TSN Past Media Collaborations
“Media working together on a coordinated investigation increases the number of people reached by the critical information and allows media to focus on different aspects of the story. Importantly, we believe that major stories impacting people around the world should be reachable and readable by people impacted by them.”
–Delphine Halgand-Mishra, TSN Executive Director
From 2018 to 2022, TSN coordinated media consortia as a way to broaden the impact of critical public good information provided by whistleblowers. Examples include questionable plasma collection devices across the world or tax evasion practices in Luxembourg. These collaborations resulted in combined audiences of hundreds of 1 millions readers in half a dozen languages.
While we no longer provide this media coordination service, this experience helps us support whistleblowers working with journalists in single and multi-newsroom investigations.
Below are some examples of TSN media collaborations:
EdTech Exposed
In 2022, TSN coordinated the media reporting of Human Rights Watch’s ground-breaking international research showing that EdTech products monitor children without the consent of the children or their parents. TSN worked with more than 25 investigative journalists on six continents and seven languages, providing them with early access to the report, data, and technical evidence on alleged violations of children’s rights by governments that endorsed education technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The reporting — which was collectively called EdTech Exposed — was coordinated to maximize impact internationally and locally. TSN worked closely with HRW and the reporting teams over six weeks to make sure each outlet had specific information for their region as well as access to the researchers themselves. With each outlet able to shape the reporting to the local context, the stories resulted in real impact.
In India, for example, the government took a rare step by acknowledging fault and committing to do better. In Brazil, Human Rights Watch launched a follow-up investigation that resulted in a state government removing all surveillance tracking from its EdTech website. The subsequent coverage by 350 media outlets pressured an EdTech company to act within 24 hours of publication to protect its students’ data privacy. Other countries and regions such as France, Catalonia and Indonesia have also made changes in response to EdTech Exposed. READ MORE
Investigation into Huawei Work Conditions
Published in 2021, the Signals Network coordinated an investigation by four international media partners across four countries into the work conditions at the Chinese technology company Huawei after sources provided information to journalists. Journalists reviewed internal documents and interviewed many former employees of the company for months across Europe. The investigation was the result of months of research by the media partners of The Signals Network, including El Mundo (Spain), The Daily Telegraph (UK), netzpolitik.org (Germany) and Republik (Switzerland). READ MORE
The Plasma Files
In 2020, TSN coordinated an international collaborative media investigation into the plasma collection devices manufactured by the U.S. company Haemonetics. While authorities had shelved the machines in France by 2018, they were still in use in the rest of the world at the time of the investigation. TSN also provided legal support to some of the whistleblowers. READ MORE
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TSN worked with these media partners on these coordinated investigations:
