Analysis
Information Sovereignty
Are Civil Society Organisations the Canary in the Digital Coal Mine?
13 September 2024
24 April 2019
Tucked away in a leafy residential street of Warsaw, stands an unassuming detached house. The only name displayed on its intercom is that of a local IT firm.
However, it’s here, in a spacious mezzanine floor room, that some of the best reporters in Poland have launched two important projects focusing on investigative journalism: Fundacja Reporterów and Vsquare. The former was established in 2010 by a group of four Polish reporters: Paweł Reszka, Wojciech Cieśla, Michał Majewski, and Roman Daszczyński.
They all came from the busy newsrooms, Poland’s leading dailies and weeklies such as Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Newsweek Polska and have valued in-depth investigative journalism. Since then, Fundacja Reporterów has been providing training to investigative journalists and helping them to get grants.
Vsquare started in 2017 and is a platform publishing long, well-researched investigative journalism stories in English on Central Eastern Europe (CEE) focusing on the Visegrád region including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is made by Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak reporters working for some of the best independent media outlets in their countries and often cooperating together on the same stories to give them a transnational perspective. Visegrad/Insight met Wojciech Cieśla, director and co-founder of Fundacja Reporterów, in Warsaw and spoke with him about both projects.