Making an impact – how Lighthouse Reports is transforming investigative journalism
Whether it’s exposing Afghan war profiteers, highlighting the exclusion of skilled migrants from jobs in Europe or revealing the West’s new plastic dump sites, the aptly named Lighthouse Reports has illuminated some of the murkiest practices around the globe. Turn the spotlight on the non-profit itself and you’ll find a pioneering organisation that’s changing the face investigative reporting.
Launched in the Netherlands in 2019, Lighthouse builds newsrooms around specific topics (arms tracking, food systems, surveillance, waste, borders, migration and war winners) and carry out investigations that are then published by a string of media partners, including Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Financial Times. The outlet works across a range of media formats, from television and documentary to news and radio, podcasts, print and online.
From the outset, Lighthouse Reports decided it would not be a publishing platform itself – a strategy that has multiplied its impact, with the organisation reaching 30 million people through more than 100 media partners. It’s an approach born out of founder and Managing Director Daniel Howden’s experiences as a journalist.
After spending most of my career in commercial newsrooms as a correspondent and an editor, Howden took a break from journalism to work for a technology start-up. “I came to learn about venture capital, collaborative work and managing remote teams and then came back into journalism,” he revealed to delegates at the recent FIPP World Media Congress in Cascais, Portugal.
“I wanted to bring some of what I’ve learned from outside of journalism, and I spent a little bit of time working for a largely non-profit newsroom. It was great that you could think strategically about what you were going to cover, and you had some time and space in a way that you don’t often have when you’re covering news.
“So, when setting up Lighthouse I wanted the commercial imperative of finding an audience to come together with the capacity to think strategically about where public interest investigations are needed. That led us to our main strategic surprise in that we are not a platform. Our stories don’t appear on Lighthouse. We don’t do audience engagement. We decided we’d set up a non-profit that was an investigations team and we would invest in that as a unit – and that all of the stories would be published through publishing partners.”
Money talks
Lighthouse’s strategy has had some significant financial benefits. “We saved a lot of money,” Howden pointed out. “When it comes to general models for non-profit investigative newsrooms, it tends to be a case that they spend about 40% of their budget on their own platform. They have good-looking brands, and those brands have small but loyal audiences.
“The reality is that the impact that comes from their journalism really doesn’t have any relationship to their sites. In all but a few examples, they were co-published with larger commercial outlets that have a bigger reach. Sacrificing that platform meant the money that we were able to raise initially could be spent entirely on the investigations unit.”
When Lighthouse sets out to do an investigation, the organisation first thinks seriously about the audience it wants to reach before partnering with, often, a coalition of outlets to make sure the work connects with people.
A crucial part of the Lighthouse success story is recruiting the right people – whether they’re journalists or not.
“When we first set out, we did a series of investigations and they landed with considerable force,” explained Howden. “But we were left with the feeling that we were leaving a lot of potential change from the work on the table because we weren’t thinking about it in an organised way.
“So, we brought in people who hadn’t worked previously in journalism, people who’ve worked in campaigning or people who had worked on developing theories of change and grassroots movements and social movement building. The impact team doesn’t come from a traditional journalism background – quite deliberately.
“Their job is to go out with the work into the world and try to take it to the places that they need to go to, but also learn about how that kind of impact happens and then bring that thinking and those learnings back into the newsroom at the earliest stages.”
To facilitate this approach, Lighthouse has an ‘impact framework’, which lists different kinds of audiences and categorises them.
“It helps journalists who haven’t thought about things in this way before, to think about that right at the beginning,” explained Howden. “When you frame an editorial question or an investigative hypothesis, what is your impact goal here? What are you trying to do with this work?
“Start to think about it right from the outset, because in my career it has tended to be that you only really think about that quite late on. If you’re covering something super interesting, you’ll often lose yourself in that investigation, and you won’t really think about where it needs to go in order to affect processes it should affect.”
The next generation
Lighthouse has also done a remarkable job nurturing a new generation of journalists who are very specialised in open-source investigative methods – whether that’s looking into money trails or supply chains. The organisation’s approach to their workforce is a much-needed string to its bow when approaching media companies.
“To be a regular partner to Der Spiegel in Germany or The Washington Post, you need to have something that they don’t have,” Howden said. “Why would they come and work with a small investigations unit that doesn’t have a public-facing brand?
“So, we try to focus on accumulating skill sets which don’t traditionally exist in newsrooms, be they data scientists, open-source investigators, financial investigators, people who can rebalance sheets and find stories in large data sets.
“We do have investigations editors, some of whom have quite a traditional news background, but we also have people who develop 3D models in order to do visual investigations and reconstruct contested events to understand what happened.”
