The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is a not-for-profit organisation based at City University, London, that bolsters original journalism by producing high-quality investigations for press and broadcast media.
The first of its kind in the UK, it was established in April 2010 with a £2 million donation from The David & Elaine Potter Foundation.
In the 21 months since it launched the Bureau has secured over thirty-four front-page stories and produced a number of award-winning web, radio and TV reports.
The editor of the Bureau is Iain Overton.
Highlights to date include:
- A collaboration with Wikileaks in its Iraq War Logs expose – winning an Amnesty Award and gaining international headlines.
- A nine- month long investigation into EU structural funds that was the subject of lengthy reports in the Financial Times, the BBC’s File on Four and Al Jazeera’s People and Power. Our work won a Thomson Reuters Reporting Europe Award.
- The largest ever analysis of public pay in the UK, turned into a Panorama and one of the most visited BBC web pages of 2010.
- A major undercover analysis of PR companies in the UK that lobby government and represent despotic regimes – leading the way to a public register of PR companies.
- An expose of the attempts by NHS managers to silence whistleblowers through gagging clauses in contracts. Our work helped instigate a ban on such practises.
The Bureau works in collaboration with other news groups to get its investigations published and distributed. To date, we have worked with BBC File On Four, BBC Panorama, BBC Newsnight, Channel4 Dispatches, Channel4 News, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Le Monde and numerous others.
