In parallel, a new program for investigative reporting in Eastern Europe was coming together. Investigative reporting was enjoying a renaissance worldwide due to ever-more-powerful technology for uncovering and disseminating information. As authoritarian regimes crumbled or collapsed, journalists were newly in a position to investigate their previous activities. Even those countries that remained secretive were no longer impenetrable. While the work was often dangerous, a growing number of journalists in repressive societies were prepared to research malfeasance and make it public. China, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere saw the creation of investigative journalism centers. The reporters’ toolkit kept expanding: formerly national databases became available globally; mobile and satellite phones, video and graphics, global positioning systems and other tools improved steadily. Established newspapers, but also a legion of bloggers and entrepreneurs, took advantage. ^[2]

Drew Sullivan, a US journalist who had trained and worked as an aerospace engineer, first visited Eastern Europe in 1999 as a media trainer for IREX. Sullivan had early expertise in computer-assisted reporting (CAR), and was much in demand. Struck by the need for responsible reporting in Eastern Europe, in 2000 he quit his job as an investigative reporter for the Tennessean in Nashville, and instead pursued opportunities to train local journalists in the former Yugoslavia. ^[3]

Sullivan in 2002 moved to Sarajevo as an IREX media trainer. At a training on how to report human trafficking, he met Paul Radu, a Romanian journalist who in 2001 had founded the Romanian Center for Investigative Reporting. Radu had considerable expertise on the subject: “I would go undercover and buy women from traffickers, and then deliver them to a shelter.” ^[4] Sullivan suggested Radu join him as co-trainer.

Radu had recently returned from an Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship in San Antonio, Texas. There he was struck by the rich potential of the databases available in the newsroom, databases that Romanian journalists could only dream about. He asked to use them, and “I was able to find right away some fugitives from Eastern Europe that were actually hiding in the US,” he says.

Those turned into big stories in Romania and elsewhere. So I realized the power of these databases and started playing a lot with them… For me, it was so easy to do investigative reporting in the US compared to Romania.

By 2003, Sullivan had gotten to know a number of officials from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Eastern Europe. They were on the verge of closing down their media training programs “as an exercise in futility,” he recalls. ^[5] Sullivan thought that was a mistake. In his view, what Eastern European journalists needed was on the job training in accountability journalism. “You need to leverage [Western journalism] standards and you need to practice the standards in the industry,” he told USAID. The agency suggested he propose a project that practiced what he preached.

CIN. In 2004, Sullivan opened the Center for Investigative Reporting ( Centar za istraivačko novinarstvo , or CIN) in Bosnia-Herzegovina with USAID funds. ^[6] The first months were challenging, but the experience of editing the work of local journalists opened up a new world to Sullivan. He says:

That’s when I really fell in love. Once you realize what’s going on, and you have that entrée into the system, and you have people who can figure it out and explain it and come back to you, and you really see what’s happening—I mean, it’s scary. These countries are incredibly corrupt.

Watch Drew Sullivan discuss his move to Eastern Europe.

That year, CIN offered training in Azerbaijan as well as other former Soviet republics. Khadija Ismayilova attended. Sullivan remembered her: “She stood out right away because of her attitude.” A few months later, he and Radu, who had teamed up, offered the best of their regional trainees an enhanced course in Warsaw. Ismayilova was selected and attended. As she recalls: “Paul [Radu] was talking about following the money, about offshore things. I didn’t know how to use all this, but it was interesting.”

OCCRP . As they ran trainings and worked with journalists from a variety of countries, Radu and Sullivan realized that a whole group of important stories was not getting done. National publications did not have the resources, access or research capacity to write regional, cross-border stories. Yet some of the most significant topics that each country’s media reported on—corruption, drug and human trafficking, fraud—represented only a small, national piece of a bigger, international story. The two trainers decided to pursue funding for a cross-border reporting project. They found donors receptive.

In early 2007, Sullivan and Radu launched the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) with headquarters in Sarajevo. The early funders were the United Nations Democracy Fund and USAID. OCCRP aimed to be an umbrella organization for investigative journalism centers throughout the region. It would provide individual centers and journalists with increased research capacity, a wider audience, the opportunity for joint projects, and increased protection for journalists engaged in the often-dangerous work of reporting on organized crime and corruption from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. “In America,” comments Sullivan, “the stories are about quality of life. In this part of the world, they’re about life and death.”

There’s no deal in this part of the world that there isn’t some political or crime interest in it. There’s no pot of money, no influence, no job, no resource that isn’t closely coveted by people who are on the inside.

Most of the reporters who worked with OCCRP had other media affiliations. “We’re kind of a layer over the top of what they’re already doing,” explains Sullivan. “All our stuff is regional. They will often come to us when they have a regional story because, they’ll say, ‘This is beyond our resources.” ^[7] OCCRP recognized that its members ran daily risks. Journalists pursuing corruption stories had died, often in grisly ways. ^[8] So OCCRP offered not just editing and information services, but also practical training in how to defend against attack, how to encrypt information on laptops and other useful tactics.