Every day, our reporters and researchers pound the pavement, dig through troves of documents, analyze massive databases and ask tough questions in order to unearth important truths in the public interest.
The Investigators turns the spotlight on them, asking them to share what drives them, what challenges them and why they choose the difficult work of investigative reporting.
Brian Fitzpatrick is a senior editor at the IJB. Previously he worked at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global investigative reporting non-profit.
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Q: Investigative journalism is a challenging choice for a reporter. It’s typically slow, adversarial, legally sensitive and, in some cases, risky. What drew you to this kind of work and what keeps you doing it?
For me it happened pretty organically. I was drawn early on to how things like organized crime and dark money affect people and communities. As my career progressed, those issues became a large part of my focus, and I was lucky to find organizations that offered space for investigative work.
Yes, it’s often slow, but time can be the most valuable thing we have, because you get the chance to properly get under the hood of an issue. And yes, the stories can be adversarial. We call it the “pointy” end of the business, because you’re often asking really difficult questions of people and institutions that may not want to answer them. But it’s a privilege to work with hugely collaborative, global networks of reporters day to day. It’s an ongoing education.
Q: Is there a particular story or source that has stuck with you long after you published?
Too many to pick one. We often cover issues that bring with them a heavy atmosphere of fear or trepidation or intimidation. That’s a recurring theme. It could be someone who has information on a financial scam who leaks you some documents, but fears retribution for doing so. Or it could be someone living under an armed group that dominates their local area, but they want to share what life is like under those conditions.
Many people show great courage to tell their stories and let the public know what’s really going on. I often think about the bravery something like that can take, and the responsibility that’s on us to help them do it safely and responsibly.
Q: When you think back on the stories you’ve done, are there moments when you felt you hit the wall? What are some of the biggest professional challenges you’ve faced?
Hitting the wall is almost a constant thing. The attrition rate between story ideas or tips that work out, and those that don’t, is very high. We can spend months working on things that go nowhere. For example, something might not end up being quite as a source described it. Or maybe you, or your collaborative network, can’t quite gather the necessary skills to crack a reporting problem.
Or maybe the “time” has just not yet arrived. That one might sound strange, but you often find that the same set of facts, or documents, might not be a story right now, but could be a story five years from now. If you wait long enough, sometimes other events let a clearer picture come into focus. That’s why we rarely throw away any lead entirely. We continually re-check things.
Q: How would you characterize your journalistic mission? What do you want to look back on decades from now?
I wouldn’t say I have any mission beyond doing the best work possible. I’m grateful that the IJB lets us all do that. Hopefully I can share some lessons and be a good colleague to the team here along the way. What I’ll look back on is the community of reporters I’ve met who are striving to make the world just a small bit better.
Journalists are often considered to be cut-throat among each other. Instead, what I’ve found in the investigative space are world-renowned people who couldn’t be more generous in their collaborative spirit. Many of them face hardships and threats that we can’t imagine, and their commitment is something the rest of us, as a group, need to try to do justice.
Q. Investigative reporting in Canada is shrinking. Most news outlets no longer have dedicated investigative positions so there are fewer reporters given the time and resources to do in-depth stories that take weeks or months to complete. What is the case for doing this kind of journalism?
The main case for doing it is that this type of work can unearth critical issues that the public should know about. It pains me to see excellent reporters who don’t have the time or resources to do the work they would love to do. This work is very expensive. It comes with risk. And the subjects — many of them wealthy and powerful — are often highly litigious. Those are among the key reasons investigative reporting has been under pressure; many parts of it can make organizations, and would-be donors, think it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Like other journalism, it’s also suffered in a world light on attention but heavy on partisan interpretations of fact-based reporting.
But I’m heartened that there are incredible groups of reporters working together, globally, to produce crucial work. On any day, we might be trying to find Canadian court files to help a reporter in Serbia. Someone else might be helping us to find a tax document in Spain. Every year, the slate of global journalism collaborations continues to amaze me, and it’s that collective spirit that keeps things moving. We at the IJB are very lucky to be a part of that ecosystem.
The Investigative Journalism Bureau is a non-profit, impact-driven newsroom telling deeply-reported stories in the public interest.
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