Collaboration as an essential element of investigative journalism

The Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) is a non-profit association based in Costa Rica, with a Latin American team that conducts and coordinates collaborative cross-border journalistic investigations and makes its technological innovations available to journalism in the region.

Pablo Medina Uribe, disinformation investigations editor at CLIP, explains that a major element of their investigative journalism work is forming alliances transnationally, to investigate and understand topics that are relevant across multiple countries. 

This then allows for them to amplify the work of their partners and to “be able to investigate things that perhaps we could not investigate on our own.”

“We do trainings for journalists – mainly on how to investigate better. We do it in several topics, sometimes in corporate research, sometimes in international market research, sometimes in digital research, sometimes in open source digital research and a little bit more, depending on the experience we have accumulated in the research we have done.” 

 “…And we try to create [a] community where you find journalists, members of civil society and citizens interested in some of those issues where we can discuss better not only how to cover those issues, but what issues are important and how you can make alliances beyond journalism to address those issues.

Uribe explains that their collaborative and community focused approach allows them to better see how issues are interconnected –  for instance, they can see parallels in disinformation around mining issues, carbon emissions and corporate corruption. By connecting civil society organizations working on carbon as well as disinformation, new connections and strategies emerge. 

The collaborative investigative journalism project Mercenarios Digitales, for example, coordinated by CLIP, involved alliances between media organizations from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain, the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. 

In gathering evidence on an international network of disinformation actors operating in the region, the investigation was able to reveal how political marketing companies are linked to the far right.