Stefan Candea is co-founder of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism and a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

As part of our ongoing profile series leading up to World Press Freedom Day, IJNet spoke to him about investigative journalism in Eastern Europe.

Candea will participate in the session 21st Century Muckraking on May 3rd.

IJNet: Which special skills do investigative journalists need that are different from other journalists?

Candea: The skills are practically the same. Both should be able to reveal facts, dig out information and put an honest story together in order to inform the public about abuses or keep a critical eye on structures of power. However, investigative journalists deal with more complex stories and need much more resources and time.

IJNet: How big, and what is the scope, of your investigations? Are they done in Romania only or are there any cross-border investigations?

Candea: My colleagues at the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism and I have done mainly stories covering Romania, the Balkans and the Black Sea region, most of them cross-border. We have taken part in international projects reporting from South America to Africa.

We developed our own publication platform to avoid censorship, and we have covered local and international organized crime, media, human rights abuses, networks of power, the environment, resources and energy, sports and undercover stories.

IJNet: Do you use computer-assisted reporting techniques in your projects? If so, what kinds of databases are available and do you sometimes have to create your own? How difficult is it to get databases?

Candea: Sure, we do. However, database access is a tricky thing in Eastern Europe. Things have evolved in the last 10 years, and there is more and more data out there. We just have to get it and re-organize it in a useful way.

We are forced to build databases from scratch by extracting information from a range of document and database formats, and by aggregating them. We do scrap and collect any kind of databases we find while researching and traveling in the region.

IJNet: Do you share the results of your investigations with officials in Romania?

Candea: We publish our stories and our findings, that’s the only way we share the results of our investigations with any official, unless we decide that we need to exchange information – a pretty rare situation.

IJNet: Do you cooperate with other investigative journalism organizations?

Candea: We became a part of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, IRE, ICIJ, and we are the backbone of regional networks like Scoop and OCCRP.

IJNet: Do you train investigative journalists? How do you find investigative journalists?

Candea: We have experience in training both journalists and students. I find the training sessions with students the most rewarding ones. The trainings with journalists can only succeed if they involve a partnership approach, a teamwork strategy.

Training is a business in the media assistance industry. The training strategy has to be assessed and reconsidered. Tens of thousands of journalists have been trained in Eastern Europe and hundreds of millions were spent, but if you look at the media industry you will find a broken industry and a profoundly corrupt media where good journalists don’t make any difference. Our media landscape is similar to the one in Western Europe and the U.S. 100 years ago.

IJNet: Who is your audience?

Candea: We have access to a very diverse audience, as we don’t publish only on our website, but also in partnership with online news platforms and newspapers at various levels: local, national, regional and international.

About 70 percent of our website visitors come from Romania and Moldova, and the rest are international visitors (our most important projects are translated into English and some into Russian).

IJNet: Has the Internet changed the investigative reporting landscape in Romania, and how?

Candea: Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, it’s so much easier to find information and publish it – but very few journalists are actually doing it.

There is a 30 percent Internet penetration around Eastern Europe, and online media is booming. It’s a dramatic change over the last 10 years, primarily in terms of online news platforms and access to public information. At least for Romania, the problem of drastic censorship is gone for now. I refer here to the strong political censorship that had its peak in 2002-2004 and was possible when a few TV [stations] and newspapers were under immense pressure from government, and online was not a serious alternative.

However, investigative journalism is more than just access to a publishing platform. It is about resources and time to perform in-depth reporting. The present ownership landscape leads to self-censorship and lack of resources for investigations, and the Internet doesn’t make any difference.

IJNet: Have there been difficult and/or dangerous investigations in your newspaper?

Candea: Any story dealing with organized crime has a certain degree of danger. The more the story covers complex international groups, the higher the degree.

Some of the stories have a very sensitive reporting phase, especially those involving undercover techniques or involving reporting in places such as Transdniester, or Ukraine and Russia. Covering conflict zones or oligarchs can also put a reporter in danger.

For more information about investigative journalism in Eastern Europe, click here.

To learn more about the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism click here.