Speaker 1: Let me tell you a story about this woman. This woman is Ida, Ida Tarbell. It's the 19th century and Ida is an American journalist working on an investigation into one of the biggest corporations in the world, an investigation into the Standard Oil Company. It is a company that dominated at that time the oil market in the US and she had the idea that this company might play dirty and that there might be something wrong with it because they were so dominating and they were making so much money. The company owner was John D. Rockefeller and the Rockefeller family are a really well-known name by now also because of this company. They got insanely rich by working in the business and she spent days, weeks, months, in the end years uncovering facts about this company and she was able to prove that they were bribing officials, fixing prices, using industrial espionage, trying to cut out the other companies at any cost pretty much. And she was able to back it up to have the evidence. She published a multi-part series in one of the biggest magazines at that time, McClure is the name. She also published a book that's called The History of the Standard Oil Company and because the book was so good and her work was so thorough, she actually was able to provide so much evidence that the US government took on her book and her investigation, did their own investigation and in the end broke up the Standard Oil Company. They broke it up, they said it's a monopolist and they are threatening and taking money from the American citizens actually. And so her work over years had real world impact and helped everyone in the US. And I think it's a really good example still today how investigative journalism can achieve something great for the society, for every one of us. And I think we need that kind of journalism even more today. We have lots of things that are problematic in our society and lots of things that are threatening the well-being of lots of people in our society. So you have, as they had back then, big corporations that sometimes take more than they should take. You can see digitally like Facebook, Amazon, Google, you can see it in the traditional markets, Volkswagen, Walmart, big banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, you had the big financial crisis. There are lots of things that need to be researched, investigated and that need to come to light so that citizens can make an informed decision and government can act on it and punish people who are overstepping their boundaries. So what is investigative journalism and why is it different from normal journalism that you would see day to day in every paper on every website? There are five points pretty much that are important to understand if you talk about investigative journalism. First one is the reporter who is doing investigative journalism has an active role. He's not just there getting information from someone, being fed and then publishing it like PR would do it. He's himself or herself trying to get new information and trying to find his own angle and his own information. The new information is another aspect that's important. He or she is publishing something that has not been covered yet. He's not just writing something up that has been published in a scientific paper or something that someone has talked about a year ago and now has a new angle to it or something. He's really trying to find new information. The third point is that investigative journalists are looking into structural problems, systemic issues that affect lots of people. So when we, in my office that I'm talking about later on, try to start a new topic, we always look at how many people are affected and how badly are they affected. The more people there are and the more they are hurt, the more likely it is we take on the subject. The fourth thing is that investigative journalists need to provide evidence because normally they're attacking someone, someone who's doing something bad, and they want to change something and this someone obviously tries to defend himself. If you don't have your facts straight and if you don't have evidence that if necessary can back up your claims in court, you have a problem. This is hard work that you need to do before you can even publish something. The fifth point is that investigative journalism is something that overcomes obstacles. Normally something only counts as investigative if you had to work for it really hard. For example, overcame like threatening lawyers or government that doesn't want to release something that you're supposed to get or something like that. So these are the main important points about investigative journalism. And to make it a little bit more understandable, I have two more things, two more examples that people might know of, maybe better than Ida Tabel because Ida is dead for 72 years now. This one, probably most of us know is the Watergate scandal, beginning of the 70s, two reporters from the Washington Post investigated Nixon and he in the end resigned and they made a film out of it, All the President's Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It's a really good film. And that leads me to another one. That's another film that's more recent. Last year, I think, at the Oscars, Spotlight won pretty big. It's based on an investigation, Pulitzer Prize winning as it says, from the Boston Globe that researched systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in the Boston area. And then even bigger, the story got bigger and bigger after they published American White and Worldwide. And these two movies, All the President's Men and Spotlight are depicting investigative journalism pretty well, actually. They are entertaining. I really like them just for fun. But they're also really good because they are realistic. Like if you watch these movies, what these people do, this is actually what investigative journalists do. So I really like these two movies. I think they're the best movies on journalism that are out there. What these also show, these examples, is that investigative journalism is not just the watch dog that you might have heard being described, like the dog that bites someone who's trespassing, who's coming into an area that he shouldn't be in. It's also some kind of disinfectant. It's kind of the scarecrow in the middle of the field with its tinkling, scaring the crows away so they don't pick the seed. So the more investigative journalism there is, the more people feel kind of scared to do bad things because they might get caught by investigative journalists. Transparency International actually did a study. They asked 3,000 companies in 30 countries, I think four years back at worst, what they think is the best solution, the best thing to do if you want to have a country that's not corrupt. And you might have guessed it by now, the solution is investigative journalism. Most of the companies actually said investigative journalism is more important than all the other solutions you might think of, like strict compliance rules or better civic society things or better government or something. Investigative journalism is one of the things that they named the most. Actually, the thing they named the most by far. You can even, if you want to, put a number on the effect that investigative journalism has on society, a macroeconomic value, if you want to. It's a little bit stretched, but someone, James T. Hamilton, a professor from Stanford, tried to do that. He crunched a lot of numbers, did the economics of investigative journalism. It's a new book, came out last year. He calculated, for example, for special investigations, how much they contributed to society and how much they cost the newspaper, for example, to do it. So he had one example of the Washington Post investigating deadly police force, how many people got shot by police, and they found out that the police was doing something wrong, and after they published it, the police changed it, and after that, they could show that way less people got shot than before. And he talked to insurance companies and tried to figure out how much is every life worth. There's a number you can put on that, at least insurance companies do that, and then he calculated that, and in the end, he could show that every dollar the Washington Post put into the investigations saved society $140. So in the macroeconomic view, investigative journalism is really worth spending on. The problem is, for the microeconomic view, it's really hard to finance it, because investigative journalism is really expensive. As you can see in the examples that I had, but also when my colleagues and I do work, we often spend weeks, months, sometimes even years on an investigation, and we publish it, and sure, people read it, and people like it, and maybe someone buys a few more newspapers and has a few more clicks, but you can never, ever get the money back that you spent the last 18 months or something on this investigation, especially if lots of other articles that you publish on the internet are way easier to produce and get probably even more clicks. If you have some great interview with a soccer star or some photo shoots from a prominent person, they're easy to do. They take a few hours, maybe a few days, and then you get lots of clicks. Investigative journalism is different. Plus, lots of us, at least in my case, I don't subscribe to any newspaper anymore. I get lots of my news from the web. I do support journalism. I do give donations sometimes. I do buy newspapers. I also pay for non-fiction books and something, but in general, I get lots of news on the internet through Facebook or Twitter, and that's a problem, because obviously, no money ends up in the journalist's bank account, and I need to eat as well and feed my family, so it's hard to do investigative journalism then. And some of the people involved in investigative journalism thought, what can we do now? This is a problem that gets deeper and deeper. It gets worse and worse every year. In the US, you have lots of newspapers already being closed. In Germany, it starts as well. Maybe we can do something that's donation-based. Maybe we can do something where we can pitch people to voluntarily give money for investigative journalism and then see what we can do with that, and that's actually what we did. We, four years ago, sat together, a few colleagues of mine and I, and thought about what can we do, how can we pitch investigative journalism, have a new pitch for it, have people be convinced to give money, and came up with the idea of corrective.org. There are a few outlets that do the same in different countries. In America, especially, there are a lot of outfits being non-profit and investigative newsrooms that work for the society and being funded by foundations and individual donors. And that's what we did as well with corrective.org. But before I get into the work at corrective.org a little bit deeper, I want to explain to you why I'm here and why I got into journalism at all. Like, why do I talk to you about investigative journalism? So, I'm from a rural region in the west of Germany. It's called Münsterland. That's where I'm from. It's from a small town. My dad is a car mechanic. My mom is an office clerk. And I'm the first one in our family to ever go to university. I have never known any journalist before I, myself, went into journalism. I'm not from an academic background or a finance background or anything like that. I'm from a typical working class family. And I think that's a good thing to get into investigative journalism from that point of view because every time I'm around people who have a lot of money or have a lot of power, I always feel a little bit unease. I'm not really comfortable around them. I always think, like, I'm kind of the person standing in the corner observing everything but not really being part of the group, being part of their kind of people. I think that helps me being this outsider, having this outside view, finding, seeing problems maybe earlier than someone who's used to be around these people. I actually got into journalism because I was a paperboy distributing the newspaper in our neighborhood, the free ad newspaper, twice a week and dragged it from home to home and put it into the mailbox. And then sometime around, I think I was 14 or 15, a friend of mine told me, why are you dragging these newspapers from door to door? You can write for the newspaper. It's way better. You get way more money. So I got into journalism because of money. That changed over time. Now I have values. I actually do it to do something about problems in the world and change society. But that's how I started. Then I went to university, University of Dortmund here in Germany. At age 24, I joined an investigative unit at a regional paper and did some nice stories. But I thought that's not everything. I should try to get better. And as you obviously all know, because you're here on a Saturday, learning never stops. You always try to get new ideas. So I decided to go where investigative journalism has a big tradition, has lots of great stories to tell, has lots of great teachers. All the three examples we had in the beginning were from the US. So I decided to go to the US. And in 2013, actually, briefly after my wedding, I boarded a plane to New York City. And joined the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. It's in New York at Columbia Journalism School. And together with 15 other people from eight countries, they were all nuts about investigative journalism. I learned about investigative journalism for a year, tried to fill the holes I had in my reporting, and pushed myself and my colleagues like 14, 16, 18 hours a day for a year. And that was really worthwhile because the people who are teaching there are really good. There are legends among journalists. Private detectives taught about their methods as well. So it was a good year. And actually, one day before I came back from New York, we launched corrective.org in Germany. So we had been planning it all the time. And then all the while I was in New York, we were developing it. And one day before I came back, we started. So what did we do at corrective.org? We are now two and a half years in. We are about 20 reporters, data journalists, about more or less 20 people. And we did some investigations like, for example, this one. This is an investigation into the payments that big pharmaceutical companies pay to doctors. So we scraped all the payments that were released at dubious websites over the internet and put a database on our website where people, you now could type in your doctor, if you have a doctor in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria, and see if he got money from big pharmaceutical companies, when he got it, what for, how much. So you can try to find out if he has a conflict of interest. Another story is that we investigated the German, more than 400 German savings banks, Sparkassen, as they are called in Germany. And we compared their transparency reports, the annual reports. We had help from several hundred citizens. We had a tool built called Crowd Newsroom, where citizens were able to put in effort and help us during the investigation. And we found out, for example, that lots of heads of directors of these savings banks earned more money than they were supposed to earn from government regulation. We also looked into the nursing home industry. We talked to hundreds of people in the nursing home industry, went undercover in several nursing homes. We scraped lots of data and documents. And in the end, I wrote my first non-fiction book about it. And yeah, I had a good insight into what the problems are in Germany, Germans' elderly care. And I think that this is, the work we have done up to now is a proof of concept. I think after two and a half years, I can say that it worked. We have several foundations supporting us. We have more than 2,000 members giving us a monthly membership fee, supporting us because they want to. They can read our work on the internet, but they want to help us do our work. I think that's really great. I also think that this is something that should be done more often. So I think, especially in these times where you have all these more and more hostile governments towards journalism, more and more populism around, more and more anti-social movements that try to put themselves first and not society first. But I think it's also important to support journalism not only financially, but also with your insight. So I want to suggest to you that you talk to journalists. Journalists are just people like you and me, obviously like me, but also like you, because they just want you to know what's going on. They want to know where the problems are. And the more people talk to journalists about their problems, about stuff that they observe, it doesn't have to happen to themselves. They can see something at work or in their social lives. And I think it's really important that people talk more to journalists and support their work. So if you see something, say something, as they say. Also leak something, if you can leak something. Good journalists work with secure email encryption, TGP. They have secure drop boxes. We have that, for example. You can also do it like traditional way, old school style. Send an envelope to a newsroom, be it the New York Times, or your local paper, or BuzzFeed, or Corrective.org. I don't care. I don't want to convince you to become all a member of Corrective.org, although that would make my work way more easy if you all became a member of Corrective.org. But you can also support other journalists. And I think that's really important that we embrace it. Because in spite of these darkening times, and the rise of populism, and more and more hate, I truly believe that we can make investigative journalism ours again. Thank you.