Portrait of a journalist by Erin Rizzato
– Alessia Cerantola was born in Bassano del Grappa, Italy in 1981. – Her career started a Japanese correspondent during 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. – She became an investigative journalist in major projects such as the Panama Papers. – Her work has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and Press Freedom Award. |
Otsuchi, Japan: the smell of rotting fish rises from the rubble, as a man takes two cigarettes and pushes them into a small altar on the ground where his house once stood. He and his wife had a smoke there every night before the 2011 tsunami took his family away. This is the story he recounts to a journalist he woke at dawn in the refugee camp, soon to become the lede of one of her major pieces for Italian news. She had been sleeping in the camps for days, set up in abandoned schools, to be in touch with the victims of the tsunami and unearth their stories among the ruins. Her name is Alessia Cerantola, who left her motherland of Italy to report on the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis.
She is now one of the most renowned voices of investigative journalism in Europe, having been Coordinating Editor of OCCRP and currently Editorial Director of Investigate Europe. Her ability to build meaningful relationships with others, be it as sources or colleagues, appears to be the red thread of her career, transitioning from solitary freelancing to collaborative investigative journalism.
“Japan is a long story for me… it’s something that has been there since I started writing, speaking, reading as a child.” After a degree in Oriental Studies in Venice, Alessia’s travels to Japan made her realise the need to tell this country’s story with deeper tools and add a voice to the Italian media landscape. “There is an important relationship to build across cultures that are so different.”
Alessia recalls relying on her own resources to get by as a freelancer. Through friends’ hospitality, linguistic proficiency and side jobs, Alessia’s initiative gained her the trust of locals and sustained her reporting. “The goal for me was to get to the news and tell it. And to do that sometimes I sacrificed other things.” This allowed her to gain not only the trust, but also the respect of local people, exemplified by the time a taxi driver was deprecating the “white woman” in the back-seat over the phone only to be shut down by the slang Alessia had learned while translating manga as a side job.
After attending the first IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) conference in Orlando, the world of investigative reporting began to open up. “I started with news, moving into reportage and then arriving to investigations, which I see as three distinct passages”, she points out. Alessia soon became involved in a cross-border investigation as coordinator of the Japanese team of the Panama Papers, as well as co-founding IRPI (Investigative Reporting Project Italy). “Finding the news is part of every journalist’s DNA but I had to gradually leave it aside because it was no longer my role.”
Since then, Alessia has become a strong defender of collaborative journalism as a tool to move beyond the often-solitary work of freelance journalists, without shying away from the challenges of conducting investigations across borders. “Even just finding a title for the Panama Papers was difficult: it is hard enough with one other colleague, so you can imagine what it was like with 400 people”.
“Collaborative investigative journalism is having a mid-life crisis”, Alessia adds when thinking of the current state of the field. “And in the Ancient Greek sense of the word, this can become a transformation and potential betterment”. Particularly after cuts to journalism funding due to recent elections in the US, investigative journalists are now faced with important questions around financial sources and their ethical implications. “We have to put everything on the table, what has worked and what hasn’t, and find a way to carry on.”