says. “It is quite remarkable to continue investigating in a country where corruption is rampant and a former president has been assassinated.”
David C. Adams, CPJ’s Caribbean correspondent who covers Haiti for The New York Times, noted that around 10 journalists have been killed in Haiti in recent years. Yet, he said, AyiboPost’s team continues doing “admirable work with very limited resources.”
“Their investigative pieces are the kind of journalism no one else is doing or is able to do in Haiti,” he said. “They want to give Haitians the truth, and it conforms to the highest standards of international journalism.”
Still, the risks are real. In 2024, AyiboPost’s Mérancourt revealed that Reuters journalists had offered gifts — including balaclavas, alcohol, and cigarettes — to gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. The exposé raised ethical alarms about the practice and ensuing risk to Haitian reporters. (A spokesperson for Reuters said at the time: “This was an error in judgment. We are investigating and will take appropriate next steps.”) Mérancourt was later forced into hiding after Chérizier threatened to “come for him” over the story.
The team of the AyiboPost discuss stories in work at their current newsroom in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Image: Courtesy of AyiboPost
For 27-year-old reporter Lucnise Duquereste, AyiboPost’s only female journalist, the dangers are compounded by gender challenges. “We expose ourselves to harassment and various violations,” she explains. “I’m very careful about what I post on social media, what I share, my location… it’s a maximum of prudence.” Duquereste reduces travel and doesn’t take public transport unless strictly necessary, preferring instead to speak to some sources by phone.
Duquereste’s reporting has spanned from the eel trade between Haiti and China to mystical practices that exploit women to local government mismanagement. “Each story, each reportage, each source remains engraved somewhere in my memory, their story, their past, their experiences,” she says. “It’s a collection of memories.” And, in part, why she says she believes journalism “chose me.”
To disconnect from the daily weight of her work, Duquereste turns to watching movies, engaging with friends, and enjoying social media. “We agree that the situation is difficult. There’s constant fear in your life. But as a professional, it’s a mission for me — to participate in Haiti’s change,” she says.
As an editor, Mérancourt is constantly having to assess the risks to his staff, but the confluence of recent events has created a “lethal environment for reporters.”
“Journalism has never been more necessary,” he emphasizes. “Yet too often the price we pay, both psychologically and physically, feels unbearably high.”
Annie Hylton is an award-winning investigative journalist and magazine writer from Canada. She writes about gender, migration, human rights, and conflict, and has reported from the Middle East, Central America, and Africa. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books. She teaches investigative journalism at Sciences Po Paris.
2025-09-24 15:00:25
It all started with my love for durian, king of tropical fruit. As Vietnam ramped up durian orchards to feed China’s surging demand, domestic prices dropped, and consumers like myself enjoyed the benefit. But I had a hunch: These orchards would eventually collapse under overproduction. That hunch sent me digging into the scale of Vietnam’s durian investments, which had already spilled across the border into Laos.
The idea of an investigation took shape when I came across a familiar Vietnamese company, with a track record of deforestation in Laos, investing in durian. Media reports documenting how Chinese investors had been pouring into the landlocked nation, hunting for fruit-growing land, further piqued my curiosity. Notably, this wave of investment followed a banana boom, which had already left northern Laos suffering from agricultural chemical pollution.
By 2022, banana plantations in Laos were largely absent from media coverage. Durian, meanwhile, began grabbing headlines, but only for its economic promise for a debt-strapped country. The reporting gaps left me with questions: What lies behind the durian boom? And what has become of those banana plantations now?
Seeking answers drove me into a months-long investigation supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, as part of the Ground Truths collaborative reporting project on soils.
After preliminary research, I arrived at the hypothesis: Mounting economic pressures are pushing Laos to overlook environmental consequences to lure foreign investment. This has enabled Vietnamese and Chinese companies to expand banana and durian plantations for China’s surging demand, fueling deforestation and soil degradation.
Laos is a black box for information due to strict government control. That makes fieldwork decisive to collect evidence, refine the hypothesis, and steer the investigation. We split the work into two regions: north and south, based on regional cropping practices and land-leasing patterns.
The South: Durian plantations are spreading rapidly alongside banana expansion. Vietnamese and Chinese agribusinesses hold government-granted land concessions of up to 50 years. Historically, several concessions awarded to Vietnamese companies included protected forests, leading us to suspect that new investors might also receive such areas. This has made the region a focal point of our deforestation investigation.
The North: The climate does not suit durian. Chinese investors have leased existing agricultural land directly from residents. Bananas remain dominant, though many companies have pulled out since the COVID-19 outbreak. This opened a chance to test soil health on lands long exploited by banana monoculture.
First, we combed through state media to get a sense of the industry’s major players, noting reports of large-scale investments, government leaders visiting company sites, and meetings between company executives and central officials.
We then turned to Global Forest Watch to pinpoint deforestation hotspots. Champasak and Attapeu provinces topped the list in the south. Notably, this is also where the region’s biggest players —including Jiarun (registered as 四川阳光嘉润现代农业发展有限公司 in China) from China and Hoàng Anh Gia Lai and Thaco from Vietnam — have operated vast plantations.
Facebook groups for Vietnamese in Laos, where durian farms are traded like hot property, offered crucial clues: Many listings often referenced proximity to water sources, leading us to guess that the plantations were likely clustered along major rivers.
We used Google Earth and Planet to scan conservation areas, protected forest, and riverbanks in Attapeu and Champasak. Historical satellite imagery and deforestation data helped us spot vast stretches of forest converted into plantations. Yet it couldn’t tell us who owned them. Field trips complemented our desk research: A few companies put up signboards at their plantation gate and operation offices in Lao and Chinese, allowing us to identify the companies. We then cross-checked with workers and truck drivers hauling bananas to confirm them.
Satellite maps from Planet Labs reveal significant changes in the Sanamxay district, located in Laos’ southern Attapeu province, between 2017 and 2024. Image: Screenshot, Mekong Eye
Unlike Hoàng Anh Gia Lai and Thaco, easily located thanks to their long-standing presence in the region, we kept hitting dead ends while finding plantations operated by Jiarun. No one, from local people to our source in local authorities and the government, knew its exact location, aside from the vague detail that they lay somewhere in Sanamxay district, Attapeu province.
Further clues came from the company’s own promotion materials, which mentioned “the hinterland of the Boloven plateau at 14° north latitude.” One of the videos on the company’s official Douyin account showed workers bulldozing large trees to clear land for roads — proof the site was nestled inside forest. Piecing these fragments together, we could only speculate about the most suspicious areas. But the zone was still too large. What we really needed was the village name to narrow down the search.
Screengrab from a video showing land clearing inside Laos posted by the Chinese company Jiarun on Douyin. Image: Courtesy of Mekong Eye
At the same time, we reached out to Jiarun, posing as a Vietnamese investor interested in its durian project in Laos. The employee we spoke with couldn’t tell us the village name, but did share a document the company used to pitch to investors. Inside, we spotted a photo showing the village name but the text was heavily blurred, with only a few letters legible. While awaiting confirmation from our source in Vientiane, we found ourselves playing a literal guessing game.
Yet even with the result in hand, it wasn’t enough. In Laos, official place names at times don’t match local usage. We were fortunate to have a local driver with a network across Sanamxay district who managed to track down the village’s local name. That alone still wouldn’t get you there, as villages in the remote south sprawl across vast areas. Even so, the name gave us an anchor point to narrow the suspicious sites. We marked Jiarun’s likely locations as places to visit for verification.
The way ‘Jiarun’ (嘉润 in Chinese) was pronounced differs in Lao, Chinese, and English, so at each site we showed villagers an image of its signboard at the operation office in Attapeu, which we had saved from state media, displaying Chinese and Lao characters. Deep in the forest, the plantation was so isolated that not every villager knew of it. We finally reached one site after coming across a villager with a cassava plot nearby. Though illiterate and having never heard of Jiarun, she recognized the signboard and guided the driver along a route not yet marked on Google Maps.
After obtaining the plantations’ coordinates, we analyzed satellite images to track deforestation timing, patterns, and hectares cleared. For riverside plantations, we measured the distance from their borders to the river and found some of them had violated Lao laws, with buffers smaller than required, posing a risk of water contamination from agrochemicals.
To assess soil health after years of banana monoculture, we sampled a plot that a company had returned to farmers about two years earlier.
A commercial lab in Laos provided the equipment and trained us in sampling methods. We also consulted a seasoned Southeast Asian farmer, who showed us this handy device commonly used to measure soil pH and moisture. Image: Courtesy of Mekong Eye
The results, together with farmers’ firsthand cultivation accounts, were sent to soil scientists and ecologists from Singapore-based organization Living Soil Asia, as well as two US universities: the University of Florida and Indiana University. The indicators alone couldn’t tell the story accurately without context, so the scientists asked us to share our observations of the land’s geography, landscape, and weather. They concluded that the soil was depleted and had very likely become compacted, limiting root growth and reducing the movement of water and air needed for healthy crops. The scientists theorized that prolonged monocropping combined with the intensive chemical application probably played a significant role.
Soil test results were conducted by a commercial lab in Laos. Image: Courtesy of Mekong Eye
We also sent the scientists photos of fertilizer and pesticide packages spotted across both the north and the south, including their chemical composition label, for safety assessment. They warned that continued use without proper controls could lead to heavy metal contamination and the collapse of soil ecosystems.
Synthetic fertilizers with Chinese-labeled packaging are commonly used on plantations across Laos. Image: Courtesy of Mekong Eye
We compiled a list of companies in both the North and South with documented environmental violations and conducted in-depth profile research on them. For plantations whose ownership we couldn’t verify, we settled for removing them from the research list, but still including them on the plantation map to show just how densely the plantations were spread across the forests.
For signboards displaying only abbreviated company names, we cross-checked with our source in Vientiane to confirm their registered operating names in Laos.
We interviewed truck drivers to trace which Laos-China border checkpoints the banana boxes passed through. The brands and trademarks printed on the boxes tipped us off during our online research, helping us distinguish between Chinese companies with similar names in the fruit sector and, in some cases, trace where their products were sold.
Tianyancha, a Chinese corporate database, helped us track the owners and other information behind companies, including their registered trademarks.
The trademarks allowed us to connect the companies with the banana products we saw in Laos and those on Douyin videos as the same trademarks printed on product packaging. Tianyancha only allows access within China so we used a VPN service called Kuaifan to access it.
We also dove deep into Douyin videos, as well as other open sources — from company recruitment posts to news reporting in Chinese and Laotian state media — to extract additional clues and corroborate information.
Our team speaks Vietnamese, Chinese, and English, with support from local interpreters and drivers fluent in Lao, Vietnamese, Hmong, and English. Still, tracking the remote areas often derailed us: Many villages aren’t shown on Google Maps under their Lao names, only as English versions romanized from Lao — often bearing little resemblance to what villagers actually call them. This turned our work into a constant “guess-the-letters” game with multiple English spellings for a single Lao name. Worse still, some places do not exist on digital maps at all.
Filling the information gaps required more than fieldwork and desk research. We continuously sought support from individuals and organizations across a wide range of fields.
Amid the opacity of the Lao state and the Vietnamese and Chinese investors backed by their own governments, wrongdoings are easily shrouded. We were only able to shed light on them by reaching out to local partners and landowners, farmers, and plantation workers who shared their firsthand experiences and the history of their land, despite the risks. For their safety, we anonymized their names and photographed only their backs.
We avoided demonizing the durian and banana industry, recognizing its potential to serve as a ladder out of poverty if cultivated sustainably and through fair, transparent transactions. Our aim was to give audiences a multi-angle narrative, beyond blaming Chinese appetite or faulting the Lao government for alleged corruption. Behind the fruit booms and their environmental and human costs, lies the political and economic logic of a neo-colonial model imposed on the least developed country in Southeast Asia. Political and ecological experts, including Lao specialists, helped us unpack this context.
Collaboration among journalists, scientists, experts, local communities, and technology and data platform providers were key throughout the investigation. It would not have been completed if journalists had worked in isolation. The collective effort kept us on track and carried the work through to the end, even in complex contexts and countries with scarce public data and restricted press freedom.
This article was originally published by the Pulitzer Center and is reprinted here with permission. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity. The author prefers to remain anonymous due to security concerns.
Founded in 2006 by Jon Sawyer, the Pulitzer Center is an essential source of support for enterprise reporting in the United States and across the globe. The thousands of journalists and educators who are part of our networks span more than 80 countries. Our work reaches tens of millions of people each year through our news-media partners and an audience-centered strategy of global and regional engagement.
2025-09-23 15:00:42
Two Nobel laureates and an African legal expert on international rule of law are the latest iconic speakers to be announced for the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from November 20-24. They will share urgent insights with the world’s watchdog community as they join more than 300 other notable global speakers and experts from nearly 100 countries, participating in the 150-plus panels that are part of the conference’s official program.
The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Maria Ressa, will be the opening keynote speaker at the conference, which is co-hosted by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and GIJN member Malaysiakini. The co-founder of Rappler, the pioneering investigative outlet in the Philippines, Ressa will share a major address on the challenges and future of the global investigative journalism community — and of truth itself — followed by an all-Asian keynote panel.
The conference will also feature a second Nobel winner — economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz — who offers unique expertise on several urgent topics for investigative journalists, such as income inequality, climate change impacts, corporate governance, and globalization. A former chief economist at the World Bank and a current co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, Stiglitz will host a special session aimed at helping attendees understand financial misconduct and what abuses to look for.
In addition, Nigerian lawyer Charles Adeogun-Phillips will share his expertise on international rule of law, in a special session that will offer deep insights into laws tied to human rights, war crimes, and business crimes. His career spans war crimes prosecutions and white-collar crime investigations. Adeogun-Phillips worked for more than a decade as a lead prosecutor for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR) and brings a wealth of international criminal law experience.
Over 100 panels and workshops in the conference’s agenda are now available on the GIJC25 website. We will be adding more sessions and speakers in the coming weeks. Additional speakers just released this week include Hayatte Abdou (Comoros), Lina Attalah (Egypt), Sheila Coronel, (Philippines), Yasuomi Sawa (Japan), Frederik Obermaier (Germany), Stéphane Horel (France), Luis Assardo (Guatemala), and Leon Yin (United States). Beyond the many networking and meet-up opportunities, there are numerous panels on evergreen subjects like data mining and analysis, following illicit money flows, cross-border collaboration, and environmental exploitation, as well as new insights on sustainable funding models, spotting AI deepfakes, documenting war crimes from afar, and investigating under a democracy in decline. The conference will also include a series of documentary film screenings. And in an era where journalism faces an increasing number of physical, legal, and surveillance threats, GIJC25 will offer practical sessions on protecting sources and whistleblowers, new tools for operating a secure newsroom, as well as drop-in clinics for advice on dealing with defamation and libel threats.
Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa speaking at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg in 2019. Image: Courtesy of Nick Jaussi, nickjaussi.com
Keynote speaker Ressa is an influential voice in exposing disinformation and defending democracy worldwide. In a rousing speech at the 2019 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg, Ressa implored the gathered audience to stand up for the truth: “We have to join forces to protect the facts.” In that address, she noted that her relentless persecution by the Duterte government and its supporters included recent arrests in just a five-week period, forcing her to post bail eight times in three months, and sometimes personally receiving 90 personal hate messages per hour. “This is an existential moment in time — where, if we don’t take the right steps forward, democracy as we know it is dead. The more I study this time — which started with technology’s disruption, then attacks against journalists, then democracy — the more I’m convinced that the attacks against us and our values are so insidious that the equivalent of an atomic explosion has ruptured our worlds, and all we do is chip away at the tip of the iceberg we can see.”
The fallout from that explosion in the intervening years has been an ominous increase in autocratic governance; the rise of even more wealthy and powerful oligarchs; the abandonment of fact checking at social media platforms; wars of naked aggression; and the explicit targeting of journalists, even by democratic governments. But this same period also saw Ressa and Russian editor Dmitry Muratov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” and the publication of Ressa’s call-to-arms book: “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” So don’t miss Maria Ressa’s keynote address on November 21.
