III. Impact
ICIJ staff members emphasize the importance of delineating journalism from advocacy. Ryle, for example, says that while he recognizes that advocacy groups “do fantastic work” with ICIJ stories that contribute to investigations’ impact, “We don’t want to be the advocates for a number of reasons.” He adds: “If our stories are good enough, they’ll get picked up by these groups, and if they’re not, then we’re failing as journalists.” For Ryle, impact can mean many things. “For me, impact is, you know, outrage—public outrage, companies changing laws, parliamentary debates, you know, protests in the streets, all of which we actually do get,” he says.
Online editor Hamish Boland-Rudder says that ICIJ does not have any “official” way to monitor the impact of its projects:
The best thing that I can point towards is I’ve started a tag on our blog: impact tag. And because we have no formal measurement tool setup, I’m not formally reporting things at all. That’s kind of the place where we try and collect the most important stuff or what seems to be the most important stuff. That’s really the only record of it that we have.
Chavkin says he finds out about the impact of his projects mostly from the news, through Google alerts, on Twitter, and from other ICIJ members around the world who tell ICIJ when “stuff is happening.” When something seems important enough to share, Chavkin says, “I put it in a post.”
In the case of “Evicted and Abandoned,” ICIJ knew it had hit a nerve when the World Bank began pushing back on the story before it had even been published. ICIJ reported that, ``In March 2015—five days after the reporting team send detailed questions informing the bank it had found “systemic gaps” in its protections for people displaced by its projects—World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim issued a statement admitting “major problems” with the bank’s resettlement practices and announcing a reform plan to fix them.79 The World Bank also released a five-and-a-half page document titled, “Action Plan: Improving the Management of Safeguards and Resettlement Practices and Outcomes.”80 It is worth noting here that ICIJ directly links its reporting to the World Bank response. ICIJ published a follow-up story in May that said former World Bank top employees did not think the Action Plan addresses the deepest flaws in the system.81
When the investigation was published in mid-April of 2015, the bank pushed back in a more direct way. The Guardian ran a version of the story in which it misstated some of ICIJ’s findings. According to Chavkin and Hudson, “Essentially [The Guardian] said that 3.4 million people had been forced from their homes, which was not our finding. It was that 3.4 million were physically or economically displaced. And so the bank made a formal complaint to The Guardian. The Guardian corrected the things they had misstated.” The Guardian readers’ editor wrote a column, “The Readers’ Editor on . . . the Pluses and Perils of Journalistic Partnerships,” in which he admitted the paper’s mistakes and said: “The Guardian’s writers and editors failed to get their heads around a complex exposé on which our partners in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists had been working for months.”82
The Guardian blunder aside, “Evicted and Abandoned” generated an impressive global response. Chavkin and Hudson followed the global pickup of the story, both by ICIJ partners and other news organizations. While they do not know the number of media outlets that ran the story, they informally kept track of the coverage estimate that there were “more than fifty, probably close to 100” articles written across the globe about the project. “Some of these are about the general findings [of the project], and some have actually used [ICIJ] data to look at displacement occurring within their own countries. So we’re glad to see all of that pickup,” they say.
ICIJ has closely followed the long tail of impact stemming from the project and, in many cases, its team members have written follow-up stories about these changes in order to communicate them with their audiences. However, in these stories about the impact of “Evicted and Abandoned,” ICIJ does not explicitly tie the changes to the investigation.
Immediately following the investigation in April 2015, EarthRights International filed a lawsuit in the United States against the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm, the International Financial Corporation, on behalf of people living and working near a coal plant in northwest India.83 While ICIJ about this lawsuit, which charges the World Bank with serious environmental and economic to fisherfolk, farmers, and villagers and the parallels to the findings of its own investigation, the post does not say that the lawsuit has any direct relationship to “Evicted and Abandoned.” In July 2015, the IFC claimed legal immunity from being sued in the United States.
In June, ICIJon the dismal results of a World Bank employee survey that found staffers did not have a clear understanding of the direction of the institution, nor did they agree that the bank “creates a culture of openness and trust.”84 Again, ICIJ did not claim that these survey results, which were worse for the bank than the prior year’s, were a result of “Evicted and Abandoned.” However, the article does construct a timeline in which the World Bank’s surveys shifted significantly from 2014 to 2015, with “Evicted and Abandoned” being one of two incidents that happened between the two (the other being demotions and reduced salaries), thereby implying that it played a role in the employee dissatisfaction. ICIJ also reported that a leaked document with open-ended answers to the survey revealed that staffers fear retaliation from senior management.
In July 2015, ICIJ reported that a World Bank Inspection Panel found that the bank had used outdated census data when funding a power transmission line project in Nepal.85 This resulted in many more families being displaced and compensation being slow, if at all.
Finally, in December 2015, the World Bank implemented reforms to address the economic and environmental resettlement costs to individuals living in areas where bank projects were developed.86 The reorganization gives autonomy to specialists who enforce social safeguards, including independent staff and budgets; hires new social safeguard specialists; requires “Resettlement Boot Camp” for all safeguards staff; and increased overall funding for safeguards support. ICIJ reported that the World Bank’s “Resettlement and Safeguards Management” factsheet was a response to its continued reporting on the issue.87
Honors and awards
Honors and awards are common indicators of the success of any journalistic endeavor. By this standard, “Evicted and Abandoned” was a considerable success.
National Headliner Award—Online Writing
Online News Association—The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award (Large Newsrooms)88
Overseas Press Club of America—Whitman Bassow Award for International Environmental Reporting89
New York Press Club—Gold Keyboard Award for Outstanding Enterprise or Investigative Reporting90
New York State Society of CPAs—Excellence in Financial Journalism Award
Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi Award—Feature Photography91
Investigative Reporters and Editors Award—Finalist
Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism—Finalist
Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best-in-Business” Award—Finalist
John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism—Finalist
D.C. Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award—Finalist