Managing 14 reporters in 10 far-flung countries

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Winter 2009 by Kaplan, David E

Insights from the Tobacco Underground project

In a world that's increasingly globalized, the crooks cross borders, transfer money and shift identities with ease, while the cops and reporters too often are several steps behind. Few journalism organizations can field the resources to take on sophisticated multinational targets. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was created for precisely this purpose - to provide an institutional base for complex cross-border investigations.

IClJ is a network of 100 leading investigative journalists in 50 countries whose members come together to work on specific projects. Let me emphasize the word network. We are linked together by cell phones, e-mail and occasional newsletters and conferences - and not much more. Two editors - myself and Marina Walker Guevara - oversee the consortium from Washington, D.C.

ICIJ was formed in 1997 and is the brainchild of Charles Lewis, founder of the parent Center for Public Integrity. (Lewis is now at American University's innovative Investigative Reporting Workshop.) The center had distinguished itself with hundreds of hardhitting, albeit mostly domestic, investigative reports, and Lewis saw the need to expand the center's style of watchdog journalism overseas. In a world of Internet access and open borders, ICIJ seemed like an idea whose time had come. Here was a nonprofit group that could link together top-notch journalists from Moscow and Manila, London and Lagos.

I joined ICIJ in 1999 and served for years as the group's liaison with IRE. Before becoming ICIJ's third director in April 2008, I'd watched in admiration as the network had taken on the international arms industry, U.S. foreign aid to human rights abusers, and, most ambitiously, the tobacco industry. Starting in 2000, ICIJ launched a groundbreaking series of investigations that exposed how big tobacco companies worked with organized crime to smuggle cigarettes around the world. Under the leadership of then-ICIJ director Maud Beelman (now still fighting the good fight as projects editor of The Dallas Morning News), ICIJ fielded a six-country team that pored through thousands of internal industry documents made public through litigation against tobacco companies in the 1 990s. The group combined that research with dogged reporting and pieced together how smuggling played a key role in Big Tobacco's strategy to boost sales and increase market share. Those revelations - and others that followed - helped prompt lawsuits and government inquiries and forced big tobacco companies to curtail their involvement in smuggling.

By 2008, however, much had changed. Once dominated by Western multinational companies, cigarette smuggling is as big as ever, but with new players, new routes and new techniques. Today, this multibillion-dollar underground industry includes everything from Chinese counterfeiters to Russian-owned factories and American Indian smoke shops. In Canada alone, the involvement of criminal gangs and Indian tribes pushed seizures of contraband tobacco up 1 6-fold between 2001 and 2006. So lucrative is the business that tobacco is the world's most widely smuggled licit substance - and its impact remains high. The illicit trafficking of tobacco fuels organized crime and corruption, robs governments of needed tax money and spurs addiction to a deadly product.

In early 2008, ICIJ received a grant from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to revisit the illicit trade, and in May our team began work on the project we dubbed "Tobacco Underground." We assembled a new team, including veterans of the previous investigation; eventually, our ranks encompassed 14 reporters based in 1 0 countries. This time we also reached outside ICIJ to work with journalists overseas with expertise in covering organized crime and the tobacco industry, including the Bosnian Center for Investigative Reporting and Russia's muckraking weekly Novaya Gazeta.

The challenges in crafting such a multinational investigation are many, but the payoff can be huge. Here's a quick rundown:

Marshaling resources

Like other investigative reporting nonprofits, ICIJ and the Center for Public Integrity raise money from foundations and other donors to fund long-term projects. Although good international reporting can be done on the fly, this kind of systematic investigation needs a dedicated staff, plenty of travel money and significant contract payments to reporters in other countries.

For "Tobacco Underground," that has meant a budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Still, our spending is modest compared to what mainstream media routinely shell out to cover presidential elections or the Iraq War (or buy photos of Angelina Jolie's twins, for which People magazine and a British tabloid reportedly paid $14 millior). At a time when the news media are closing foreign bureaus, ICIJ's brand of network-based, projectoriented reporting may prove increasingly cost-effective.

Dealing with culture, language