Investigations editor Jeff Leen spoke with the Global Investigative Journalism Network about The Post’s new podcast, The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop, and how “if the idea is good enough, we can go anywhere in the world to pursue it.”
“The best investigations come from the passions of individual reporters, who find them on the ground, and Martine Powers is one of those reporters. Martine’s mother moved [to Grenada] seven years ago, and Martine noticed everybody kept talking about this mystery. Martine is not an investigative reporter, she is our key voice talent on Post Reports. So the Grenada podcast really was a collaboration between investigative and audio…This podcast will shed more light than anything has in 40 years on this mystery.We did a project called The Afghanistan Papers that was a 70-person team, The Opioid Files was an 80-person team. In my unit, we can go fast, medium, long-term; we can do local, national, and international. If the idea is good enough, we can go anywhere in the world to pursue it. We now have an international investigations team, run by Peter Finn, and they just did an investigation of tennis fixing, which was really wonderful.We just did a project about the Smithsonian’s racial brain collection, and that eventually involved 100 people. That was a global investigation, because it went back to the Philippines, and involved Filipino natives who were brought to St Louis for the World’s Fair [in 1904], where the brains of some were taken to be studied by an anthropologist at the precursor to the Smithsonian Institute, and he had these white supremacist theories.Investigative reporting is now woven through the entire newsroom, so everybody in every staff is looking for these types of stories, and when they find them, they bring them to us, and we build a team around them. Part of the story selection process is: Can we have impact? What is the scope and what is the harm?— https://gijn.org/stories/exclusive-look-washington-posts-investigation/
