International Consortium Adds 41 Investigative Journalists

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The Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has added 41 new members to its roster, expanding the network’s reach to 158 news professionals working on an array of media platforms in 61 countries. ICIJ is a global network of reporters who collaborate on in-depth, cross-border stories and is a project of the Center for Public Integrity.

The new members are reporters, editors and journalism entrepreneurs in 28 countries on five continents. They bring a new wave of talent to the world’s oldest global network of investigative journalists — from cutting-edge computer-assisted reporting to multi-media skills. They also represent new business models and non-profit investigative centers that today are diversifying the media landscape from South Africa to Latvia.

“These additions to ICIJ mark the ambitious expansion of an already stellar team of journalists,” said ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle. “It is notable that in this group of dedicated professionals are courageous women and men who’ve helped investigate and explain some of the most important events and issues of our time, from the repressive regimes that led to the Arab Spring uprisings to the inner-workings of multi-national drug cartels. This is experience and ability that will invigorate our plans for cross-border investigations with global impact.”

The new ICIJ members are:

  • Theophilus Abbah (Nigeria) editor of the Abuja-based daily Sunday Trust
  •  Hisham Allam (Egypt) chief deputy of investigations at the Cairo-based independent daily Almasry Alyoum
  •  Roman Anin (Russia) investigative reporter for the Moscow-based Novaya Gazeta
  • Justin Arenstein (South Africa) investigations editor at the African Eye News Service
  •  Fabrice Arfi (France) investigative journalist at Mediapart
  • Walid Batrawi (Palestine) deputy chief for Internews Network in Palestine
  • Sven Bergman (Sweden) freelance investigative reporter and producer of current affairs program “Uppdrag Granskning” on Swedish Public Broadcasting 
  • Tamás Bodoky (Hungary) editor-in-chief of atlatszo.hu, a watchdog organization
  • Inga Springe (Latvia) founder and director of the Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism
  •  Stefaans Brümmer (South Africa) managing partner at the Mail & Guardian Centre for Investigative Journalism
  •  Neil Chenoweth (Australia) senior writer at the Australian Financial Review
  •  Emilia Díaz-Struck (Venezuela) investigative journalism coordinator at the Press and Society Institute of Venezuela
  • Alexenia Dimitrova (Bulgaria) reporter for the daily 24 Chasa – 24 Hours
  •  Steven Dudley (United Sates) co-director of InSight Crime, a nonprofit investigative news organization focused on organized crime in Latin America
  • Joachim Dyfvermark (Sweden) investigative reporter and producer for the current affairs program “Uppdrag Granskning”  on Swedish Public Broadcasting
  •  Elena Egawhary (Britain) freelance investigative journalist
  •  Bissane El- Cheikh (Lebanon) Beirut-based reporter for the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper
  • Mónica González (Chile) founder and executive director of Chile’s Centro de Investigación e Información Periodística (CIPER), a nonprofit investigative journalism center
  • Ola Haram (Norway) freelance investigative journalist based in Oslo
  • Paola Hurtado (Guatemala) chief of the investigative reporting team at elPeriódico in Guatemala
  •  Milorad Ivanovic (Serbia) executive editor of the weekly magazine Novi
  • Karl Laske (France) investigative reporter for Mediapart
  • Andrew McIntosh (Canada-USA) Investigations editor for QMI News Agency
  •  Musikilu Mojeed (Nigeria) managing editor of the country’s only online newspaper, Premium Times
  • Mihai Munteanu (Romania) reporter-at-large for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and co-founder of the Romanian Investigative Structure for E-journalism Project (RISE)
  • Syed Nazakat (India) principal correspondent at the magazine The Week
  •  Adrian Mogoş (Romania) head of investigations at the Bucharest daily newspaper Jurnalul Nationa
  • Jenny Nordberg (Sweden) U.S. and foreign affairs columnist for the Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet
  • Angelina Nunes  (Brazil) assistant editor at O Globo newspaper
  • Toshihiro Okuyama  (Japan)  reporter for Asahi Shimbun newspaper
  •  Alfredo Quijano Hernández (Mexico) chief of the special investigations unit and news editor of the newspaper El Norte de Ciudad Juárez
  • Rob Rose (South Africa) investigative reporter for South Africa´s Sunday Times
  • Rana Sabbagh (Jordan) executive director of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
  • Sam Sole (South Africa) managing partner at the Mail & Guardian Centre for Investigative Journalism
  • Serena Tinari (Switzerland) investigative reporter with RSI, the Swiss-italian public broadcaster
  • Jeroen Trommelen (Netherlands) investigative journalist with the Dutch daily newspaper de Volkskrant
  • Stanimir Kumurdjiev (also known as Stanimir Vaglenov) (Bulgaria) head of the department of information and online services in Media Group Bulgaria
  • Frédéric Zalac (Canada) national television documentary reporter for CBC/Radio-Canada
  • Ali Zalat (Egypt) deputy investigations editor at the Cairo-based independent daily Almasry Alyoum
  •  Blaž Zgaga (Slovenia) freelance investigative journalist and co-author of the trilogy “In the Name of the State”
  • Aurore Gorius  (France) a freelance reporter and a professor of investigative journalism at the European Institute of Journalism in Paris

With financial support from international foundations, ICIJ brings together journalists from around the world to investigate cross-border crime, corruption and other issues of regional and global importance. To release its findings, ICIJ partners with leading news organizations worldwide. Recent investigations have been published with BBC World Service and BBC World TV, Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Le Soir (Belgium), Novaya Gazeta (Russia), the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia).

ICIJ’s work has been recognized by numerous journalism awards. Most recently, “Dangers in the Dust: Inside the Global Asbestos Trade,” won Columbia University’s 2011 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and a medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors. “Looting the Seas” won the 2011 Overseas Press Club’s Whitman Bassow Award for reporting on international environmental issues as well as the 2011 Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Tom Renner Award.

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.

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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