Clara Zid, September 2024
“In the past, investigative journalists were seen as lone wolves, nowadays a collaborative spirit is increasingly important”. Urszula Kifer is an editor with many years of experience in the largest Polish media including WP.pl, Gazeta.pl, Newsweek Polska and Rzeczpospolita daily. She became involved in investigative journalism in 2020 when she joined Fundacja Reporterów (Reporters’ Foundation).
Urszula is a managing editor of Frontstory.pl as well as a member of VSquare, an independent, cross-border journalism initiative. Both media belong to the Fundacja Reporterów. Urszula’s main topics of investigation are fraud, corruption, abuse of power, money laundering, scams and environmental disasters.
“It’s hard to pick a favorite investigation”, Urszula says. “We deal with challenges every day”, she adds. The most difficult ones are big cross-border investigations that concern complicated financial issues, because “it’s always very hard to find all proofs and connections when you are dealing with cross-border crimes”.
Cyber crimes are the most difficult investigations, like “Tales from the Crypto” where her team uncovered how crypto crimes were made in their region. According to Urszula, “it was a challenge because of the technical side of the crime”.
Another interesting one was “Cyprus Confidential”, an investigation that covered shady businessmen who were trying to hide their assets and connections: “It’s always very demanding to have access and read all the financial papers and to uncover something that many very well-paid lawyers and experts are working hard on to hide”, says Urszula.
Most of these investigations have in common international collaboration with other journalists: “Collaboration is really imprinted in our DNA, we feel that it’s the only way to do a big story these days: crimes, disinformation or spy craft, it’s always crossing borders”.
Fundacja Reporterów is member of many international organizations, like Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Open Information Partnership, so they work with journalists from all over the world on a daily basis.
“We did a story about a Polish Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Tomasz Poręba, and we discovered that he had apartments for rent in Croatia”, Urszula explains. Thanks to Fundacja Reporterów presence in international networks, they could reach out to their colleagues in Croatia, who helped them with field trips and checking land and company registers. “Local stories can many times be enhanced by collaborating with colleagues from other countries, because so many of these stories are crossing borders”, says Urszula.
“Russian diplomatic buildings have these antennas that are used to spy in countries where they’re residing”
Another example of an interesting investigation is a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) story that they published last year, when they combined efforts in several countries to show how Russia was doing shady things in many of their diplomatic buildings: “They have these antennas that are used to spy in countries where they’re residing”. When journalists compared results from various countries they saw the scale of the operation and that this was just not an isolated incident.
“Russian influence is the most pressing issue in Poland that needs investigative journalism attention”, according to Urszula. They have had to deal with it for many years, but since the full scale war in Ukraine, Poland is on the forefront of these attacks: “Russian influence is something that we monitor closely and frequently write about, and we still feel that not everyone in the media is aware how much Russian influence there is”.
“Influential people are spreading climate disinformation or pro-Russian narratives”
One important issue connected with Russian influence is disinformation, very rampant in Poland: “We are not a fact-checking outlet per-se, but when we see that influential people are spreading climate disinformation or pro-Russian narratives, it is a topic for us”.
The process for fact-checking is rigorous: “We use advanced tools and analysis to uncover networks that aim to spread disinformation, influence people and make them not trust media, authorities, science and wise people”.
Disinformation has a strong ally that makes their work harder than ever: Artificial Intelligence. “AI creates this danger, it’s more difficult than it was before to verify and find information.”
But AI is also an opportunity for investigative journalists, new tools that can facilitate their work and make them more effective: “It can really help with time-consuming things like translating articles, data analysis or AI-generated audio versions of articles”. Urszula is confident that “in news or sport journalism, AI may replace journalists pretty easily, but when it comes to investigations, humans are essential”.
Disinformation is also the root of one of the biggest problems in Poland: polarization, according to Urszula: “It’s not an isolated case, it’s all over Europe and the world. It’s really obvious that people are very divided and are living in these bubbles so it’s hard to reach people outside the bubble, and for us it’s really important not to be partisan and to not be on one side of the debate”.
They fact-check themselves as much as they can: “Every article that we publish is very thoroughly checked and we don’t publish anything that doesn’t have a proper source or doesn’t have a proper proof”. Urszula thinks proper fact checking is essential since there is so much disinformation out there, and a lowering quality of many media dispatches, it’s crucial to show that there are trustworthy sources.
But, although they are accurate, they have a lot of lawsuits from people with “power, money and influence”. Fortunately they are winning the lawsuits but it takes a lot of time, effort and money, says Urszula.
“We have protocols and every staff member has gone through security training”
Physical safety is also a risk for investigative journalists: “We try to be very careful, we have protocols and every staff member has gone through security training”. They have also had training in cyber security through Qurium’s mentorship: “We are covering Russia a lot, so they try to attack our websites and take them off, but here Qurium is of very big help”, Urszula remarks.
Media freedom in Poland is getting better after last year’s election victory by the democratic opposition. Although the situation is improving, there are big financial problems, Urszula says: “Mainstream media are falling into a trap of click baits and just publishing what people want to read, so it’s not an easy market for media, and especially not for independent outlets like ours who have no advertisers”.
Fundacja Reporterów is the first non-profit organization of investigative journalism in Poland and does not receive financial support from state subsidies. They are funded by donors like National Endowment for Democracy, Global Anti-Corruption Consortium and IJ4EU, and sometimes receive prize money from competitions in investigative reporting.
According to Urszula, investigative journalists have to be “stubborn, inquisitive and have a curiosity and drive to just dig deeper, but also a lot of grit and patience, not to give up easily because our investigations usually take many months”. That’s why it’s really important not to loose the final publication insight, but to remain focused.
She insists that the most important thing is “teamwork, be able to share with your colleagues and to collaborate with them. It is something that has changed, but it really makes an impact on our work”.
And this is what she recommends to investigative journalists: “Don’t try to do everything by yourself, try to reach out to other people, to connect with investigative centers or with networks of investigative journalists”.
The editor is confident that “the global community of investigative journalists is really supportive, and everyone benefits if more people are involved. So, if you reach out to them, they are always willing to help because we work for a common cause”.
Urszula is proud of Fundacja’s work: “Investigative journalism is very important today because it can help to prevent bad people from doing bad things, and to control the politicians and people in power”.
Frontstory.pl is hosted with Virtualroad.org since 2023