On October 30th at the Barbican Centre in London, investigative journalists and allies from around the world will gather for “Overreach,” the 6th biennial CIJ Logan Symposium. We recently had the pleasure to interview James Harkin, Executive Director of The Centre of Investigative Journalism and board director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, about the conference.
Can you explain the origin of the CIJ Logan Symposium and how it has since evolved?
The CIJ Logan Symposium dates back to 2014. It was originally established because something new and exciting was happening in the world of investigative journalism. Partly because of technology and partly because of politics, investigative journalism was rapidly changing and new people were using technology to facilitate leaks and to help whistleblowers, most notably in the case of WikiLeaks’ early work on Afghanistan.
As a result of that, Richard Logan and Gavin MacFadyen, the founder-director of CIJ, came together to create a journalism conference that not only speaks to journalists but to their new allies within this brave new world. It thinks about how best to protect those new allies—be they sources, whistleblowers, slightly crazy hackers—and beyond that, it thinks critically about what investigative journalism has been, what it is, and what it’s becoming.
What I love about the symposium is that it’s much less self-congratulatory than similar journalism conferences. Often you will see echo chambers of journalists who all say the same things. That can be kind of boring after a while. Our symposium is rather different from that—it brings everyone together to think outside the box, in an avant garde way, about how to make investigative journalism better.
In terms of how it’s evolved, the political terrain and technology have changed rapidly. In many ways, the world of investigative journalism is much more fragmented now. But we more or less do the same things: we say what doesn’t get said in other conferences; we defend the kind of people who are slightly beyond the pale; and we are a little bit pricklier and more critical about what’s happening to investigative journalism.
What is most exciting to you about this year’s symposium?
Last time, we tried to think of four interesting but very small nonprofit outlets around the world who were doing amazing stuff. This year, we’ve decided to go a bit more mainstream, but mix that up with more distinctive ideas.
I honestly believe that this year’s symposium will be the best I’ve ever seen and you will find it nowhere else in the world. Because we stay close to our original mission to speak beyond the echo chamber, we’re capable of getting the best journalists on earth as well as people you’ve never heard of, with ideas that are super interesting and not discussed at any other journalism conference.
If you want to get a flavor of those speakers, we’ve invited Khadeeja Safdar, who I met first at the Logan Symposium in Berkeley. She is the woman who did that great investigation for the Wall Street Journal about the birthday note Trump sent to Jeffery Epstein. We also invited Hannah Natanson from the Washington Post whose home was searched by the FBI in an attempt to intimidate her and her sources. We have an interesting debate on journalism in Hungary with unusually different opinions, and our opening panel is about the legal assault on investigative journalism.
We have great names for our panels. We’re doing a panel about the private intelligence agency which is called “Spies Like Us.” Hannah Natanson’s panel is called “Knock Knock.” We’re good at this! Gotta be fun.
Who is most likely to benefit from the program? What is the importance of bringing together a diverse set of attendees?
In keeping with our mission to broaden investigative journalism and to find new allies, it’s of interest not only to early- and mid-career journalists but to anyone who wants to think critically about the world, who wonders what is happening to journalists, and who wants to learn what is fresh, new and most interesting in terms of tools in the journalism world.
It’s not an invite-only event. It’s available to anyone who wants to come. We hope that it will appeal to a broad range of people—certainly people from NGOs, the human rights world, politicals. We often get a lot of people from the private security world who are really interested in the kind of people that we can get to the symposium.
The way I think about diversity is not only in terms of the most obvious kinds of diversity that we strive for—people of different colors and walks of life—but also to think about political diversity and conversations between people with very different points of view who may not usually inhabit the same stage.
The short film commissioned for the symposium is so effective. What inspired you to collaborate with an artist?
We realized that among other things, this brave new world of investigative journalism is one which often thinks as much about images as about words. Increasingly, we have to think visually. One of the new things in investigative journalism is open-source intelligence (OSINT), and that is about not only having a nose for a story like traditional investigative journalism, but having an eye for a story—knowing something about how they look and how to interrogate the visual things. In keeping with that, we thought it would be great to have a visual story of what investigative journalism is at its best and why it’s important.
I had next to nothing to do with this. My excellent colleague Jake Charles Rees, who runs the symposium on our end, is ahead of the game, visually. And one of his connections is a fantastic animator in Montreal called Ben Clarkson. Jake went to Ben with this idea and Ben was enthused about the project and symposium.
It’s a rather beautiful way of illustrating why investigative journalism is important and why we need to protect not only journalists but sources and whistleblowers—the kind of people who find themselves much more vulnerable when things go wrong because they have nothing to fall back on and no one to rely on. We also think quite a lot about broadening our audience to young people who may not be that interested in your mother or father’s investigative journalism, but who might be interested in the ways to tell a more interesting visual story.
What lessons do you hope that attendees will take away from the Symposium?
We hope they take away that there is currently a legal assault on investigative journalism from all kinds of different quarters—from the corporate world, from the state, through legal advances that protect privacy which can sometimes prevent stories from emerging. They might not have heard about it before if they’re not journalists, but this is a quiet war against investigative journalism and we, as investigative journalists, in some ways are the canaries in the coal mine. Because if they come after us, they’re very likely to come after you next.
We hope that people get a sense that, amidst all this hype around disinformation and misinformation and subsequent government crackdowns on what we can read, there is a marketplace of different ideas and investigative journalism out there. We hope people get a sense that if they are able to read everybody’s stories, then they will get a much richer sense of what’s really happening in the world. There is a diverse body of investigative journalism going on, some of which they won’t even know about. We tried to identify a few people to put on stage who people really won’t have heard of.
Why the Barbican Centre?
The Barbican Centre is where the symposium began in 2014. It’s a fantastic modernist beauty of a venue. It’s surrounded by these hanging gardens where people will mix and network. We hope that by hanging out in this beautiful garden-like atmosphere, they will actually talk to one another, hash some stories, and make new friends. This is extraordinarily good value to get to hang out in the coolest arts venue in the center of London while listening to amazing speakers.
And if we’re thinking about solidarity, a good place for that to start is over a coffee, over a drink, over a free hot lunch.