Q&A: Drew Sullivan on how collaborative reporting can tackle crime, corruption, and threats to democracy
Drew Sullivan is co-founder and publisher of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an organization that collaborates with investigative reporters around the world to uncover crime and corruption.
Sullivan has been an investigative reporter across the US and Eastern Europe, and he’s seen democracy come under threat and helped journalists respond. With similar patterns happening in the US, and the recent loss of USAID funding to OCCRP and others, we caught up with Sullivan to hear about what’s next for global reporting collaboratives and US journalists.
WF: How did you get involved in collaborative journalism?
DS: I was a board member and employee of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), so I kind of grew up in that sphere. The death of Don Bolles, which led to the Arizona Project, was to me always a model of when journalists are at their best. They investigated the murder of a journalist and found who did it. It was an unpopular project in some places, but it was impactful. That was a model I learned when I was young, and it always stuck with me. But American journalists don’t always collaborate particularly well. When I went to Europe for the first time, I realized journalists do a lot of collaboration, and it’s more of a collaborative environment. I started thinking about this when I met a journalist from Romania named Paul Radu. I was running the Center for Investigative Reporting in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time. As we talked, I realized he was dealing with a lot of the same issues that I was and knew a lot more about them than I did. We started working on a project together about human trafficking and interviewed a trafficker together outside of Sarajevo. It was striking how much the trafficker told us he collaborated with other criminals, and we were amazed at how collaborative these criminals were. We thought that if you really wanted to report on a network, you needed to be a network. We decided to do a story together where we collaborated with regional journalists and it proved to be quite successful, as we won the first-ever Global Shining Light Award with it.
That’s when I realized the importance of collaboration. Europe contains many different countries very close together, so it can be easier to collaborate because everyone is writing in their own language, and you don’t have to worry about competition as much. I would go to conferences and tell people what stories I was doing, and they would offer to help and check on what was going on in their country. It was working in the Balkans where I really learned the beauty, power, and impact of collaboration. Today, when we hire people, we look for people who are good at collaboration, because they can leverage other people’s skills and make themselves better. It really is a specific skill you look for in a reporter. In the end, every story is better because it draws from everybody else’s work.
WF: How does the recent USAID crisis impact your organization’s funding and others doing this work around the world?
DS: The murder of USAID was incredibly disruptive, ignorant, and short-sighted. It removed overnight more than $200 million that was really supporting the global collaborative reporting space. Many organizations have seen significant cuts, even as much as 100% of their money disappear. These were organizations doing good work exposing corruption in these countries, which made everybody — including US officials — aware of corruption and organized crime. For example, Tren de Aragua would not be known if it weren’t for the news organizations writing about it. Our understanding of organized crime and corruption often comes from news organizations, and not from law enforcement or places like that. Donors have stepped in, and we’re working hard to stabilize these organizations and make sure they get enough money to survive. We lost about 38% of OCCRP funding, but we’ve probably recovered close to a third or a half of that, so we’re going to survive. But the small organizations are especially at risk, and they’re the ones with the local expertise. OCCRP only works because there are individual reporters and organizations in each of these countries that have the local expertise, good investigative skills, and can do the reporting that’s necessary for all of us to piece together this problem.
WF: What is OCCRP doing to help your organization and others move forward and find more sustainable forms of funding?
DS: A lot of this is on our shoulders. Investigative reporting should be good enough that the public wants to give you money. Even though it’s difficult, it’s also more important in places like Romania or Moldova to know what’s going on in your country. We have to be responsible for our future. We have to work towards better news products, more effective outreach and sales to the public, and make the case why people need to give us money to survive. That’s always been our focus, trying to get these journalism organizations to be supported by the public. It’s difficult because there’s no advertising in these markets. Companies wouldn’t advertise in most investigative publications because they’d lose their business with the government, and they may even get into trouble. So we have to rely on direct contributions instead, even though people are poor in many of these countries. Contributions tend to be smaller. But a lot of organizations in places like Serbia, Hungary, or Romania get more than 50% of their income from individual contributions. The process has to be improved, we have to do better A/B testing, and there’s a lot to be learned from other publications like The Guardian that have refined this down to an art. We have to learn and get better at these revenue strategies as nonprofits. There’s also a huge demographic disparity in news between older people and younger people. A lot of these audiences are quite young. What I see in Eastern Europe is that organizations like iStories, which does Russian language for a Russian audience, can get 10 million views on their videos. They get tremendous traffic and impact — there are a lot of successes out there, but it’s hard to monetize it in a consistent way, and we just need to do more work to figure that out.
WF: Have any of these funding developments changed your focus as an organization or caused you to shift coverage areas?
DS: We are not a political organization. We’re apolitical, not partisan at all. Our job is to tell the most important story that we can find on organized crime and corruption. Given that most of our funding, which is replacing the US government funding, is worldwide and can be used anywhere, we now have the ability and the money to work in the US. Obviously, there are corruption issues in the US that need to be looked at. We have a lot more freedom now, which is nice. For us, the whole thing is a hidden benefit. We’ve been somewhat stuck on US government money for a long time, because in order to grow and reach more news organizations, there’s still not a whole lot of donors. But now I think a lot more donors are coming into this space and willing to fund, and that gives us a lot more flexibility and ability to go on global stories. We’re actually looking forward to the next couple of years. It’s going to be really challenging, because I think American media is going to be pounded into submission, as media is in a lot of other places in the world. This is a playbook — I’ve watched democracy fall in about 20 countries, and I’ve had a front row seat in many of these countries. What’s happening in the US is pretty much identical to what happened in Hungary and other places. It’s a huge problem. So we’re not going to change our stories, but we’ll do more stories on the US and about what’s going on in the world, and how the US is interconnected.
WF: What are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned in your career, and where is OCCRP looking to go in the future?
DS: Despite all the journalists who are working in the world, and all the work that gets done, the most basic and important stories don’t always get told in an effective way. Investigative reporting is wonderful, but it’s got its limits. That’s why OCCRP is branching out. We’re going into film — we have a program called Floodlight where we work with filmmakers. We invite other investigative reporters to pitch films, and there’s around eight that we are moving forward right now. We’re also having our first game jam — gaming offers opportunities for real-life investigations and involves the public in finding out who’s corrupt and what they’re doing. We’re fascinated by all these topics and opportunities to bring investigative reporting to the public in new and engaging ways.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering local and collaborative media ecosystems. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. You can reach him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
