100Reporters
100Reporters is a nonprofit investigative news organisation based in Washington, D.C., that reports on corruption and public accountability around the world. Founded by two former New York Times correspondents, Diana Jean Schemo and Philip Shenon, it was built to give freelance and in-country investigative journalists a platform, editorial structure and distribution through partner news outlets — at a moment when traditional newsrooms were cutting exactly that kind of expensive, slow, risky reporting. Its stories, produced with reporters in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, focus on graft in politics, business, education, the environment and government, and its best-known public project is Double Exposure, the United States' first film festival devoted to investigative journalism.
Founding by Two Times Correspondents
100Reporters was co-founded by Diana Jean Schemo and Philip Shenon, both former correspondents for The New York Times. Accounts of its launch date it to 2011, with the organisation describing itself as founded in 2012 in foundation records; its early development was made possible through support from the Ford Foundation, which contributed a $200,000 grant as seed funding in 2014. Schemo, who serves as executive editor, is an author and veteran national and foreign correspondent with more than 25 years at The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. Shenon is an investigative reporter who spent most of his career at the Times and is the bestselling author of books on the 9/11 Commission and on the Kennedy assassination.
The founders' stated purpose was to fill a void in the media landscape: as news organisations retrenched, corruption and accountability reporting — especially cross-border reporting requiring local partners — was being abandoned. 100Reporters was designed as a home for that work.
Nonprofit Status and Early Funding
The organisation marked two milestones in August 2013: approval of its nonprofit status by the IRS, and a new grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, which awarded $50,000 in general operating support for domestic reporting, to be matched by the Ford Foundation. Schemo said at the time that the grant validated the awards the young organisation had won and the impact of its stories exposing graft and corruption worldwide, and that the funds would sharpen its focus on United States government and corporate accountability.
Foundation support remained central to its model. The MacArthur Foundation, for example, awarded $125,000 in 2015 and $100,000 in 2016 in connection with the Double Exposure festival and symposium, describing 100Reporters as a small nonprofit investigative reporting organisation that provides a platform and structure to support the work of freelance investigative journalists.
What It Investigates
100Reporters defines its beat plainly: corruption and public accountability, which it describes as what citizens around the world identify as a top problem. Its reporting spans politics, business, education and the environment, and it frequently examines corruption inside government agencies and international institutions. One line of reporting criticised the United Nations refugee agency for refusing to address corruption or protect whistleblowers who reported it in countries including Kenya, Yemen and Uganda — a subject that captures the organisation's twin interests in institutional power and in the people who risk their positions to expose its abuse.
Within its first eighteen months, the organisation had already won a string of journalism awards. The Native American Journalists Association gave it first place for best coverage by a non-Indian publication for a story detailing South Dakota's retaliation against two whistleblowers — a former prosecutor and a social worker — who had revealed the sexual abuse of Native American girls by their adoptive father, and a third-place prize for a second story, on youth suicide. The organisation says its reports have reached millions of readers and viewers through collaborations, and have led to further media investigations, government actions and corporate concessions.
A Network Model of Reporting
Structurally, 100Reporters is not a conventional newsroom with a large staff of employees. It works with in-country reporters and accomplished investigative journalists — freelancers and local partners who know the terrain — and provides the editorial, legal and organisational scaffolding that independent reporters often lack. It then distributes the finished stories to a global audience through partner news outlets, multiplying the reach of work that a freelancer alone might place in only one publication.
That model explains the organisation's name and its scale: a small Washington-based core supporting a much wider circle of reporters across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. For journalists working on corruption in places where they may face retaliation, the backing of an established organisation — and co-publication abroad — is itself a form of protection.
Whistleblowers and Secure Tips
Working with whistleblowers is central to the organisation's practice. 100Reporters pointed, when announcing a partnership with WildLeaks, to its record of working with whistleblowers on stories involving the World Bank, Veterans Administration hospitals and corporate misbehaviour. WildLeaks, created with the California-based Elephant Action League and partners including the Environmental Investigation Agency in the United Kingdom, the Oxpeckers Center in South Africa and EcoJust in the Netherlands, was the first secure online whistleblower platform dedicated to wildlife crime — inviting tips on traffickers, financial transactions linked to poaching, shipping companies moving illegal wildlife products, corrupt officials and shops and factories dealing in products such as ivory.
The partnership extended 100Reporters' method into environmental crime: take anonymous tips securely, investigate them fully with experienced reporters, and craft them into publishable news stories. National Geographic's Bryan Christy, a founding member of WildLeaks, framed the shared logic simply — an informed public is the strongest weapon against international trafficking and corruption.
Double Exposure: An Investigative Film Festival
In 2015 Schemo founded Double Exposure, described as the nation's first and only investigative film festival, which remains a project of 100Reporters. Built with co-creator Sky Sitney, it pairs a multi-day film festival with a concurrent symposium bringing together filmmakers and journalists in Washington, D.C. The MacArthur Foundation was lead sponsor of the inaugural festival in 2015, which ran from September 30 to October 2 with public screenings and panel discussions, and supported the second annual edition in 2016 as well.
The festival screens documentary and narrative films that are about investigative journalism, based on investigative reporting, or investigations in themselves, with screenings followed by discussions with directors, producers, protagonists and journalists. Its symposium offers panels, master classes, workshops and a pro bono legal clinic, and past programming has taught concrete skills — safety in the field, encryption, protecting whistleblowers, taking stories from print to screen — alongside larger questions such as illicit tax havens and whistleblower protections.
Double Exposure in Practice
Later editions show the festival's range. The fifth annual festival in 2019 screened Barbara Kopple's Desert One, about the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran, followed by discussion with former hostages, members of Delta Force and diplomats, and closed with Feras Fayyad's The Cave, about medical staff in an underground hospital in Syria. The sixth edition, held virtually in 2020, opened with a film documenting the first days of the COVID-19 crisis in Wuhan and featured a centrepiece film on the FBI's harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. By its seventh year the festival was running in hybrid form, opening with a documentary about NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, with Winner herself joining the post-screening conversation.
The National Whistleblower Center partnered with Double Exposure as an affinity partner, noting the shared commitment of whistleblowers and investigative journalists to the truth — a pairing that reflects how thoroughly the festival, and its parent organisation, treat source protection as part of the journalistic craft rather than an afterthought.
The People Behind the Stories
The organisation's reporting draws on journalists with deep regional experience. Its staff writer Douglas Gillison, for instance, served as executive editor of The Cambodia Daily from 2009 to 2011 and reported from Cambodia for nearly six years, covering the Khmer Rouge trials, human rights, mining, national security and environmental policy; his work there revealed an internal United Nations inquiry into kickback allegations at the trials and helped spark a transnational bribery investigation of an Australian mining company. That profile — years in one place, language and local knowledge, stories with legal and governmental consequences — is the kind of journalism 100Reporters was built to support.
Washington Base, Global Reach
100Reporters is headquartered in Washington, D.C. — listed at 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW in festival records — a location that places its small core staff near the United States government agencies, courts, foundations and international institutions its reporting so often examines, and near the partner outlets and policymakers who act on investigations. Its website is 100r.org. From that base it coordinates reporting and collaborations on several continents and convenes, through Double Exposure, an annual Washington meeting point for the investigative film and journalism community.
Why 100Reporters Matters
100Reporters belongs to the generation of nonprofit news organisations that emerged as commercial newsrooms shrank, testing whether foundation funding, freelance networks and partnership distribution could sustain accountability journalism. Its particular contribution is focus: where many nonprofits cover a city or a single topic, 100Reporters aimed from the start at corruption as a global system, connecting a whistleblower in South Dakota, a procurement scandal in Cambodia and a wildlife-trafficking network into one editorial mission. Its award record in its first two years, and the longevity of Double Exposure since 2015, suggest the model found both an audience and a community.
100Reporters Today
Today 100Reporters continues from Washington as a nonprofit investigative news organisation: a small core team, a worldwide network of contributing reporters, distribution through partner outlets, and Double Exposure as its flagship public event. More than a decade after its founding, it describes its award-winning reports as having reached millions of readers and viewers and prompted further investigations, government actions and corporate concessions — the practical measures by which an accountability newsroom, built to fill a void, asks to be judged.
