Investigative Journalism: How a Tip Becomes a Story That Holds

In January 2002 the Boston Globe published a story about a single priest, John Geoghan, who had been moved between parishes despite complaints about him. The paper had spent months in court getting sealed documents opened, and months more checking them. Within a year the Archbishop of Boston had resigned and the story had become a worldwide reckoning with how institutions protect themselves.

That arc, a tip, a long grind, a story that holds up under attack, is what separates investigative journalism from a scoop. A scoop is first. An investigation is proved: someone is accused of something serious, and the evidence is laid out so that a hostile reader, a lawyer and a court can all examine it. This piece takes real, well-documented cases and shows the method. It is descriptive: how newsrooms work, not legal advice and not a guide to anything risky.

The shape of an investigation

Every serious investigation goes through roughly the same stages, whatever the country or the subject. The names differ between newsrooms, but the logic is constant: you begin with a sentence you can disprove, collect more evidence than you need, and stop only when each claim can survive a cross-examination.

Hunter's Story-Based Inquiry, the manual UNESCO published in 2009 for reporters in many countries, makes the first move explicit: start with a hypothesis, a plain statement of what you think happened, then plan the work as a search for evidence that would confirm or kill it. A reporter who only collects what supports the idea has not investigated.

Without JavaScript: tip, hypothesis, gather, corroborate, reply, legal review, publish, follow up.

Evidence: two sources, or one document you can check

The Watergate reporting is the best-known American case. On 17 June 1972 five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's offices in Washington. Two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with editor Ben Bradlee, followed the money from the burglars to President Nixon's re-election campaign. A government source they called "Deep Throat" was identified in 2005 as Mark Felt, then the FBI's deputy director.

The honest version has several parts. The Post's work kept the story alive, won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and was not infallible: an October 1972 story about a grand jury and a White House aide overstated what a source had said, and the administration used the error to attack the paper. The consequences came from elsewhere: a judge, John Sirica, who pressed the burglars; a Senate committee whose 1973 hearings revealed the existence of White House tape recordings; and the Supreme Court's 8–0 order of 24 July 1974 that Nixon hand them over. He resigned on 9 August 1974. Journalism supplied evidence and attention. Institutions supplied the penalty.

In 1971 the New York Times and then the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, a secret 47-volume history of the Vietnam War of about 7,000 pages that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had commissioned in 1967. Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on it, copied it and gave it to reporters; the Times began publishing on 13 June 1971. The government won a temporary injunction, a rare prior restraint on a newspaper, and the Supreme Court lifted it on 30 June in New York Times Co. v. United States (6–3). Ellsberg and his colleague Anthony Russo were prosecuted, and the case was dismissed in 1973 because of government misconduct. The lesson for method: the document was real and the paper checked it, yet the real fight was legal.

That is why the bar is high. A common newsroom rule is that a serious claim needs either a document you can authenticate plus a person who can explain it, or two independent human sources. A single anonymous source is a lead. The board below uses that rule on an invented story.

Without JavaScript: a claim needs a checked document plus a person who can explain it, or two documents. A single anonymous email is a lead. Claims about named people also need their reply.

Follow the money: ownership and the Panama Papers

A great many investigations come down to one question: who really owns this? Companies can own companies, and a chain of "holding companies" in different countries can hide the person at the end. The effective share is the product of the shares in each link, and control is a different thing.

Without JavaScript: with four links of 70%, your effective share is about 24%, below a 25% disclosure line, but you control every company in the chain because 70% is more than half at each step.

The Panama Papers showed how this works at scale. In 2015 an anonymous source, calling themself "John Doe", gave the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung about 11.5 million documents (2.6 terabytes) from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama law firm that created offshore companies. The paper brought in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), founded in 1997, and journalists in about 80 countries worked on the files for a year. They began publishing on 3 April 2016. Iceland's prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, resigned on 5 April after the files linked him to an offshore company; the firm closed in 2018; and the project shared the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Holding an offshore company is often legal. The story was about secrecy, tax avoidance and who benefits, and where the use was improper, the evidence had to say so.

Many newsrooms, one story: leaks, networks and Lava Jato

A data leak of millions of files cannot be read by one newsroom, and the people with the most to lose can sue or threaten in the place the paper is based. So investigative journalists now share. ICIJ's networks led to the Paradise Papers (2017) and the Pandora Papers (2021). Africa has produced its own: the Luanda Leaks (January 2020, about 715,000 files on the finances of Angola's Isabel dos Santos, with the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa) and the South African GuptaLeaks (2017, a large cache of emails published by amaBhungane and Daily Maverick), which fed the public inquiry into "state capture". In Ghana, Anas Aremeyaw Anas's undercover team filmed football officials taking cash in "Number 12" (2018); his methods are debated by press-ethics scholars, and a colleague, Ahmed Hussein-Suale, was shot dead in January 2019.

In Brazil, Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) began in March 2014 as a police investigation into money laundering and grew into one of the largest corruption cases in history, centred on the oil company Petrobras and contractors including Odebrecht, which admitted bribing officials in twelve countries across the Americas and Africa. Here the press was often a recipient: reporters published leaked plea statements and police files. In 2019 The Intercept Brasil published leaked chat messages that, in its reading, showed the judge, Sergio Moro, advising prosecutors; Moro and the prosecutors disputed what they showed. In 2021 Brazil's Supreme Court annulled Lula's convictions on jurisdiction grounds and a panel later found Moro had been partial. That chain shows both halves of the craft: journalists exposing corruption, then journalists examining the investigators who exposed it.

In Asia, Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in Myanmar in December 2017 while investigating the killing of ten Rohingya men and boys at Inn Din village. They were sentenced to seven years under the Official Secrets Act, released in May 2019 after a presidential amnesty, and shared the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In the Philippines, Maria Ressa of Rappler shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Russia's Dmitry Muratov for work on freedom of expression; she was convicted of cyber libel in 2020, a verdict she appealed.

Right of reply and legal review

Two steps happen late and decide whether the story survives. The right of reply: before you publish a serious claim, you tell the person or company what you will say and give them reasonable time to respond. It is fair, it sometimes turns up the missing fact, and in several legal systems it matters for the defence. Then legal review: a lawyer reads every sentence and asks whether it can be proved, whether it is fact or opinion, and whether it serves the public interest.

The rules differ by country. This table is an overview of how some systems work, not legal advice.

Place	The shape of the rule
United States	Truth is a defence. For public officials the plaintiff must also show "actual malice" (knowing falsehood or reckless disregard), from New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
England and Wales	Defamation Act 2013: a claimant must show serious harm; defences include truth, honest opinion and publication in the public interest, which protects reasonable belief on a matter of public interest.
Europe	Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the press; the European Court of Human Rights treats public-interest reporting and the watchdog role as weighty. The EU's 2024 anti-SLAPP directive targets abusive lawsuits.
Latin America	The Inter-American system opposes desacato (insulting officials) laws and criminal defamation for public-interest speech; practice varies by country, and several states have repealed such laws.

Without JavaScript: do not state a crime you cannot prove; publish what public records show as written; attribute allegations to a named source and include the denial; and keep conclusions out of news copy.

Protecting sources, and the people who do this work

Without sources there are no investigations, and the promise to keep a name secret is the most serious one a journalist makes. Protection comes from several places and none is complete.

• Law. In the United States there is no general federal reporter's privilege: Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) held that reporters must answer grand-jury questions, though most states have shield laws. In 2005 the New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail rather than name a source. In Europe, Goodwin v. United Kingdom (1996) held that forcing a journalist to reveal a source violates Article 10 unless an overriding public-interest need exists, and the EU's European Media Freedom Act (2024) includes source protection. Brazil's Constitution safeguards the secrecy of the source, and the Inter-American Commission's 2000 Declaration of Principles says every journalist has a right to keep sources confidential.
• Practice. Don't promise what you can't deliver; agree terms (on the record, background, off the record) before the information is given; keep as few records as possible; and many newsrooms run secure drop-boxes, such as SecureDrop, with their own instructions for sources.
• Risk to reporters. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist who reported on Panama Papers links to Maltese politicians, was killed by a car bomb on 16 October 2017. The Slovak reporter Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were shot dead in February 2018 while he was investigating tax fraud. Networks such as Forbidden Stories now continue murdered or jailed journalists' work so killing the reporter does not kill the story. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders keep dated counts; see Media Law & Press Freedom (35/96).

What happens after publication

People expect an exposé to be followed by justice. The record is more varied. Some stories end within days; others take years and are won by other institutions; and some cost the reporters more than the targets. The chart counts days from one event to another in the real cases above, not measures of success.

Without JavaScript: Panama Papers 2 days (publication to the Icelandic prime minister's resignation), Pentagon Papers 17 days (to the Supreme Court ruling), Spotlight 341 days, Reuters in Myanmar 511 days (arrest to release), Watergate 783 days.

The causal link is also debated. The press rarely acts alone: the Panama Papers resignation followed street protests in Reykjavik, Watergate needed the courts and Congress, and the Boston story drew on lawsuits. The honest claim is that investigations supply evidence that other institutions can act on, when those institutions are willing.

What a graduate just sees

• An investigation starts as a sentence that could be wrong, and goes looking for the evidence that would show it.
• One anonymous source is a lead. A checked document plus a person is a claim.
• Ownership multiplies down the chain, and control and ownership are different.
• Big leaks are shared work: no single newsroom reads, checks and survives them alone.
• The target gets to answer before publication, and a lawyer asks "can we prove it?"
• Source protection varies by country and can fail, so promise carefully.
• Credit for consequences is shared with courts, legislators, whistleblowers and the public.

Where it shows up next

• The Business & Future of News (35/99): investigations cost months of pay, so non-profits, foundations and subscriptions decide how many are done.
• Media Law & Press Freedom (35/96): the defamation, privacy and source-protection law behind every step.
• Public Policy (35/16) and Criminal Law & Procedure (35/07): what happens when a story reaches a regulator or a court.
• In the world: auditors, prosecutors, anti-corruption agencies, whistleblower lawyers and any citizen reading a "Papers" story.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Brant Houston and the IRE, The Investigative Reporter's Handbook (Bedford/St. Martin's, several editions), a standard US text from Investigative Reporters and Editors; check for the latest edition.
• 📘 Gentler. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men (1974), the Watergate story told as a detective story; and Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002).
• 🌐 Free text. Mark Lee Hunter and colleagues, Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists (UNESCO, 2009), free to download in several languages.
• 🌐 Free course. The Global Investigative Journalism Network (gijn.org) has free guides and resource centres in many languages, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas runs free online courses on investigative reporting.