Our takeaways from GIJN’s Investigative Journalism Week 2026

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come,” said David Kaplan, investigative journalist and former executive director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), during the opening session of IJ Week 2026, quoting the French author Victor Hugo. “That’s what happened to investigative journalism,” he continued, referring to the wave of collaborative, cross-border investigative journalism that took off in the 1990s, culminating in the first Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Copenhagen in 2001.

Today, 25 years and 14 GIJCs later, with a network of 266 member organizations across 95 countries, the GIJN held its inaugural online Investigative Journalism Week. From October 26 to 30, 2026, more than 130 speakers from 65 countries talked about everything that concerns the community today: from the audience engagement and impact to struggles of exiled media and funding investigative journalism.

Here are our main takeaways from IJ Week 2026.

Audience engagement: video games, hackathons and content creators

In the age of Google Zero, journalists can no longer rely only on search engines to reach their audiences, said Foloranmi Folayan, Communications and Partnerships Manager at the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), speaking during the session “Connecting with the Audience: Strategies for Investigative Journalism”. CCIJ has, in that context, experimented with the gamification of investigations, for example on Fortnite, in an effort to make reporting more engaging and help it reach younger audiences. “Turn every investigation into multiple formats […] to ensure that you reach as many audiences as possible”, Folayan stressed.

Physical meetups, in the form of public dialogues on reporting outcomes and workshops or even documentary screenings and hackathons, are among the methods used by El Surtidor, a Paraguay-based digital outlet, to approach its audience, said Jazmin Acuña, its co-founder and editorial director. “It’s very important to bring people together to make sense of reporting,” she stressed during the same session.

Content creators are becoming increasingly important in the news landscape, with 46% of respondents globally turning to content creators for news, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report for 2026, noted Jonatan Rodriguez, Senior Program Manager at the Pulitzer Center speaking in the panel “Innovative Partnerships for the Future of Journalism”. It is in that context that the Pulitzer Center has developed several programs aimed at “tackling these gaps between content creation and journalism,” he said.

According to Malu Junco, a Brazilian content creator focusing on science-related topics, who has collaborated with the Pulitzer Center, content creators can translate the expertise of journalists or experts into more accessible formats as a creator “knows how it feels like to not know,” something which experts may have forgotten, she said. Narrating a story in parts can help audiences relate to your work and is particularly relevant to investigative journalism which is developed through a long and incremental process. Integrating your personal experience and emotions into complicated topics is another way to engage your audience, especially for more complex topics, Junco continued.   

Junco believes there is “a switch in how social media content is being consumed” today, with people looking for more quality over quantity because “the market is just very oversaturated”. This creates an opportunity for specialists to enter social media, she added, especially if they work with creators who are already engaged with these specialists’ field of interest.

For Sherry Lee, COO and deputy CEO of The Reporter, Taiwan’s first nonprofit newsroom, impact is important for building audience loyalty, she noted during the session “In Conversation with Sherry Lee.” How can journalists achieve this impact? According to AnuOluwapo Adelakun, a Nigerian journalist, who spoke in the panel “Breakthrough Journalism: Rethinking the Path to Impact”, defining impact indicators at the start and mapping out who can make a difference and the time at which they are most receptive is essential for creating impact. A small budget does not have to be an obstacle, she stressed.

Funding Investigative Journalism

Journalism is a calling, “but it is in fact a business, […] whether it’s for profit or non-profit, it doesn’t change the fact that you are running an organization,” said Gina Chua, Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism and Executive Editor at Large at Semafor, in the panel “Funding Investigative Journalism: What’s Working Now.” Creating a business plan is essential, she stressed.

According to Bridget Gallagher, principal of Gallagher Group LLC, knowing “your audience […] and what is the need that is not being met by other products in the marketplace” as well as knowing “what you are doing better than anyone else in the field”, while being aware of what value your work creates for donors, are all key to securing funding. Gallagher also warned newsrooms against the common pitfall of scheduling fundraising for a specific time each week but often failing to follow through, due to a breaking news situation, for instance. “Fundraising is a habit; What is one thing you can do everyday?”, she said.

For The Reporter, which relies partly on donations, securing a donation once does not necessarily translate into donor loyalty. “Even when someone decides to support you because they think you did a very good investigative story, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have their loyalty yet,” Lee noted, adding that loyalty is built through an ongoing relationship. Explaining the Reporter’s decisions to their donors is also one of the factors contributing to the outlet’s sustainability, she noted.

Journalism in Exile

For journalists living under authoritarian regimes, while the decision to leave the country is difficult, it can often be necessary. Yucca Wai, Program Director at Exile Hub, shared some guidelines helping journalists decide whether the time to leave has come in the panel “Holding Power to Account from Exile.” “Usually, it’s slow threats that build up over time […] and then the journalists become used to the level of danger that they’re in, kind of like ‘a frog in boiling water situation’,” she said. Common red flags include officials targeting one’s outlet, state authorities checking one’s home, and the arrest of a colleague, Wai noted.

“Just crossing the border doesn’t mean you’re safe, it just means you’re in another place with different types of risks” Wai stressed, giving the example of journalists from Myanmar who faced challenges even after moving to neighboring countries which also face human rights problems. Reporting from exile comes with its own set of problems. David Dembélé, a Malian investigative journalist and founder of the Malian Network of Investigative Journalists (RMJI), said he has lost some of his sources following his exile, and his reporting is, sometimes, significantly slower: Something that would take him one to two hours while he worked inside Mali, might now take two weeks, he said.

For Rinat Tuhvatshin, co-founder and CTO of Kyrgyzstani investigative media Kloop, working in exile is approximately five times more expensive than working inside Kyrgyzstan, as he shared during the panel “Regional Look: Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan – Challenges and Journalistic Investigations.”

Tools and resources for investigative journalists

• North Data: a search engine and platform aggregating and visualizing public information on companies in 27 European countries, from their history to their finances and legal structure. Free accounts are offered for investigative journalists.

• Horizons: a research platform developed by C4ADS that allows journalists and other investigators to search billions of records, including corporate filings, trade data and property records, in one place, helping them identify ownership networks, uncover illicit activities and connect findings across jurisdictions.

• Earshot: a nonprofit specializing in forensic audio investigations, using sound analysis to authenticate audio recordings, including suspected AI-generated audio, conduct audio ballistics and help journalists reconstruct events, identify weapons and investigate potential human rights violations.

• Vertical52: a platform offering satellite imagery and analysis services to newsrooms to investigate anything from environmental changes to conflicts and other developments in hard-to-reach areas.

You can find the tip sheets and presentations shared by the speakers here: IJ Week resources