Tomorrow's Fish and Chips

Lessons from 20 years as an investigative news reporter

"Beer-battered flathead tails, chips, aioli AUD17.50 - Wombat Hill House, Daylesford" by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This week, a new war began in Europe. For weeks beforehand, many people had been trying to do their own risk assessments, with varying degrees of success. If you are wondering how you can do it better in future, let me share some hard-won lessons from investigative journalism with you.

This year marks my 20th anniversary as a full-time investigative reporter. The news industry’s transition from analogue to digital during these years make my two decades in the trenches a little more noteworthy than it would have been before the internet. What have I learnt during these long years chasing scoop after scoop? And what lessons can non-journalists draw from my experiences?

The first lesson involves the importance of a beat, or area of interest. My beat mostly encompasses scoops about mergers and acquisitons (M&A) involving large Spanish companies. I step outside this zone from time to time, with conference reporting, interviews with Barcelona-based startups and articles about innovation in M&A, but most of my work is focused on one broad area of interest.

Funnily enough, trying to build expertise in one relatively small area can have a ripple effect. For example, I take an interest in Spain’s banks. This only works if I keep an eye on the sector as a whole, as well as issues like interest rates and the general macro-economic context, as well as incursions into banking territory from fintech and decentralized finance startups. Meanwhile, trying to understand large energy companies means I need to struggle with issues like cleantech, environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing and climate change.

In an inter-connected world, trying to understand one thing will bring you into contact with many other subjects. Even specialists end up becoming generalists to a certain extent. With such a wide range of subjects to understand, a little humility ends up going a long way. You can’t expect to be an expert on everything!

My day always begins with a review of the press. Non-journalists often choose one news source and read it religiously. This seems strange to reporters, who tend to read all the papers without necessarily buying into any particular story too heavily. Some papers are better than others, but even the best papers make mistakes and the tabloids carry world-changing scoops from time to time. My recommendation to read several news sources but throw away the commentary comes from this daily habit.

The next step in an investigative reporting practice is to have a wide network of sources, extend it whenever possible and have as many conversations as you can manage on a daily or weekly basis. In the process of swapping notes with your sources, you will develop leads (ideas you want to investigate). Quite often, these will come in with a little spin attached. It is important not to fall in love with the first iteration of an idea. Suspending judgement is important for both journalists speaking to sources and non-journalists reading up on current affairs.

As investigative reporters check leads through multiple conversations, our thinking will evolve. Our job is to slowly build a case. It is important to learn to live with cognitive dissonance by holding several conflicting ideas in your head at the same time and comparing different models. The way we inch closer to publication is similar to the way a Bayesian will move an idea along an imaginary sliding scale as new evidence emerges. I recommend a similar approach for non-journalists trying to understand current affairs.

One of the most important steps is to check our ideas against public information before writing a draft. This includes checking what information has already appeared in the press and going through documents provided by market regulators. I have already mentioned the importance of checking everything and how research is a team sport. I struggle to imagine how to do this job without working in collaboration with hard-working reporters with complementary beats or diligent editors. Social media can help non-journalists can build communities of people who are interested in current affairs.

After publication, it is important to watch out for feedback from sources and to keep track of the success rate of your theses. Non-journalists can borrow this approach. If you were convinced Russia wasn’t going to invade Ukraine, sit down and work out what assumptions you got wrong.

Of course, any conspiracy theorists reading this will be shouting at the screen at the alleged dangers of reading the press. Far be it for me to defend every article, every reporter or every newspaper, but there is plenty of evidence that a free press is good for society on a net basis. In fact, press freedom is one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy. Would Vladimir Putin have been able to invade Ukraine based on conspiracy theories without suppressing the Russian media first? I have my doubts!

I would actually go further. If authoritarian policitians, quack-cure gurus or other dogmatists tell you that only suckers read the press, it should be a giant red flag that you are probably dealing with a con artist. Make sure you have your wallet and back quietly out of the room without making any sudden moves. Dismissing the whole news media as corrupt is the first step on a slippery slope that has groupthink at the bottom.

In my experience, fact-checking is never a neutral act. Some politicians - including Putin - use lies as a loyalty test. Checking their narratives can be an act of rebellion. A cold, hard look at big lie narratives like this one about “fascism” in Spain will always be politically charged. It is interesting to note that Putin based the rationale for the invasion on a weak accusation of fascism. Questioning that claim seems sensible if you want to understand what is going on in Ukraine.

Of course, as an investigator of financial news, I’m not bringing down corrupt politicians, like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in the 1970s. Is financial news good for society? I think that on the whole it is. Digging up uncomfortable facts about companies encourages transparency, which in turn protects investors from abuse.

My best scoops, which uncovered problems with Banco Popular’s property portfolio in January and February 2017 and were published behind a paywall, are a case in point. The articles gave investors plenty of time to position themselves before the Spanish press caught wind of the bank’s difficulties. The bank, which had a market value of 4.2bn euros before my first scoop on its property portfolio, ended up being sold for just one euro in June 2017 after it failed to deal with its toxic assets.

Some people on the left might question whether serving investors is good for society. It’s a great question. I don’t have a fully formed answer, I’m afraid, but I do think that we should encourage as many people as possible to make sensible investments. Ordinary people can definitely benefit from financial education and learning about the dangers of financial fraud.

At the very least, taking investment seriously can lead to a comfortable retirement. If you want to take an interest in business and finance further, investing your time in a startup is almost certainly a better way of changing the world than investing your time in politics. See you next week!

Further reading

All the President’s Men by Bernstein and Woodward

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.