Brian Fitzpatrick joins the Investigative Journalism Bureau as a senior editor, bringing a decade’s worth of investigative experience to the newsroom.
In Canada, Fitzpatrick worked at the Toronto Star before taking up roles with Postmedia, first in Saskatchewan and then at the National Post in Toronto, where he latterly served as deputy news editor.
In early 2020, he moved to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global investigative reporting group which coordinates a network of investigative member centres, providing them with technology, editing and fact-checking, security support, and reporting assistance.
With OCCRP, where he held the roles of core editor and senior investigative reporter, he worked on landmark collaborative projects such as Suisse Secrets, Passports of the Caribbean, the Narco Files, the Russian Asset Tracker, as well as the Pandora Papers led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In recent years, he has worked with journalists in numerous countries to coordinate, edit and report deep-dive investigations into issues like transnational crime, financial fraud and healthcare swindles. He has also investigated mafia infiltration in the Canadian banking and property sectors, the deadly aftermath of the Colombian peace process, and gang and paramilitary activity in Haiti.
Fitzpatrick’s firm belief in collaborative reporting brought him to the IJB. In an industry that often seems focused on competition and exclusivity, he sees collaboration as the most viable way forward. After nearly five years with OCCRP, he says it wasn’t a single story that brought him back to work full-time in Canada, but the chance to keep contributing to this kind of journalism.
“The investigative and journalism work the IJB has been doing, and the impact it has had in just a few years, speaks for itself,” he says. “It has quickly become the go-to group for investigative collaborations in Canada, and when you see the team working at close quarters you understand why. I’m excited to get started and share some of my own project experiences, ideas and learnings.”
For Fitzpatrick, working within a team is second nature.
“I can’t remember the last time I worked on a story that wasn’t a collaboration,” he says. “The best journalism I’ve been a part of has come when people throw their personal competitive streaks out the window and focus on trying to get to a deeper version of the truth, together.”
He believes there’s room for Canadian outlets to do more cross-organization and cross-border collaborative investigations.
“The North Americans are still some way behind Europe, where this model has been adopted by hundreds of amazing reporters who have almost formed a continental ‘club’ of investigators who produce amazing journalistic results.”
He feels the IJB’s model, which is already winning Canadian media awards, offers a much-needed roadmap.
“On this side of the Atlantic, we’re all facing the same resource crunches, the same funding issues, the same technological shifts. My outlook would always be: how can we find new partners, find new experts, expand our abilities and build structures that make collaboration the default, not the exception?”
“There’s no reason a newsroom in Toronto shouldn’t be working with one in Montreal, one in San Francisco and one in Mexico City to trace the supply chain being used by, say, an organized crime group or a fraud ring,” he says.
“The issues we’re all reporting on – whether it’s healthcare fraud, mafias, drug trafficking or environmental exploitation – don’t respect provincial or national borders. The journalism doesn’t need to, either.”
The Investigative Journalism Bureau is a non-profit, impact-driven newsroom telling deeply-reported stories in the public interest.
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