About the ICIJ

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is a global network of more than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories.

Founded in 1997 by the respected American journalist Chuck Lewis, ICIJ was launched as a project of the Center for Public Integrity to extend the Center’s style of watchdog journalism, focusing on issues that do not stop at national frontiers: cross-border crime, corruption, and the accountability of power. Backed by the Center and its computer-assisted reporting specialists, public records experts, fact-checkers and lawyers, ICIJ reporters and editors provide real-time resources and state-of-the-art tools and techniques to journalists around the world.

Our advisory committee consists of some of the biggest names in investigative journalism worldwide: Bill Kovach, Chuck Lewis, Rosental Calmon Alves, Phillip Knightley, Gwen Lister, Goenawan Mohamad, Reginald Chua and Brant Houston.

Why we exist

The need for such an organization has never been greater. Globalization and development have placed extraordinary pressures on human societies, posing unprecedented threats from polluting industries, transnational crime networks, rogue states, and the actions of powerful figures in business and government.

The news media, hobbled by short attention spans and lack of resources, are even less of a match for those who would harm the public interest. Broadcast networks and major newspapers have closed foreign bureaus, cut travel budgets, and disbanded investigative teams. We are losing our eyes and ears around the world precisely when we need them most.

Our aim is to bring journalists from different countries together in teams - eliminating rivalry and promoting collaboration. Together, we aim to be the world’s best cross-border investigative team.

What we do

ICIJ projects are typically staffed by teams ranging from as few as three to as many as 100-plus reporters spread around the world. These journalists work with counterparts in other countries and with our Washington, D.C., staff to report, edit, and produce groundbreaking multimedia reports that adhere to the highest standards of fairness and accuracy.

Over the years, our teams have exposed smuggling by multinational tobacco companies and by organized crime syndicates; investigated private military cartels, asbestos companies, and climate change lobbyists; and broke new ground by publicizing details of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts.

Who we work with

To release its findings, ICIJ works with leading news organizations worldwide.  We are always open to new collaborations. Our stories have appeared in more than a dozen languages and with such partners as the BBC, including flagship program Panorama, Le Monde (France), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais (Spain), Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Le Soir (Belgium),  the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Stern (Germany), The Guardian (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), Proceso (Mexico), the Huffington Post (USA), The Age (Australia),24chasa (Bulgaria), ABC Color Digital (Paraguay), Armando.info/Ipys (Venezuela), The Asahi Shimbun (Japan), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) (Canada), Center for Investigative Reporting - Investigative Journalism Center (CIN -IJC) (Croatia), CIPER (Chile), Commonwealth Magazine (Hong Kong), El Comercio (Ecuador), El Confidencial (Spain), Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE (Finland), Fokus (Sweden), Hetq - Association of Investigative Journalists (Armenia), The Indian Express (India), Isra News Agency (Thailand), The Irish Times (Ireland), Korea Center for Investigative Journalism - Newstapa (South Korea), Kyiv Post (Ukraine), La Nación (Argentina), La Nación (Costa Rica), Le Matin Dimanche and SonntagsZeitung (Switzerland), L'Espresso (Italy), M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism (amaBhungane) (South Africa), Malaysia Kini (Malaysia), Ming Pao (Hong Kong), NDR (Germany), New Age (Bangladesh), NEWS (Austria), Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK (Norway), Novaya Gazeta (Russia), Novi Magazin (Serbia), Origo (Hungary), Pak Tribune - Pakistan News Service (Pakistan), Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (Philippines), Premium Times (Nigeria), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Azerbaijan), Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (Romania), Rustavi TV (Georgia), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Sunday Times (UK), Ta Nea (Greece), Trouw (Netherlands), The Washington Post (USA)

These unique collaborations have been honored repeatedly. Among ICIJ’s awards: George Polk Award, Overseas Press Club Award, John Oakes Award, Editor and Publisher Award, Society of Professional Journalists, KC Kulish Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award.

Outreach

In addition to ICIJ’s in-depth reporting, the consortium plays a key role in bringing together investigative journalists from around the world. ICIJ reaches thousands of followers in dozens of countries with news on the latest reporting tools and techniques via:

ICIJ staff and members regularly contribute to conferences and events around the world, sharing not just the findings of investigations but also the tools and lessons learnt along the way to help promote better understanding and best practices in collaborative journalism.

Our supporters

The ICIJ is a non-profit organization. We give our work away for free. We rely heavily on charitable foundations and on financial support from the public. Without your help, we cannot exist.

Cross-border investigative journalism is among the most expensive and riskiest in the world.

Recent ICIJ funders include: Adessium Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Fritt Ord Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Ford Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and Waterloo Foundation.

We are also very grateful for the support of the Australian philanthropist and businessman Graeme Wood.

We welcome individual donations in support of our work. You can make a gift online here. Any help, no matter how small, is most welcome.

We want to hear from you

ICIJ encourages tip-offs from the public, story ideas, as well as outstanding investigative journalists interested in collaborating with us. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas.

If you want to be considered for ICIJ membership please send us your CV and clips.

Contact us

Our Staff

Gerard Ryle

Director
Gerard Ryle leads the ICIJ’s headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., as well as overseeing the consortium’s more than 190 member journalists in more than 65 countries. Before joining as the ICIJ’s first non-American director in September 2011, Ryle spent 26 years working as a reporter, investigative reporter and editor in Australia and Ireland, including two decades at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers. He uncovered some of the biggest stories in Australian journalism, winning that country’s highest journalism award four times. He is a former deputy editor of The Canberra Times and a former Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. He is the author of a critically acclaimed book based on one of his former investigations, Firepower, and has contributed to two other books on journalism, published in the U.S. and Australia.

Marina Walker Guevara

Deputy Director
Marina Walker Guevara is ICIJ’s deputy director. A native of Argentina, she has reported from a half-dozen countries and her investigations have won and shared more than 25 national and international awards, including honors from Long Island University’s George Polk Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and the European Commission. Over a 20-year career, she has written about environmental degradation by mining companies; the global offshore economy, and the illicit tobacco trade, among other topics. Recently, she co-managed the Panama Papers investigation, one of the biggest leaks in journalistic history, which involved more than 370 reporters in 76 countries. Her stories have appeared in various international media including The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, Le Monde and the BBC. She graduated magna cum laude from Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina, with a bachelor’s degree in communication sciences, and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Michael Hudson

Senior Editor
Michael Hudson is a senior editor at ICIJ. He has been an editor and reporter at the ICIJ since 2012, working on ICIJ’s ground-breaking investigations of offshore financial secrecy and the global trade in human tissue, and leading ICIJ's World Bank investigation. He previously worked as a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, the Wall Street Journal and the Roanoke (Va.) Times and as investigative editor for Southern Exposure Magazine. His work has also appeared in Forbes, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, El País and many other publications. His two decades of reporting on mortgage and banking fraud has prompted media observers to call him the reporter “who beat the world on subprime abuses,” the “guru of all things predatory lending” and the “Woodward/Bernstein of the mortgage crisis.” His reporting has won or shared many honors, including an Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, a Sigma Delta Chi Award, two George Polk Awards, a John Hancock Award for business journalism and accolades from the National Press Club, the White House Correspondents’ Association, the American Bar Association, the New York Press Club and the New York State Society of CPAs. His most recent book, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis (Times Books, 2010), was named Baltimore City Paper Book of the Year and was called “essential reading for anyone concerned with the mortgage crisis” by Library Journal.

Sasha Chavkin

Reporter
Sasha Chavkin is a reporter for ICIJ. He was ICIJ's lead reporter for the Evicted & Abandoned investigation which revealed massive forced displacement caused by projects funded by the World Bank. He was also the lead reporter for ICIJ and Center for Public Integrity's award-winning Island of the Widows and Mystery in the Fields projects, which examined a mysterious form of kidney disease that is killing agricultural workers across continents. He has previously written for ProPublica, Columbia Journalism Review, and the New York World, an investigative website covering New York. Sasha has reported from countries including Ethiopia, South Sudan, Honduras and Sri Lanka and his work has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Sidney Hillman Foundation. He holds masters degrees from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and School of International and Public Affairs.

Mar Cabra

Editor, Data & Research Unit (Madrid, Spain)
Mar Cabra is the head of the Data & Research Unit, which produces the organization's key data work and also develops tools for better collaborative investigative journalism. She has been an ICIJ staff member since 2011, and is also a member of the network. Mar fell in love with data while being a Fulbright scholar and fellow at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in 2009/2010. Since then, she's promoted data journalism in her native Spain, co-creating the first ever masters degree on investigative reporting, data journalism and visualization and the national data journalism conference, which gathers more than 500 people every year. She previously worked in television (BBC, CCN+ and laSexta Noticias) and her work has been featured in the International Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, PBS, El País, El Mundo or El Confidencial, among others. In 2012 she received the Spanish Larra Award to the country's most promising journalist under 30. (PGP public key)

Emilia Díaz-Struck

Research Editor
Emilia Díaz-Struck is the lead researcher for ICIJ's cross-border investigations. She is a professor of journalism at the Central University of Venezuela, and also co-founded Venezuelan news website Armando.info. Emilia has been a contributor for the Washington Post, and has also written for the magazine Poder y Negocios and Venezuelan newspapers El Universal and El Mundo. She was previously the investigative reporting coordinator at the Press and Society Institute of Venezuela, and in 2012 was Reporter in Residence at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University and Connectas, a journalistic platform for the Americas. Emilia has taken part in cross-border investigations such as: ICIJ's Offshore Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks and Swiss Leaks projects; a collaboration between journalists from 5 countries that revealed the illicit trade of coltan; and a collaboration with Costa Rica's La Nación newspaper on a real estate scandal involving a former Venezuelan magistrate who fled ahead of an arrest warrant. She is a former fellow at the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano and Investigative Reporters and Editors. Among her awards is the Latin-American Prize for Thesis in Communication from the Latin American Federation of Social Communication Faculties.

Hamish Boland-Rudder

Online Editor
Hamish Boland-Rudder is ICIJ’s online editor. He spent two years running the breaking news website for The Canberra Times in Australia, which included coordinating digital coverage of elections, major sporting events, and live coverage of significant natural disasters. Hamish also instituted new digital reporting rounds for the daily newsroom, and has himself spent time as a reporter writing for The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Korea Herald, and various other publications. He studied at the University of Sydney where he was awarded the Helen Newborn Bennett prize for history, and was granted an Australia-Korea Foundation fellowship.

Rigoberto Carvajal

Data Analyst (San José, Costa Rica)
Rigoberto Carvajal is ICIJ’s data expert. He graduated from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology as a computer engineer, and has strong experience in software development and database administration and analysis. He is passionate about database technologies for business intelligence, but he discovered it can be even more rewarding to utilize all these powerful data tools in a newsroom, contributing to stories that have a global impact. Before joining ICIJ Rigo was chief analyst in the investigative unit of Costa Rica’s La Nación, where his team developed impressive data journalism projects under the guidance of award-winning data journalist Giannina Segnini. His first project for ICIJ was the data transformation of the flat Offshore Leaks database into an interactive web application which let journalists and members of the public from all around the globe explore the complex and secretive networks of the offshore world.

Matthew Caruana Galizia

Web Applications Developer (San José, Costa Rica)
Matthew Caruana Galizia is ICIJ’s web applications developer. He holds a joint postgraduate degree from the Danish School of Journalism and City University London and was a Carnegie-Knight fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. While working at FT Labs, he was a core developer on several products for the Pearson publishing group, including the FT Web App FT Tilt and the Economist web app. Prior to joining the ICIJ, he worked with an investigative data journalism team led by Giannina Segnini at La Nación, in Costa Rica.

Will Fitzgibbon

Reporter
Will Fitzgibbon is a reporter for ICIJ. In 2014, Will was ICIJ’s first Investigative Journalism Fellow. He was a reporter on ICIJ's Swiss Leaks project and heads ICIJ's Africa Desk, coordinating and expanding ICIJ's collaboration with journalists across Africa. Before coming to Washington, he worked at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in London where his work on politics, the finance industry and housing appeared in The Guardian and The Observer. He studied at the London School of Economics, Sciences-Po Paris and The Australian National University.

Cécile Schilis-Gallego

Data Journalist
Cécile Schilis-Gallego is a data journalist and researcher for ICIJ. She graduated in 2014 from Columbia Journalism School (US) and Sciences Po Journalism School (France) with a master's degree in investigative reporting. She is a 2014-2015 Brown Institute Magic Grantee, working on a investigative data project aiming at making financial statements of public companies more transparent and more accessible to journalists. She previously contributed to the French webzine Slate.fr.

Martha M. Hamilton

Editor
Martha M. Hamilton is an editor and writer for ICIJ. She was a writer, Wall Street and corporate crime editor, and personal finance columnist for The Washington Post until 2008. Since then she has worked as deputy editor for PolitiFact and written for publications including the Columbia Journalism Review and National Geographic News. She is an editor of Best Business Writing 2014.

Tom Stites

Consulting Editor
Tom Stites is an ICIJ consulting editor. In 2007 he shared a Sigma Delta Chi Award and a first place award from Investigative Reporters and Editors for his role as primary writer of "Collateral Damage: Human Rights & U.S. Military Aid Before & After 9/11," a 50,000-word ICIJ project. Newspaper positions Tom has held include national correspondent, national editor, and associate managing editor for project reporting at The Chicago Tribune; night national editor of The New York Times, and managing editor of The Kansas City Times. Reporting he has supervised has won an array of major journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize. He has held two Harvard fellowships, at Harvard Divinity School and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Advisory Committee

Bill Kovach, United States, former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and an American newspaperman for 30 years, is the North American representative and chair of the ICIJ Advisory Committee.

Kovach has been a journalist and writer for 40 years, including 18 years as a reporter and editor for The New York Times. As an editor, Kovach supervised reporting projects that won four Pulitzer Prizes, including two during his two-year tenure as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the first Pulitzers awarded to that paper in 20 years.

Kovach was a 1988-89 Nieman fellow at Harvard University and remained as curator of the Nieman Foundation journalism fellowship program until 2000.

Among his many other awards are the Sigma Delta Chi Award for contributions to journalism research in 2000, the National Mental Health Award in 1968, the New York State Bar Association Award in 1968, the AEJMC Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award in 1992, the Sigma Delta Chi First Amendment Award in 1996, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2000, and the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, which was accompanied by an honorary doctorate from Colby College.

Kovach served on Pulitzer juries from 1987-1990 and is a board member of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He is co-author of Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, and Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload.

Kovach is a long-time advisory board member of the Center for Public Integrity.

Charles Lewis, United States, is a tenured professor of journalism and founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.

He has been a national investigative journalist for more than 30 years, and is the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Lewis left a successful career as a producer for ABC News and the CBS News program 60 Minutes and began the Center, which under his 15-year leadership published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, its work honored more than 30 times by national journalism organizations.

He is the co-author of five Center books, including the bestseller, The Buying of the President 2004, and author of 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity (June 2014). He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and the PEN USA First Amendment award in 2004.

Lewis co-founded the Fund for Independence in Journalism in 2003, which he led as its president for five years, and Global Integrity in 2005.

He has been a Ferris Professor at Princeton University and a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Rosental Calmon Alves, United States/Brazil, is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the first John S. & James L. Knight Chair in International Journalism. For a decade, Alves worked as a foreign correspondent for Brazil’s daily newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, reporting from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States. He taught journalism at two Rio de Janeiro universities and in 1987-88 became the first Brazilian to be selected as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. As a correspondent and editor, he has participated in or directed several investigative reporting projects. Alves is the Latin American representative on the Advisory Committee.

Phillip Knightley, Britain, was a member of The Sunday Times' Insight team in its heyday, and it was there that he first uncovered the Kim Philby spy scandal. He later discovered that the newspaper’s executives had informed British intelligence about the activities of their journalists.

The Australian-born Knightley also played a central role in investigating and exposing thalidomide birth defects and later detailed the scandal, which came to be known as the Profumo affair, in his 1987 book An Affair of State.

The author of nine books, Knightley wrote A Hack’s Progress about his life as an investigative reporter in 1998. In 2000, Knightley released his latest book, Australia: A Biography of a Nation.

He is the European representative on the Advisory Committee.

Read Phillip Knightley's essay on how to be a great investigative reporter in ICIJ's Secrets of the Masters series.

Gwen Lister, Namibia, founded The Namibian in 1985 during apartheid colonialism in the country. The newspaper and staff were consistently targeted by right-wing elements and security forces because of the perception that the newspaper supported the liberation movement. Lister was jailed twice, in 1984 under the Official Secrets Act, and in June 1988, when she was detained without trial and denied access to a lawyer. Authorities jailed her the second time in an attempt to force her to reveal the source of a secret document she had published, which proposed sweeping new powers for the police. She was four months pregnant at the time. Attacks on the newspaper and harassment of its staff culminated in an arson attack that destroyed the offices of The Namibian in October 1988.

After independence in 1990, the newspaper was again targeted by right-wing elements after a front-page report about a possible coup attempt against the new government. The editorial offices were damaged in a phosphorous grenade firebombing. In these and other bombings, The Namibian never missed an edition.

The role of The Namibian in pre-independence Namibia has been honored by a number of international awards. In 2000, Lister was named one of 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the last half century by the International Press Institute. In 1992, she was awarded a Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award and the Press Freedom Award of the Media Institute of South Africa.

In October 2011, after 26 years at the helm of The Namibian Lister handed over the reins to Tangeni Amupadhi. At the same time she formalized the non-profit Namibia Media Trust which owns the newpaper, and appointed other Trustees. Lister is Executive Director of The Free Press of Namibia (Pty) Ltd and Chairs the Trust - in terms of which the profits of The Namibian are ploughed back into promotion of free and independent press, excellence and training in journalism in the wider media community.

Lister was a 1996 Nieman fellow at Harvard.

Goenawan Mohamad, Indonesia, is founder and editor of Tempo magazine, Indonesia's most-respected newsmagazine. It was banned by the Suharto government in 1994 after publishing details of the government’s purchase of aging East German destroyers, a confidential subject of dispute among Suharto’s cabinet members. In 1995, Mohamad founded the Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information (ISAI) which produced alternative media intended to circumvent censorship. Mohamad later formed the Alliance of Independent Journalists, the only independent journalism organization in Indonesia. Following Suharto’s resignation in May 1998, Mohamad led a group of reporters in restarting Tempo online and in print. Mohamad was a 1990 Nieman fellow at Harvard University and in 1997 received the Nieman fellows’ Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. In 1998, he was awarded the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award. Mohamad is a visiting history professor at the University of California at Berkeley this year, where he will teach courses in Indonesian and Southeast Asian culture. Mohamad is the Asian representative on the Advisory Committee.

Reginald Chua is Editor, Data and Innovation at Thomson Reuters, based in New York. From July 2009 to March 2011, he was Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post, responsible for the editorial operations of the Hong Kong-based news media company. Prior to that, he had a 16-year run at The Wall Street Journal, including as a Deputy Managing Editor in New York, where he managed the global newsroom budget, supervised the graphics team, and helped develop the paper’s computer-assisted reporting capabilities. He began a 16-year career at the Journal as a correspondent in Manila, opened the paper’s bureau in Hanoi, became the longest-serving editor of the Journal’s Hong Kong-based Asian edition, then moved to New York, where his initial duties were to manage the paper’s global newsroom budget and administration. During his eight-year tenure as editor of the Asian Journal, the paper won numerous Society of Publishers in Asia awards for editorial excellence; staff at the paper also won a Pulitzer Prize and an Overseas Press Club of America award. He also covered the Philippines for the Straits Times, worked at Reuters in Singapore, and was a television and radio journalist at the then-Singapore Broadcasting Corp. A native of Singapore, Reginald graduated with a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Brant Houston, United States, is a journalism professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he holds the John S. & James L. Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting. Houston served for more than 10 years as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a nonprofit organization of more than 4,000 members, and as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He co-founded the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2003 and is chair of the recently formed Investigative News Network. Before joining IRE, Houston was an award-winning investigative reporter for 17 years at metropolitan papers in the United States. He is author of Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide and co-author of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook. He has taught investigative reporting and computer-assisted reporting in more than a dozen countries.

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