Newsletter January 2021

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In 2020 – our second year – we have been very productive. We embarked on some thirty investigations. Half of these resulted in publications, the others will reach that stage in 2021. Most of our publications attracted widespread media coverage, and in some cases international attention. For more details, see the January-June newsletter and the July-December overview below.

We are particularly proud of our international publications and co-operations with the British Medical Journal, the Le Monde newspaper, the University of Bath (UK), and – in various ongoing projects – with investigative journalists in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Mali, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

We acquired substantial additional funding, consisting of project subsidies, structural funding and publication fees. This allowed us to expand our investigative team to ten journalists and another four regular contributors.

We coached two groups of interns from the Utrecht Journalism School and two interns who applied on a personal basis. From February until June, our Investigative Teaching Lab ran its program for the first time – not an easy period, since the participants had to do most of their meetings, workshops and interviews during the Covid-19 lockdown phase, so online.

Our prospects for 2021 are exciting. Inevitably, some of our current research is Covid-19 related, but we will certainly not neglect our main specialisations. All five desks are working on important investigations and have plans for new ones. A growing number of projects will be international and include cross-border collaborations, but we will also start co-operating with regional media in the Netherlands.

We expect to be able to broaden and strengthen our financial basis, to increase our staff and thus to continue our mission to investigate the workings of power in business, governments and other institutions, produce thorough stories about these workings and – if possible – spur the reform of unjust, illegal and abusive practices.

January 2021

Marcel Metze, editor-in-chief

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