CIPER Chile

My name is Francisca Skoknic, and I am CIPER’s editor. Our director, Mónica González, had long felt that there weren’t in the traditional media people devoted exclusively to in-depth journalism and research—journalism that scrutinizes the authorities and fills spaces not covered by the editorial line.

At the very beginning, we did not plan to have a website. Our business model was a little idealistic. We thought we could create very interesting investigative reports that we could sell to traditional media below cost—at a price not reflective of the real cost of the report. But the Chilean market is small, and it’s very difficult to compete. Thus after three months we set up the website, which I personally did not have much faith in. I thought it would be too shielded and that it would not have adequate dissemination. Our reports are not typical light Internet reading. We come from a print journalism background. We write long pieces, and a computer screen is not always best. But the truth is the effect it generated was a great surprise.

The idea is to do investigative journalism based on documents. Two years before the transparency law was passed [in August 2008; the law went into effect in April 2009] we proposed a goal of using existing legislation, which didn’t give you the tools to demand information but ensured transparency in some ways. We had to think about documents that were accessible or public and that we could ask for and use in our reporting somehow. It’s hard work, because it usually takes longer to obtain the documents than to do the story. When we publish an article based on documents obtained via the transparency law, we upload a scan of the original documents. The idea is that you read the story and open the original documents. In some cases, the document is powerful evidence for the report, so no one can question what we have written. In other cases, we write about the process of obtaining the documents. For example, we brought several cases before the Council for Transparency and took two the Court of Appeals [during the course of obtaining documents].

Readers who follow our work realize that the issues that are not in the mainstream media are more important. People feel our stories are filling a void, which is a very important criterion in determining what to publish. That generates a loyal group of readers.

On one hand, there are issues that touch the public and private. That is the case, for example, with an investigation of the public bid to build a new technology platform for personal data in the Civil Registry, a process that was flawed. It was a public sector project, but with links to a private company.

Another area we’ve focused on is non-profit institutions. The idea is to find areas where private entities are required to provide personal and sensitive information to the public sector, and then to look at how the non-profit sector differs in its reporting requirements. We are fighting for the legal reports and statements of non-profit foundations to be made public, as well as those of companies in the stock market. It’s been a long process and we’ve achieved some things. We are in the midst of a case against President Sebastián Piñera’s Futuro Foundation to have access to its accounting information, and if we win this case it will help set a baseline for what information is actually public and how this information must to be reported.

In cases that have to do with private companies and the like, we use traditional methods of documentation based on existing reporting requirements.

Informally we have cooperated with a few, but we don’t have a formal relationship with any. We have a few relationships with transparency organizations, such as Foundation Proacceso, who occasionally support specific cases or projects we have.