Investigative and Cross-border Journalism: A Conversation with Ulla Sätereie

Ulla Sätereie is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Gothenburg, where she is also program coordinator of the International Master’s Programme in Investigative Journalism (MIJ) which has a profile towards cross-border journalism and data journalism. And when she’s not teaching at the university, she is also the chairperson for the Swedish Association for Investigative Reporters (FGJ).

Ulla Sätereie (photo: Anna von Brömssen)

What are the key similarities and differences among investigative journalism, data journalism, and science journalism?

First of all, I believe journalism, in general, is the same no matter what you do within it. It is about finding interesting, relevant, and true stories and revealing them to the audience. So, we all work with the same element as our foundation: it’s all about curiosity. I strongly believe in curiosity-driven journalism, which is the common ground for all kinds of journalism, including investigative journalism and science journalism. Science and investigative journalism are not the same, but they share some traits. This goes back to precision journalism and the social science-based journalism that was hot in the US some 20 years ago. And that’s when it started, with computer-assisted reporting, which all evolved into what we today call data journalism. There, you use the same methods: you call it a hypothesis, but that is equal to a research question, and so on. 

And in investigative journalism, if lucky, you have much more time than an ordinary news reporter or maybe even a science reporter has. So you have time to phrase your hypothesis, do your literary overview, and ensure that you know what has been published both journalistically and scientifically within the field you are reporting on. In this sense, an investigative journalist is more similar to a science journalist.

Science journalism is not my backyard, but as I understand it, it’s crucial to be familiar with the field: to know who’s who and what they are doing and also where it is developing right now, which universities are more interesting in different areas. And, of course, if you have worked for a while in investigative journalism, you will get your own specialisation: you might know everything about the banking or social welfare systems.

Another similarity is that good science journalists also have a critical eye, so they scrutinise, and they are not the PR people for scientists. That’s why really good science reporters are also very important for good journalism.

What about the JMG’s international Master’s Programme in Investigative Journalism? What kinds of students do you have in the class?

We have students from all over the world, around 35 students a year and they are from 18-20 different countries from every continent, so it’s really a diverse group to work with. You just need to have a bachelor’s grade in something, it doesn’t have to be in journalism, but most often around half the class come with a journalistic background, either straight from some bachelor’s program or that they have worked for sometimes many years as journalists. And then we have others who have never been in journalism but are interested in changing their track of life. They could be lawyers, biologists, nurses, or they could come from other social science backgrounds and so on. 

We are mainly teaching cross-border journalism, and we teach the method described by Brigitte Alfter in her Handbook on cross-border journalism. If you talk cross-border, reporters from different countries work together on a subject of mutual interest. And then you share all the material: all interviews, all pictures, everything is available for all team members. And in the end, you produce the journalism for each national audience. So you don’t produce it together, you produce your journalism for your home audience: it’s the same method used by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). But there you have the cross-border aspect of it, and what we also see today that is important is the cross-discipline way of doing things. So for us, having people specialising in different subjects is an added value. It is a pedagogical idea for us to have them work in teams of 3-5 students together and then combine their competencies and teach each other what they need.

Could you provide an example of a journalism project that was both cross-border and cross-disciplinary?

There’s one group of students now doing a final project on multi-resistant bacteria in Ukraine. One team member is from Ukraine, and she’s a journalist but has been living in Gothenburg for a few years; another member is a trained nurse who’s Slovenian-British-Spanish, then there’s a Kurd from the Netherlands, and she has a background in microbiology, and then we have also a Swedish student who comes from global studies. So, two of them are now in Ukraine, and two are in Gothenburg, and they’re investigating how these bacteria spread over Europe and what can be done to prevent the spread. However, their combined competencies make them much better than if they were all journalists.

This is their final project, but before it, students have a crash course in journalism and investigative journalism and work in digital environments. Then, they have 10 weeks of data journalism and visualisations. And that is so important because all over the world, there are so many reporters who are scared of Excel or statistics... I mean, journalists internationally are not famous for their math talents. Nevertheless, the students learn how to read statistics and judge if it’s good or not, and they learn how to work with big data and visualise the results.

Another very good example of cross-discipline journalism is the project “Forever Pollution” created by Stéphane Horel. She’s a pioneer in collaborating with scientists and bringing them into her project. That was a big and very interesting effort, and we have former students working on that project, too. So that is one of my top examples of where investigative journalism and science journalism merge.

What are the most essential tools for a journalist today besides a solid understanding of basic math and Excel?

Quite often, it’s a mistake to talk about the tools because it’s more important to talk about the method: you have to learn what you want to do, and then you can choose your tools. I think everyone should be familiar with Excel [or an equivalent software] and know how to work a sheet. But also, I’m no expert, but I know how to work an Excel sheet and how to sort things and how to design it, because a good Excel sheet in investigative journalism, that is one of the ways to find the story. And that is always the challenge in ambitious investigative journalism: how am I going to tell this as a story? So it’s not an academic thesis.

And then I’ve been there from the beginning of digitalisation; I have been through all the search engines, and also some of the digital tools, but the important thing is that you learn one of them (depending on what you want to do) and then in three years, that will probably have been replaced by something else that is more or less the same but better. If you know one, it’s easy to learn the next one. So, I think that is the most critical takeaway regarding digital tools and different software.

What are your thoughts on the new AI tools, which are both exciting and somewhat intimidating, and their impact on the media landscape?

I’m fascinated by how journalists, like many other people, always react with fear to all developments. I’m very optimistic when it comes to development; I think that in the long run, things will get better. When the radio was introduced, everyone thought that it would kill the newspapers. And then we had the TV—the same thing; then came the Internet, and now we have AI…

Of course, just like the Internet as a whole, it has its good parts, and they are really good, and then we have some awful effects of that use. And I believe that will be the same thing with AI: of course stupid ways of using it will give stupid (or dangerous) results. I mean, hallucinating AIs or LLMs [Large Language Models] is not good. However, we will grow and develop in our attitude towards AI. We will find good and useful ways of using it.

The best example I know of is a very small newsroom in the extreme north of Norway called iTromsö. They have a journalist named Rune Ytreberg, who is a pioneer. He built that newsroom with excellent data journalists but also recruited good programmers with different competencies, and then they built AI models for their needs. They started by asking, “What do we want AI to do for us?” and then they gave the answers to the programmers who built the AI models. And now they do probably some of the best local reporting in Europe, in this little town in northern Norway, where instead of just scraping things they have the AI doing it for them, and so every reporter will get their personalised feed of news from the municipality each morning. So the AI can suggest stories to them: “Here we have something that sticks out from the normal; maybe you are interested in that because you’re reporting on constructions or climate...” That is a smart way of using AI, and a way that will result in better journalism.

This is also where journalists need to start getting better self-confidence and working on higher esteem for good journalism globally. Because now, we are in a sad time where if you look at Reporters Without Borders and their Press Freedom Index, it’s really looking bad; the development is going the wrong way. If you look at the Democracy Report produced by V-Dem, where they rank all countries in the world on a democracy index, that’s the same thing. There are so few people who live in well-functioning democracies today compared to 20 years ago, and each year, we get more and more autocracies. And in that time, when we have people like the president of the US talking about fake news and talking about journalists being the enemy of the people, we need to step up and start talking about what we are doing, why we are doing it, what we are good at and why it matters. And start thinking about how well-functioning democracies build on well-functioning, free, independent media. We know that, but we need to make other people aware of that.