Ryle started his journalistic career with an Irish newspaper, the Longford News, famous across Ireland for publishing a blank front page with the headline “No news this week”. Ryle made his name as an investigative reporter for twenty years in Australia, famously exposing a fraudulent company – Firepower International – that deceived the Australian government with a scam product claiming to reduce fuel consumption.

Ryle admits that he began as a typical “lone wolf” reporter, even keeping secrets from his editor. “He was under pressure to find a story and wouldn’t give me the time to do it. You learn to keep secrets”. However, Ryle’s story has a twist that changed the nature of investigative journalism, turning the “lone wolf” model on its head. What if journalists joined forces on big investigative stories?


Invited to Washington in 2011 to head ICIJ, Ryle had little idea what to expect. It was run on a shoestring with three staff from a basement office “with bars on the windows and a view of a dumpster”. But Ryle knew what he wanted to achieve: “I had in my head that we could be doing big cross-border investigations. So I changed the model.” He travelled the world trying to persuade editors of big media organisations to buy into his collaborative model. “It was considered a crazy idea. They asked: why would we want to work with you? I realised that editors weren’t going to listen to me, so I went directly to reporters. It doesn’t matter what language they speak, reporters love the idea of a great story. If you can sell them the story, they will do all the advocacy inside the newsroom for you.”

A plan

“I had a plan”, Ryle told the audience at the Irish Embassy in Lisbon. “I had in my back pocket 2.5 million secret records from an offshore company in Singapore that was setting up accounts for people with secrets all over the world.” More than 100 journalists from 60 countries collaborated in the massive investigation that Ryle initiated into international tax fraud, resulting in the ground-breaking Offshore Leaks report.

That was the start. Thirteen years after taking the reins, Ryle leads an international network of 600 investigative journalists who have uncovered many of the great global financial scandals of the last decade, including the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers. He and ICIJ have won many accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize and an Emmy Award shared with 60 Minutes.

Ryle recounts the colourful story of how the Offshore Leaks investigation got off the ground. The original leak arrived anonymously by mail, in a disk which named a Canadian citizen with a provocative e-mail address, ontherun@hotmail.com. One lead led to another and the story spun out to 170 countries by 2014.

Soon after, a French journalist received the files that would turn into LuxLeaks, which in turn opened the door to the most famous of ICIJ’s investigations, the Panama Papers in 2016 – a leak of 11.5 million secret documents that exposed many significant financial scandals and caused the resignation of Iceland’s Prime Minister. “An ICIJ family started to build, and by the time we published the Pandora Papers in 2021 we were working with 600 journalists, in 117 countries with 150 media partners”.

Philanthropy

The ICIJ budget has grown from half a million to seven million dollars, though Ryle laments the fact that ICIJ still depends on philanthropy for its funding. Funding is rarely guaranteed for more than a year and small donations of five or 10 dollars from individuals are still important. “It’s a really bad way to finance our activity. I have to spend at least half my time trying to raise money”.


Until the Panama Papers ICIJ was almost unknown. “We flew under the radar”, Ryle admits. “Nobody knew what we were doing, otherwise we would have been very vulnerable”. But the task of publishing investigative journalism grew and new tools were needed. Ryle explains that a single journalist, looking at 11.5 million documents would take three years to get the job done. Who can spare three years?

376 journalists worked on the Panama Papers investigation which cost ICIJ around one million dollars. But their work enabled governments around the world to recover around 1.5 billion dollars in tax revenue.

Artificial Intelligence

Today, ICIJ uses Artificial Intelligence. “If we get 11.5 million documents, we can use our system to find every member of parliament, all of their spouses and children and within seconds we have 3,000 documents that might be interesting.” In the early days ICIJ’s international newsroom operated with open source software designed for a dating website and file-sharing technology developed for libraries. Today there are 50 full time workers, ten dedicated to software and security.

ICIJ determines the timing of publication of its stories. All other editorial decisions are the responsibility of ICIJ’s media partners around the world. In this way ICIJ is protected from most of the inevitable lawsuits. Ryle surprises the audience when he says: “We only have one lawyer”. He highlights the benefits of being based in the US and enjoying the legal protection of the US Constitution.

There is safety in numbers. “Some of our members are able to get a story out that they might not normally be able to publish. We have had a few cases where reporters say, if I publish this in my country I will never be able to work again or my publication will be shut down. They can pass their material to us and we can publish safely somewhere else”. And there is another number that provides safety, this time to the readers. “When you have 600 journalists from all over the world looking at the same facts, it’s very difficult for someone, even Vladimir Putin, to accuse you of taking sides. I think that is fantastic, and probably the thing I’m most proud of is that we have created a very trustworthy organisation.”

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