“If no-one gives a shit, you’ve failed.” Before heading home to Sweden after six months off in Gisborne, award-winning investigative TV reporter Joachim Dyfvermark told local reporters they’re up against the likes of Netflix, HBO and YouTube.
Joachim Dyfvermark (right) and his felow reporter at Sweden's SVT network Sven Bergman. Photo: supplied
This past week, the grisly killing of a TV reporter overseas - Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova - and the alarming disappearance of another journalist - Saudi Arabian Jamal Khashoggi - offered further evidence that investigative journalism this days is a risky business.
But threats facing investigative reporters aren’t always obvious.
Last year Swedish journalist Kim Wall was murdered and dismembered by self-taught Danish engineer Peter Madsen after interviewing him on his home-built submarine. This week one of the makers of hit Danish TV series Borgen announced Kim Wall’s killing will be made into a six-part TV series.
Another Swedish journalist who knows about the risks of the job is Joachim Dyfvermark.
He recently returned to Sweden after six months unwinding in Gisborne to pick up a 20-year TV career in which his investigations have revealed abuses of human rights, put people in prison for serious fraud and even cost one national leader his job.
Mr Dyfvermark and his colleagues at Swedish public TV show Uppdrag Granksning (roughly translated: 'Mission Investigate') discovered in the Panama Papers that Iceland's PM and his wife had a shell company to invest funds offshore.
They ambushed Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsen in a TV interview and he walked out, claiming he’d been tricked. It triggered the biggest demonstrations in Iceland’s history and the PM resigned in disgrace.
Police stand by as people protest against Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson outside parliament in Reykjavik, Iceland on Monday. Photo: AFP
UG won awards for that - and there have been plenty of others.
In 2005, they revealed one of the first examples of what came to be known as known as "extraordinary rendition".
In 2007, Joachim Dyfvermark went undercover to reveal bribery and corruption in huge deals to sell Swedish jet fighters in Europe. That led to police investigations, arrests and prosecutions in seven countries.
Before he returned to Stockholm recently, he passed on some handy hints to local reporters at NZ Centre of Investigative Journalism at Massey University.
He also told them they aren’t just competing with rivals for good stories these days or battling the powers that be to get at the truth.
They’re also competing with the likes of YouTube, HBO and Netflix for our attention.
Joachim Dyfvermark at the NZ Centre for Investigative Journalism at Massey University. Photo: PHOTO / RNZ Colin Peacock
"The competition is about time. You know how life is. The time our viewers once spent looking at the telly they are now doing other things," he told Mediawatch
"It forces us as journalists - in TV, print and web-based media - to be better at storytelling. The circulation of papers is going down, viewership is going down. We have trouble financing what we do so we need to be better.
"Look at the stories done ten years ago. They're boring," he said
"People watched them then because there was nothing else," he said.
In 2013, UG uncovered an even bigger financial scandal. Sweden’s equivalent of Spark - Telia Sonera - had paid huge sums to the ruling family in Azerbaijan. Telia Sonera was forced to pull out of Central Asian nations, senior executives were sacked and the company was fined more than US$1 billion.
It took reporter Joachim Dyfvermark into danger in several countries in the region and it's been hailed as a case study in tracking corruption across international borders.
He said big important international stories like the Panama Papers need international co-operation.
But there are two ways to get things done: either forming joint-ventures between major media outlets and international journalism bodies - or by pin-pointing the best reporters in the country you need to operate and sharing everything with them.
New Zealand Herald reporter Matt Nippert won the country's most coveted prize The Wolfson Fellowship last year. This prize offers 10 weeks at Cambridge University in the UK to study a subject of significance for the media.
"My intent is to build up the New Zealand Centre for Investigative Journalism to better enable the work of journalists overseas to feed into our stories, and in return co-ordinate the legwork of New Zealand reporters for stories of interest to an international audience," he told Mediawatch.
Joachim Dyfvermark at the NZ Centre for investigative Journalism. Photo: PHOTO / RNZ Colin Peacock
Joachim Dyfvermark says it's the right way to go.
"It's a win-win situation with PR departments growing and the people becoming better and better at resisting investigative journalists it will be up to the reporters and not media houses to get this happening," he said.
"During the 15 years we have worked with dozens on journalists in co-operation on stories we have never been screwed - except once," he said.
That was with 60 Minutes in the US on the rendition of Egyptian citizens from Sweden by the US in 2001.
"We helped them extensively and they went quiet. They aired their story later and the only credit we got was 'according to Swedish sources . . ."'.
"We will never be working with them again. The US journalists were taken out of the Panama Papers because they had trouble co-operating," he said.
His investigations abroad - sometimes undercover - have put him at risk.
"We were arrested by the KGB in Belarus. More recently a BBC team following up our story in Central African Republic got caught in a firefight where people got killed. There are risks but it's a huge difference for the people we work with in countries like Uzbekistan, Russia and Azerbaijan. And now even in Malta and Poland," he said.
"I'm not sure I would be doing what I'm doing if I lived in Russia,' he said.
Was he in Gisborne for six months because he needed to lie low?
"No," he inisisted.
"There were lots of other reasons. Surfing, for one . . . "
