Investigative journalism requires persistence, high standards and the capacity to admit when you’ve gone down a blind alley. It’s most often complicated, slow and costly. Across a troubled industry, the commercial temptation is to retreat from it.

But every study on investigative journalism has shown its society-level return on investment is immense. It is a precondition for accountability, democracy and the rule of law.

Without it there is no capacity to uncover what’s being deliberately hidden; to illuminate systems; or hold powerful actors to account. And far fewer starting points from which civil society can push for change.

The inputs in terms of disciplines, data and skills feeding into investigations are growing. The outputs from hard news and new media to dramatic fiction are proliferating. In between these two a small dedicated corps of journalists can have a big impact.

The investigative wing of the fourth estate is costly, creative and fundamental. It’s a natural place for collaboration and one that’s inherently well suited to strategic, mission-driven nonprofits.

We review new investigation ideas at our monthly pitch meeting. All staff provide input into which investigations we choose; newsroom editors decide and manage the allocation of resources to investigations.

Here are some of the criteria we use when deciding when to take on a new investigation:

• Overall quality: Is the investigation clearly formulated, focused, and well-researched?
• Investigative: Does the story expose systemic failures or wrongdoing that would otherwise be kept hidden?
• Cross-border: Does the story impact more than one country?
• Collaboration: Does this reporting require a team?
• Innovative: Are there opportunities to break new ground by experimenting with and/or combining different reporting methodologies?
• Relevant: Does the story fit with one of our current newsrooms?
• Feasibility: Do we have the capacity required to do this investigation?
• Impact: What kinds of change could this story help create?

Lighthouse Reports is not a publishing platform.

We form coalitions of journalists and/or media organizations and lead investigations on public interest stories. Each media journalist/media organization publishes their version of the story, be it in print, via television or radio broadcast or other mediums. Lighthouse Reports makes sure that partner publications adhere to high-level standards for fact-checking and accuracy.

For each investigation, we publish on our website a short summary of the investigation’s findings along with the methodology we used.

Lighthouse Reports has reporters who specialise in data, OSINT and money trails techniques. Our technical specialists work in collaboration with reporters in our different newsrooms. This combination of subject matter and methodological expertise can lead to novel ways of approaching reporting questions in each of our “beats”.

OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence, and it refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources. Members of Lighthouse Reports’ OSINT team triangulate between various sources such as news articles, social media posts, government reports, public records, satellite imagery, and other publicly accessible information to gather data and insights for reporting.

In recent years, OSINT techniques became an essential tool in the modern journalist’s toolkit, enabling journalists to access a wealth of information that can enrich their reporting. This is particularly crucial for investigating stories in places that traditional reporters cannot easily access, like war zones or border areas.

Lighthouse is not a platform so we are not competitors to the media partners we work with.

Our investigations are open for all media partners and all formats, from international to local, we make sure that the partners aren’t competing with each other. We don’t have a membership model.

Lighthouse takes the lead in the investigations but doesn’t dictate how media partners tell the story. They know best how to reach their own audience.

Media who are involved in investigations will have to contribute in time and will share all the findings within the investigation with other team members so that everyone has access to everything.

We publish our methodologies at https://www.lighthousereports.com/methodologies/ For our data-driven investigations, we strive for transparency and reproducibility and so for more ambitious investigations, the methodology will be quite exhaustive and somewhat dense. Whereas for more data light investigations, the methodology is designed to be quite accessible to investigative journalists who are curious about trying their hand at some of the topics and tools we have covered.