Investigative journalism

The problem

A press investigation rarely lasts a week. It runs for months, gets interrupted when the news moves on, and picks up again three weeks later. In between, the file has grown: companies, directors, documents obtained, leads dropped.

The real cost is not the gathering, it is the resumption. Reopening a file and wondering why a given name is in there, or whether a lead has already been ruled out, eats hours that produce nothing.

On top of that, you are not alone in the chain. A desk editor wants to know where the story stands. A legal team wants to know what is established and what is not. And a reader, at the end, has to understand a seven-company arrangement at a glance.

What the map brings

Picking it back up in five minutes. Each entity carries its source and its date. A named link reminds you what you had concluded and on what basis. The map is your memory of the file, not just its inventory.

Seeing the arrangement. A cascade of holding companies cannot be understood in a spreadsheet. Pulling linked entities together brings out the clusters, and following the direction of the links shows who controls whom.

Separating the established from the hypothetical. By naming each link with the right word, you produce a document that distinguishes by itself what you can publish from what you still have to verify. That is exactly what a legal review asks for.

Getting a diagram out. Exporting as an image gives you a starting infographic for layout, built from the real work rather than reconstructed after the fact.

A typical session

You start from the name of a company cited in a tip-off. You put it down, you open the company register, you add its director and its registered office, noting the date of consultation.

The registered office address rings a bell. You find it on another company you put down three weeks earlier, and you draw the link. These two structures share an address. That is not proof, but it is a question.

You look up the domain name of the first one, and you note its creation date and its host. The domain leads to an archived site which, two years earlier, displayed a different director. You add the person, you name the link “director until 2024”, and you attach the archive reference.

At the end of the session, you export. The dated file goes into the story folder, the image into the newsroom channel with three lines of comment.

What it does not do

The map replaces neither human sources, nor documents obtained by other means, nor the writing. It verifies nothing on your behalf and detects no link by itself: what you have not drawn does not exist.

Nor does it protect your sources. It limits the exposure because the file stays on your machine, with no account and no server, but the security of that machine remains yours.

The sensitive point

A press file holds the names of people who have not been accused of anything, and sometimes elements that identify a source. Two simple rules cut the risk: only let into the map what serves the story, and keep the file where you control it.

That is why Ositra works on your computer, with no account to create. The guide on personal data sets out what the journalistic framework changes, and what it does not.