Q&A: Marina Walker Guevara on the past and future of collaborative journalism
Marina Walker Guevara is executive editor at the Pulitzer Center, where she leads large-scale collaborative journalism investigations across borders.
Walker Guevara helped to build out the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), working there for 15 years and managing some of the most impactful collaborations ever — the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers.
We caught up with Walker Guevara to chat about how the field of collaborative journalism has transformed and where it is going next.
WF: How did you get into collaborative journalism?
MWG: My first experience was when I was a masters student at University of Missouri in 2004. I decided I wanted to do a cross-border project following the money and pollution of a lead smelting company that had done bad things in Missouri and had transferred its operations to a town in Peru.
That story challenged me to find partners. There was a reporter in Missouri who had been following the story for a long time. Instead of starting from scratch and duplicating resources, she already knew so much about the company, so it made sense to join forces with her.
I also found local journalists in Peru because I had no intention of ‘parachuting’ into the country. Even though I speak Spanish and I’m Latin American — I used to live in Argentina, a neighboring country — there were still so many cultural norms that I didn’t know.
That was my first experimentation with collaboration. It made a world of difference, both in understanding and impact, by having the expertise of people who knew the local contexts really well. After that, I decided that was the route I wanted to go. I also came across ICIJ and I was really excited that there was an entire organization fully committed and designed to foster collaboration across borders. I was ultimately given the opportunity to help build up ICIJ and I went on to become deputy director and was there for 15 years.
WF: At ICIJ, you managed huge collaborative investigations like the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. What was it like working on those projects?
MWG: We had built up to it, starting with data-driven projects and investigations involving just a few countries and reporters. This was the early days of collaboration, and we didn’t have a methodology tested and all figured out, so there was a lot of trial and error. It was a time where you still had to convince a lot of reporters and editors that collaboration is the way to go.
Before Panama Papers and the big splashy investigations, I want to honor all the smaller ones we did along the way that led to the big ones. It allowed us to show what was possible, trusting one another and seeing the benefits by joining forces and working together. It also showed us that we needed a technical infrastructure to support these collaborations in order for them to be safe. We often collaborated with reporters working in repressive societies, and we needed to have the safety consideration in mind from the beginning.
We also were starting to work in the era of big data, so we had the problem of sharing documents with one another in a way that was both efficient and inclusive, so our colleagues in all parts of the world — whether Europe or sub-Saharan Africa — had the opportunity to look at the same information. In that way, collaboration can be an equalizer. No matter whether you work at the BBC or a small outlet in Bolivia, you have access and you’re a part of what we are constructing together.
WF: What advice do you have for people that want to try a collaboration, but haven’t done one before?
MWG: Pick your partners right. That is 50% of the success. When we started in collaboration, we wanted to go for whoever had the most expertise in any given area — but we sometimes forgot that actually there are journalists that don’t want to collaborate. You have to consider the personality — can this person be a good team player? Do they have social awareness and the ability to communicate well and the empathy to put themselves in someone else’s shoes?
Also, collaborations don’t manage themselves. There should be a dedicated project manager or collaborations coach — someone who helps bring everyone together, gets them out of their rabbit holes, stays focused on the big picture, and has great organizational and leadership skills to keep the trains running on time.
WF: How do you show people that collaboration is valuable?
MWG: Everything starts and ends with a story — all of us want a great story. A story lends itself for collaboration when there’s a problem that cannot be solved by a single newsroom or reporter. If it is a global story with implications in multiple places, you want to be part of it.
If you ask me, most big investigative projects qualify for this — they are complex, involve lots of documents and data, and the trails just lead everywhere. But collaboration can be difficult. Editors are sometimes a little bit reluctant to take on this risk. What we have now that we didn’t have 15 years ago is a lot of success that we can point to — many collaborative stories have resulted in real world change and attached more visibility to all the newsrooms involved. It ends up helping everyone.
WF: What are you excited about in the field of collaborative journalism as you look forward to the future?
MWG: At the Pulitzer Center, we are creating networks that are specialized in areas of inquiry that are underreported or misreported, that necessitate this collaborative methodology. For example, we are working on climate change, specifically about rainforests, and how the criminal supply chains associated with the destruction of rainforests are cross-border, transnational enterprises that lead to the biggest markets in the world.
For these investigations, you need journalists in places like the US, Europe, Indonesia, and Brazil working together to unravel and uncover the transnational stories. We realized that journalists were working in isolation and tackling little pieces. That was an example of identifying an area that is bigger than one story, it’s a whole area of reporting, and by adding this collaborative methodology and creating a network, we can dramatically increase the impact of reporting.
We have global media outlets like the New York Times and NBC and El Pais working alongside regional outlets in the mainland forest regions of the world — they are following the money and the commodities all the way to the biggest fashion brands and car companies in the US and Europe. Even if the Pulitzer Center isn’t facilitating this work in the future, those journalists are already connected and working in a way that is so much more effective to approach the scale of stories that need to be told.
The collaborative methodology allows for a much more open, diverse, inclusive experience. If managed and approached correctly, it can help us open opportunities internationally as well as locally, pushing us to think about who’s at the table and who’s included. I am excited thinking about how collaborative journalism can help us become a more equitable industry.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
