Lighthouse Reports

About the network

Lighthouse Reports is an award-winning international investigative newsroom that pioneers collaborative journalism by partnering with the world’s leading media outlets to deliver deeply reported, public-interest investigations. Established in the Netherlands in 2019 as a non-profit organization, the network was created to push forward accountability reporting through cross-border cooperation. Rather than acting as a traditional standalone publisher, Lighthouse Reports functions as a specialized investigative and project management team that channels editors, advanced tools, and dedicated resources directly to working journalists.

The organization currently maintains a team and network of 20 to 50 core members, welcoming staff reporters, independent freelancers, and institutional media partners alike. By building specialized newsrooms around critical topics, Lighthouse Reports brings together content creators, hyper-local outlets, and global media professionals. The network has identified a powerful formula for tackling complex transnational issues in ways that deliver fresh stories to diverse audiences and trigger systemic, tangible change. Through its extensive network of over 70 media partners across multiple formats—including television, documentaries, radio, podcasts, print, and online outlets—its co-published investigations have reached audiences of tens of millions of people.

Lighthouse Reports relies on strict editorial independence and is funded primarily by private foundations and individual donors. Its decentralized, collaborative newsrooms incorporate specialized skills that blend traditional investigative reporting with cutting-edge techniques:

• Investigative Methods: Conducting rigorous traditional research, including Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and extensive document analysis.
• Advanced Specialisms: Leveraging data science, open-source intelligence (OSINT), money-trail tracking, visual forensics, and welfare surveillance analysis.
• Collaborative Infrastructure: Providing editorial coordination, project management, multilingual journalism, and community outreach to ensure stories capture public attention.

The network’s investigations tackle profound systemic and structural issues across several core public-interest subjects:

• Human Rights & Migration: Tracking systemic abuses, border violence, and the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
• Corruption & Organized Crime: Exposing financial malfeasance, sanctions evasion, and illicit trade.
• Democracy & Politics: Examining state accountability, algorithmic discrimination, and institutional misconduct.
• Climate & Environment: Investigating ecological threats, corporate pollution, and resource exploitation.

Network Projects

• Frontex and the Pirate Ship: An investigation exposing how the EU’s border agency Frontex and the Maltese government systematically shared coordinates of refugee boats trying to escape Libya with vessels operated by militias linked to war crimes and smuggling.
• The Crotone Cover-Up: An inquiry revealing how Italian authorities lied about their role in a tragic shipwreck that killed 94 people (including 35 children), with the EU border agency Frontex implicated in the cover-up.
• Suspicion Machines: An unprecedented technical and investigative experiment examining welfare surveillance algorithms that revealed widespread discrimination against vulnerable populations.
• Reconstructing the Melilla Massacre: A visual and forensic investigation combining open-source evidence, ground reporting, and testimonies to challenge official Spanish and Moroccan accounts of a deadly border incident.
• The West’s Next Plastics Dump: An investigation tracking how rich nations offloaded plastic waste onto more vulnerable regions in Southeast Asia following import bans.
• Syria’s “Bloody” Phosphates: An expose uncovering secret trade networks with the EU that enriched the Assad regime while evading international sanctions.
• Unmasking Europe’s Shadow Armies: Groundbreaking evidence linking violent pushbacks and abuses against asylum seekers at EU borders to state-backed security structures.

Contact
Website: https://www.lighthousereports.com

Contact

Website: https://www.lighthousereports.com/